Is there a way to know if an individual college prioritizes weighted vs. unweighted GPA?
Of course, the usual advice from counselors is to take the most challenging classes the student can handle and still have a good chance of getting an A. Our son places into all honors classes (or AP classes depending on the subject) but a class load like that is stressful and so much work that it may be hard to excel and get that A in every class. I know many students who just take all honors/AP and get half B’s or mostly B’s and now they are juniors and our school is telling them that unweighted GPA has become important. Those kids are now presenting lower unweighted GPAs than kids who took a mix of regular and honors classes.
Our son has already made his decisions about his classes for next year (soph year) but, for junior year, I’m wondering if he needs to be more deliberate about his choices based on what his unweighted GPA would be come application time.
Even if a college uses an UW GPA it will take class rigor into account with that GPA. It sounds like your S is not one of the naturally brilliant students (no offense meant). I would recommend taking challenging courses that he has a reasonable chance of doing well in and that will keep him interested. If he ends up with a 3.5 GPA that’s OK. He’ll know what kind of colleges to look at.
Thanks, @“Erin’s Dad”. It’s not really a matter of “smarts”. It’s kind of a matter of sleep. And I guess in the end it’s a personal decision. We really don’t want our son to be sleeping less than six hours a night. Every student I know with all honors at our high school (especially juniors) are very stressed out and burning the candle at both ends. Not healthy. Our son (unlike our daughter) would be considered at the tippy top of his class when it comes to standardized testing and motivation. Only one B in all honors freshman year…and that was very close to an A.
Our daughter, who is still very young, is the kind of student who scores in the 90th percentile on standardized tests (unlike our son at 98th percentile). She’s the one who works her butt off for her As. Same results for grades but very different experiences.
I guess the answer is to just choose the classes that fit but try not to overwhelm. And, if you take a few non-honors classes, don’t look back and re-think the decision. Just go with it and do your best. Just wondering if other parents had heard that unweighted GPA was becoming more important in general.
I feel that rigor is a lot more fuzzy than the cold hard unweighted GPA number. I agree that kids need to get sleep, so am of the opinion that they should take honors courses if they think they will do well (A, A-) with a ‘standard’ amount of work, and courses that interest them.
My son always took all honors, but when it came to AP time (AP is only allowed starting junior year) he only took APs in the courses he really enjoys. He could have taken APUSH or AP Bio, but chose not to. Instead, he chose an honors elective that he really wanted to take - so had a full schedule. That was his rigor. Next year, he’ll take 4 AP courses, but he can handle them better as a senior. Also, they are the subject he enjoys and he is dropping language which he does not enjoy. He’ll have a full schedule - and Sophomore, Junior and Senior year were predominantly Honors or APs. So - he’s got the rigor. But because he didn’t overextend himself junior year, his unweighted GPA is excellent, and he got PLENTY of sleep and had time for his activities.
A. Do not assume that the weighted and unweighted GPA calculated by the high school (especially the weighted GPA) is used by colleges. They may recalculate weighted and/or unweighted GPA based on their own methods, or just have admission readers holistically look at the academic record.
B. This looks like the FAQ of “A grade in easy course versus B grade in hard course, which is better?”. The usual answer is “A grade in hard course”. However, if the course load of all hard courses is too hard, the student may want to select some hard and some easy courses. Asking the counselor for his/her criteria for marking “most demanding”, “very demanding”, “demanding”, etc. course schedule on the counselor report may help with the decision.
We went with the approach of take some hard classes mixed in with some not as hard classes. I don’t know how well our approach is working. My son, a junior, has A- grades across the boards on his fresh and soph transcript and his class rank is pretty bad. A lot of kids took a few more honors classes as freshman and and thus their overall GPA is slightly better than my son’s. I don’t think he’ll ever catch up. I’m not sure it matters though, really. He’s taking all honors as a junior, and next year 2 AP’s that he wanted to study. That’s it. There will be a bunch of kids with 6-8 AP classes probably. He won’t win the GPA battle with them.
We are hoping that schools see he took some hard classes, increased his workload every year, got good grades in everything, had some decent EC’s, decent ACT scores, and just feel he is a solid well rounded student.
FWIW, not all AP courses are equally hard. Of course it also depends on your school / teacher but generally, AP Gov, Ap Human Geography, AP Psych, AP Environmental Science, tend to be easier than the others some say AP English lang too
and my son said AP Stat, and AP Calc AB are pretty easy due to not so many homework/projects…
The CB does not dictate HW; that is solely up to the teacher, so that’s an example of where the teacher determines the course rigor.
@runswimyoga I’m sure that’s true! We avoided AP Euro for next year for that exact reason. WAY too much work. Although I’ve heard it’s a awesome class with a great teacher, our son has other honors on his plate that he’s more interested in. Anyone know the difficulty of AP Comp Sci? That’s the AP class he chose for his soph year.
Junior year will be rough. Definitely AP English Lang, BC Calc, AP Physics. Will maybe avoid APUSH and stick with regular US History. French 4 H and AP Art Studio round out that year. Now that I’ve actually typed that out, I’m thinking definitely no APUSH!
@skieurope that’s good advice. AP work load may be on a school by school basis. In fact, I’ve heard of some schools that don’t have finals in their AP classes. Our school does have finals for all APs. One week before the AP test. Ugh.
I never took it, by my friends who did say that it is not hard, but there is a lot of work. Again, this might be dependent upon the teacher.
However, the lower bound on rigor does depend on the course. For example, calculus AB covers a subset of the material that calculus BC covers (assuming that both are one year courses started by a student who just completed precalculus). So it is possible for a teacher to make the AB course less rigorous than the BC course. Or the teacher can add extra busy work to the AB course to make it appear as rigorous as the BC course, even though the students are learning less material. Or, even if the teacher does not add extra busy work to the AB course, the usual tendency of students to choose AB or BC based on their strength in math may result in the BC students thinking that BC is relatively easy, while AB students may not find it to be as easy (note the score distributions for the AB versus BC exams).
Son took AP comp science this year with no prior computer programming experience (most in his course had honors computer science the year before) he felt it was one of the easier AP’s.
His teacher barely assigned any homework so it was no problem re work wise, but as for the test - he said while he knew all of the skills, since he didn’t have a lot of repetition practice, he was very slow in doing everything. Still he felt confident that he did well. He was actually jealous in talking to others from different schools that they did assigned programs a week and were so much quicker and confident. Still easy material to grasp for a neophyte according to him- If that helps you at all.
Agreed
A big part of that, IMO, is that the kids who take BC (or Physics C and a couple of others) are a very self-selecting group. Plus there are 3X as many students taking AB.
Be careful not to overload on classes that will require so much work for a B that there’s no time left to do what’s required for the A where it’s possible. Easy path to a 3.0…
@homerdog AP comp sci without prior programming experience is brutal. For me at least, it was worse than Physics C
Our son takes a combination of honors and AP’s. I think parents need to really listen to kid in what load they are willing to take on. We also need to listen to their current teachers in what they should take the following year. They are usually pretty accurate. My son has a friend who is taking all AP’s and is as cool as a cucumber and doing well. My son would not have handled a load like that well. Kids need to make it through High School before they can even go to college.