<p>What happens if your school doesn't rank or weight GPAs? I know its impossible to rank students but what about weighting GPAs? How do you do it?</p>
<p>Every school in our county doesn't rank students. Frankly, I think class ranking should be abolished everywhere anyway. However, if they don't rank, I have not found any schools that use it against us per se. However, most schools do get a class profile and try to figure out a ranking anyway.</p>
<p>That's not true. Ranking does occur in the US.</p>
<p>Figuring out rankings is impossible since the class profile comes out after we graduate. Not to mention, there are over 900 students in the class of 2006 at my school. There are a few scholarships I want to apply for that ask for rankings. </p>
<p>How do you weight GPAs correctly?</p>
<p>Since I'm valedictorian and have the highest GPA in my class, can I write in my college app that I'm no. 1 (class rank) even though my school doesn't rank?</p>
<p>Darwinishungry, I said no school in our county, not no school in our country!</p>
<p>Darwinishungry,
The UC's have there own special way of weighting GPA's - that is available on their websites.</p>
<p>Most of the college info sessions we attended tended to unweight GPA - or so simply look at the transcript. High schools have a variety of weighting methods - if colleges look at GPA explicitely, they take to standardize it.</p>
<p>Many schools do not rank and do not weight their GPAs. My D's school does not do either. And yes, this means the kids who take many AP classes generally would "rank" lower and have lower GPAs than kids who do not. Fortunately, the colleges you apply to know all about what's going on at your school because the school submits something called a "School Profile" with your application. This profile describes the school, average GPA, the number of kids who go on to 4 year colleges, average SAT scores for the school, # of AP classes offered, average AP scores, which colleges kids from the school have enrolled in over the previous several years, etc. Thus, they can interpret your GPA and usually are good at estimating a rank in the context of your classmates. So don't worry about this. And yes, some colleges, e.g. the CA state system, calculate their own GPAs and ranks using certain year's grades (may exclude freshman year), weighting in their own way, etc. Just do your very best work and get the best grades you can. The rest will take care of itself.</p>
<p>Even schools that don't advertise rank will disclose your rank/decile/quartile to colleges. In many cases it is simply the question, "how many students have 4.0 and above, how many 3.5-4.0, etc". GCs will answer these questions.</p>
<p>bandit:</p>
<p>our (Calif) GC will only mark top decile if true, otherwise, s/he'll mark Do Not Rank on the report. OUr school profile is sorta nebulous, and not much help to an adcom either.</p>
<p>Op:</p>
<p>as ohiomom notes, you can weight your own gpa by looking up your HS in pathways/doorways and searching for all UC-approved honors courses. That will at least give you an idea how you compare with instate student apps to the UC's. Remembers to follow the weighting scheme, a-g courses, Soph & Jr years only, 8 semesters worth of bonus points.</p>