<p>I am curious about the weighting given at various public high schools for AP classes. My sons school gives .05 added to the grade but I have had others at different schools say theirs were .5. That makes a big difference in the ranking in the class and the GPA. What do others know about this and how it works in your districts.</p>
<p>Our school does not weight AP or honors classes at all.</p>
<p>S’s school weights both Honors and AP classes by a full point, and doesn’t rank.</p>
<p>At our school, honors class are weighted by 0.25, AP courses by 1.0 (on a scale of 4.0). School does not rank.</p>
<p>You’ll find that top prep schools do not rank or weight GPA, so I don’t think that there is a big need to focus on it. On applications, if you leave these spaces blank, the colleges will look the the transcript more in depth, rather then just label you by number. </p>
<p>Several college have told me that they don’t pay any attention to the provided GPA anyway, due to wide variance of method. They pull apart the transcript and make their own calculation.</p>
<p>S’s HS does not weight honors/AP classes or compute class rank. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry too much about the weighting issue. Many selective colleges recalculate weighted GPAs in their own standard, unweighted form. Otherwise, they’d be comparing apples and oranges around the admissions table. Regardless, colleges will consider the rigor of the applicant’s curriculum within the context of the opportunities s/he has had.</p>
<p>Our school system weights As and Bs in both honors and APs by one point, but I think there’s some screwy system by which they don’t weight low grades. I’m not sure whether Cs are weighted; the policy on that may have changed recently.</p>
<p>The school system says that it doesn’t rank, but they’re not really telling the truth. My two kids attended different high schools in the system. At my son’s high school, there was a valedictorian, chosen on the basis of weighted GPA. At my daughter’s high school, they had no valedictorian, but they did give certificates to the kids in the top 5 percent of the class on senior awards night. So obviously there is ranking; it just doesn’t go on people’s transcripts.</p>
<p>It doesn’t really matter how schools weight GPAs or whether they rank, though. Colleges re-weight the GPAs, and they can figure out a kid’s approximate ranking from the school profile that is sent with the transcript. Kids from school systems that don’t rank do not seem to suffer in the college admissions process.</p>
<p>No weighting in our school system. UW uses unweighted grades, also.</p>
<p>Thanks for the information. I was just curious, since this is S1, how this all works. Wish we had left the blanks like toadstool suggested. One of S1’s top choices looked like a perfect fit for all but the fact that their accepts were top 5% in class. He is not, but very few of the competition at his school took all the APs he did. Don’t know if they would have looked harder at the transcript or not. ?? A little bit wiser for the other four. Being the oldest in my family too, I really didn’t want the parental learning curve to “hurt” my first, but I guess you have to start somewhere. Didn’t even know this site exsisted until it was too late. Thanks for all the insight for the next one.</p>
<p>Not to hijack, but it was interesting to me to find out how different colleges weight classes. I emailed a couple on behalf of D and got two totally different answers.</p>
<p>We have the typical 4 point scale of A=4, B=3, etc. (Pluses and minuses for quarter grades, but not semester grades, and only semester grades are counted in the GPA.) An A in an honors or AP course is weighted as A=5, B=4. School does rank.</p>
<p>In my high school years ago, we had the 4 point scale with the intermediates used (e.g., A-= 3.7, B+= 3.3) and while the honors / AP courses weren’t weighted (an A was still a 4.0) you could get an “H” in a honors class which was weighted at the 5.0. </p>
<p>Given how different schools are, I can’t imagine that colleges can really look at it other than in broad strokes. And they certainly can’t hand recalculate thousands of apps (or can they?).</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, it seems that some colleges actually do recalculate. I guess each decides individually, but unless they’re not being honest, some unweight completely and then re-weight. Some don’t re-weight at all.</p>
<p>Manually for thousands of applications?<br>
I see an iPhone app waiting to be developed!</p>
<p>Maybe they have a program of some sort and just input the actual grades? I didn’t even to think to ask how they do that.</p>
<p>As far as I know very selective programs pay huge attention at the rigor of transcript including number of AP’s. There is no chances for somebody who slacked out even if he had straight “A”'s. But it depends on how steep competition.</p>
<p>In our sch. system, an Honors class gets one extra point (A=5 pts) and AP gets two extra points (A=6).</p>