Weighted vs Unweighted GPA for Highly Competitive College Admissions

I’m wondering how much highly competitive colleges, mainly Ivy League, look at the weighted vs the unweighted GPA. In my case, I’m a junior and at the end of my second semester, if I maintain my grades, I’ll have an unweighted GPA of 4.0, but a weighted GPA of only 4.5, which is somewhat low for those schools. Of course, there are a lot of other factors in the application that make a huge difference but I’m mainly concerned with how much colleges look at the weighted or if the unweighted plays a large part.

UW > W.

A WGPA of 4.5 might be low in one school, and high in another. And, there are plenty of schools that don’t weight at all.

Since each high school may weight differently, comparing weighted GPA between high schools is not meaningful. Some colleges recalculate high school GPA by their own method to get something somewhat comparable. Some of the most selective colleges may just look at the record and see if it contains all or almost all A grades in hard courses.

The actual number for your weighted GPA won’t mean much on its own, given the many different weighting scales out there. Most schools are on a 5 point max scale (which is impossible to reach) and a 5.0W is barely top 10% at our school, due to the odd weighting scheme (5.56 is the max possible - I assure you they don’t have some huge advantage at top schools based on this).

But schools are very interested in course rigor, represented by honors, DE, IB, AP courses, which factor into WGPA.

Some may recalculate a weighted GPA using a standard scale, some may just look at the course rigor and consider the UW in that context.

So while the actual number of a WGPA doesn’t mean a lot, the concept of more rigorous courses is certainly important in the admissions process at most schools.

If your 4.5 is based on a set of courses/grades and someone from our school has a 5.2 based on the exact same grades and classes, that sliver of the application would be considered to be equal at any school that knows what they’re doing. And competitive/Ivies certainly know what they’re doing.

A good application reader doesn’t focus on the GPA number, but rather looks at the transcript in totality, including trends, grades, and course selection. All A’s in easy classes won’t impress. Advanced rigor across the board, in math, sciences, history, English, and foreign language will be be respected, even with a few less than perfect grades.

Unweighted of course… not only does it weigh in your academic performance of that class, but the difficulty of that class too. However, I would also like to say that colleges do tend to look for quality over quantity so if you have a 3.7 UW but 4.2 W then they would rather take a student who is 4.0 UW and 4.0 W

I disagree with this. Most colleges would prefer a student that challenged themself with honors/AP/etc. that earned the extra .5 weighting (which is pretty substantial) and got a 3.7 than someone who took absolutely nothing above base-level courses and got A’s.

Unweighted.
And yes, they look at the transcript, see the courses and their grades. No rushing with extra calculations. Nor, guessing.

Now try to learn more if what matters to a tippy top, so you can actually pull together your best app/supps.