<p>They absolutely will look at the curriculum...if your student did not take the most rigorous stuff available it will hurt them....regardless of the GPA..what they are looking for is the advanced classes AND good grades, not one without the other.</p>
<p>Yeah, they evaluate your schedule in the context of your school. It would be better to take the accelerated classes and earn a few Bs or B+ than to take no accelerated classes and get a higher rank. They will most likely see that your son has nothing on his transcript for weighted GPA and they will know what that means in terms of rank.</p>
<p>My school weights for senior year IB courses but does not rank. They will provide a percentile if they have to, but otherwise they send the information that they don't rank. All schools have different methods of giving grades, some give numbers, some give +s and -s, some give +s but no minus, some give evaluation paragraphs, etc. Some weight, some don't, some provide a ranking number, some provide a percentile, some don't provide anything unless absolutely pressed to. Colleges have to take this all into account but rigor of coursework is very important along with unweighted GPA.</p>
<p>I wouldn't count on someone doing the grunt work to figure out what the reported rank would be if the school did it the way all on CC would agree makes most sense. </p>
<p>I'd point out somewhere in my app that the rank (if you know it) or the "standing" ( I'll use that as the euphemism for the rank that they report by using bar charts or decile boundaries or whatever else they send) weights all courses the same, even though you have a full dollup of the advanced stuff.</p>
<p>I frankly think that the idea that HYP or even Michigan or Cal bother to make these distinctions for individual high schools is ludicrous. There are too many in the US, and there is too much turnover from year to year on admissions staffs.</p>
<p>MilwDad, what's the high school's track record for placing kids at selective schools? If it's a good one, then I wouldn't worry about the "non-weighting". The selective schools probably have some pretty good knowledge about the high school and understand how it works.</p>
<p>I keep trying to find this out....when you look on a school's web site or College Board site or a book like Princeton Review the colleges provide an average GPA for admits or for enrolled students. But there is no note if that is U or W. So if your child has a weighted 3.5 and UW 3.0 its hard to know which schools are a match for a particulat student since its not clear which GPA calculation is used to define their average.</p>
<p>I've found that that almost no school tells you in their literature or on the website whether the GPA's they post are weighted, but when asked (either verbally on in an e-mail) they will almost all give a very straight answer as to what they do and how they do it (see my post #4). It's a pain, but I think that's the only way to find out.</p>
<p>That's a good question, dogs. I wish I had the answer. It's also the fact that some colleges manipulate the data to make themselves look as selective as possible or to buff up the profile of their entering classes. I recently read that the large local private university where I live has been mixing and matching ACT or SAT scores taken by its entering freshmen in different sittings so as to come up with higher numbers when it announces its profile. Obviously it's every college's right to make admission decisions based on criteria of its own choosing; but this seems more to be about gaming the system to make it seem that a "better" class of students is entering than is really the case. (Let's put aside legitimate arguments about the actual value of standardized tests, for the moment.)</p>
<p>And this can lead to the same problem you are describing. If I read that the 75th percentile ACT at Local U. is 28 when in reality it's 26 it makes it much more difficult to determine whether that school is truly a good "match."</p>