<p>What exactly is the unweighted GPA?</p>
<p>My score weights GPAs such that A+ is 4.33, A is 4, A- is 3.66, etc. Honors classes get a .33 bump and APs get a .44 bump. </p>
<p>I have read that an unweighted A is a 4, B is a 3, etc. Where do the -'s and +'s come in? And what is considered more important, the unweighted GPA, or the school's weighted GPA?</p>
<p>Some schools use pluses and minuses as different grade points (like your school); others do not. A school that sets an A+ as a 4.33, an A as a 4, and so on, is considered (as far as I know) to use unweighted grades---provided they do not assign additional grade points for honors or AP courses. Your school uses a weighted GPA and calculates for pluses and minuses.</p>
<p>As far as which is more important, unweighted GPA is important in that it shows how you actually did in each of your courses (the average of what letter grades you got). However, weighted GPA is vastly preferrable if your school ranks because it takes into account the difficulty of your courseload. Without any other information, a GPA by itself is basically meaningless--you could look at my unweighted 3.82 GPA and think that that isn't very good because half of the class at your school gets at least 3.8, but in reality my GPA and rank are weighted and I ranked 14/768. Context is everything.</p>