Due to a recent change in our schools grading system, I was wondering if there is a consensus of the various programs?
Our school had a formula where a 96 in an AP class would get bumped up to a 97, however, an 85 could get bumped up to a 91. Never seemed very fair to me, but that is how it was done.
The school recently changed their grading system and started weighting the grades equally. Last report card, DD had 100’s on all her AP classes. They were actually higher, but they don’t report that. Looked ridiculous.
Must be causing an uproar, as I have been unable to get DD’s rank for scholarship applications, due to mail boxes being full and no one returning my calls.
I doubt you’ll ever see consensus around weighted GPAs. Those that benefit from the waiting scheme that is selected will almost always support it. Those that don’t benefit will of course call it unfair.
D’s HS weighs AP, IB, and DE courses on a 6.0 scale (A=6, B=5…). Honors courses are weighted on a 5.0 scale. Students can go full-time DE at the community college next to the HS (up to 4 classes a semester) their junior and senior years. As a result, the Valedictorian every year is a full-time DE student with a GPA in the 5.3-5.4 range that may not have set foot on the HS campus since their sophomore year.
It becomes more political within the high school when class rank matters heavily, like in Texas.
Otherwise, having a more exaggerated weighting scheme (e.g. where 5.something or 6.something GPAs are possible) can help students aiming for colleges and scholarships at colleges that take the high school weighted GPA at face value. (However, many colleges recalculate GPA their own way to nullify differences in high school weighted GPA.)
When it comes to postings including a student’s GPA in the “college search and selection” and “what are my chances?” sections of these forums, weighted GPA with no information on the weighting method is useless.
All the colleges we visited (we visited around 30) claim they don’t use GPA because each HS calculates it differently. They construct their own “GPA” by computing with their own weights (based on the HS profile and prior applicants from that school) on a subset of courses of their selection.
^ As a result, the Valedictorian every year is a full-time DE student with a GPA in the 5.3-5.4 range that may not have set foot on the HS campus since their sophomore year.
I remember a news article a few years ago, that a student was transferred as a Junior and only took DE classes, and became the HS’s Valedictorian even though the student has never set foot on the HS campus ever.
This is the biggest issue that I have with weighted GPAs, especially when class rank is significant (TX is a great example) or when students and/or parents have aspirations for elite colleges. They’ll take an AP or DE course that they have no interest in rather than take an art course or third language course that won’t be weighted and will drop their GPA. I even know of parents that have had their kids take fewer classes their senior year because their only elective options were note honors or AP.
I’ve been around these boards enough to know that there are hundreds of different ways to weight grades and all of them have pluses and minuses. It’s unfortunate that scholarship money sometimes rides on what the school chooses to do. From what I can tell, for admissions, at least, colleges usually can figure out who is taking demanding schedules, who is actually doing A work, and who is actually doing interesting stuff outside the classroom, and the right kids for the most part get accepted.
FWIW our school weirdly gave all regular college prep level classes a 5% boost, and both AP and honors classes a 10% boost. Grades were reported on a 0-100 scale (or 1-110 weighted scale though in practice because of required freshman courses it’s impossible to get over 106 or 107 I think.) They said they only counted academic courses, but it was a little confusing about what was considered academic. I think many, but perhaps not all of the arts courses were counted. I never did figure out how my younger son’s GPA came out to what it did - and I had an Excel spreadsheet to calculate it!
Our school doesn’t tell the kids what their rank is until fall senior year, and at least my kids paid no attention whatsoever to their weighted vs unweighted grades until they were actually applying to colleges. They took the AP courses that interested them and/or the ones their friends were taking.
Every single college we visited when my kids were applying said they looked at the student’s course rigor and then at the grades they got in those classes, not at the GPA, for the reasons you’ve all stated. Colleges are very good at figuring out that that a B+ in AP Calc BC is harder to achieve than an A in regular calculus.
Weighting grades may be useful for getting a higher class rank, but not for college admissions. Schools will use unweighted grades and look at rigor. It is not fair to students whose schools lack as many opportunities to use grade weighting. I also like the A, B, C reporting with A = 4 et al to figure a gpa. Too fine a marking, such as 100% et al showcases nonexistent differences (I doubt they are using statistics to explain how a one point difference is insignificant et al). I also dislike grading where 100% is the top, knows it all, perfect score. It is easier to use an A knowing the student knows nearly all or more than was expected. Testing so a top score is 90%/an A leaves room for students to realize how much more there is to learn. Gets back to the grading on a curve versus grading on how much is known. I’ll bet it is hard for teachers to construct a test which is not too easy or hard so some but not all students can get 100% instead of throwing out a challenge.
Confused by the above? Should be. There’s a reason so many different ways of grading are done.
A local private school was planning to eliminate weighting because they thought the kids were putting too much pressure on themselves. Parents nearly rioted at the thought that it would discourage kids from taking rigorous schedule and got the school to go back to weights. This school also gives a different weighting for A versus A+ and there is a lot of pressure on the top students to get over a 97 in a class.
Our school weights but an A is the highest for any class so no distinction between a 94 and a 100. I agree with @wis75 that they should “leave room for students to realize how much more there is to learn”
In my opinion weighted GPAs are more valuable to high schools students and their parents since it compares student to student in that system. Unweighted gradepoints are reasonable for colleges/unis because it’s simpler and they can see which classes a student took. A high GPA at a grade inflationary school isn’t going to be he boost that some people think it will be.
The very rigorous private school where my children attend(ed) doesn’t weight at all. Graduates get accepted to colleges with lower GPAs than the norm. It was all very confusing for us the first time around.
I went to a high school that weighted honors classes. t took me years to stop being bitter about my class rank in high school. I had straight A’s, but because my parents refused to let me play the GPA game and take study halls - they insisted I take electives each year - I ended up ranked 6th. The people above me all took study halls to improve their GPA and the girl who graduated #1 actually took the fewest number of classes needed to graduate. (I think I was also secretly jealous of anyone not stuck taking Latin classes with the kookiest Latin teacher ever!)
I have my kids pick their classes based on what they want to take and not on GPA. DD got a bit concerned about it her senior year when she realized her electives were possibly hurting her GPA, but in the end it didn’t matter for college admissions. I honestly think school would rather see a student’s schedule full of classes than just APs and study hall. Although I think they do really want A’s in all those classes.
My kid’s small independent school did not weight, did not rank, did not have APs, and did not do DE enrollment. Students were expected to take a full course load of courses that interested them, including electives of all types. A handful of courses in all disciplines were considered the most rigorous and both students and counselors knew which ones they were.
College admission outcomes for her classmates were excellent. But to be fair, the ratio of college counselors to students was small enough that the counselors could write effective personalized recommendations and to steer the students towards appropriate college choices. In larger schools with fewer counselors, ranking is helpful to differentiate the student body. However, I still don’t understand the logic of a study hall being weighted more than an arts or foreign language elective.
My son took two orchestra classes every year he was in high school. He also had a shockingly large number of B+s on his transcript. He still got into U of Chicago, Vassar and Tufts. Frankly I think the fact that he did some interesting things, showed his sense of humor in his essays and had teachers who really appreciated his strengths was far more important than how many A’s he racked up in his AP classes. (He was #37 in a class of over 650 - so a good but by no means perfect rank.)
https://scholarships.ua.edu/faq/ indicates that Alabama takes the highest HS GPA on the HS transcript at face value, so that HSs which have exaggerated HS GPA weighting schemes may help their students collect scholarship money from Alabama (though the students still need to meet the test score thresholds).