<p>What is the Difference between Cumulitive Gpa and the Unweighted/Weighted Gpa? What is a good Cumulative for schools such as Emory,Duke,Unc Chapel Hill. My Guidance counselor will only give me my Cumulative Gpa and tell me that colleges don't care about the weighted. However, My mother and a college adviser keep telling me that colleges do care about the weighted Gpa. What do you think. Please help. Thanks!!!</p>
<p>Cumulative GPA - your overall GPA from freshman year to to end of Junior year if your are applying EA/ED or first semester senior year if applying RD/EDII.</p>
<p>Unweighted GPA- your straight GPA.</p>
<p>Weighted gpa -the extra boost/added points that your school may give if you are taking an IB, Honors or AP course. The problem with weighting is different schools weigh courses differently.</p>
<p>The more selective the school, the more likely to use the unweighted GPA (which is your straight forward GPA), because there is already and expectation that you are taking the most rigorous courses your school offers and are doing well.</p>
<p>Thanks!! What is the difference between the Cumulative and Unweighted?</p>
<p>From what I understand, your cumulative and your UW would be the same. </p>
<p>And colleges care about the weighted GPA only because it tells them how rigorous a course load you’ve been taking - it lets them know if you’ve been taking Honors, AP or IB courses. And the way they know how they are weighted for your weighted GPA is because your school sends them a printout with the information about how your school weights certain courses. Also, your guidance counselor will tell them how challenging your course load has been - and maybe that’s why s/he thinks it’s unnecessary.</p>
<p>There are two different categories:</p>
<p>Cumulative vs. current: your cumulative GPA is, as sybbie said, the average of all your grades from the beginning of freshman year through the most recent report card; your current GPA is just the average of the grades on the last report card.</p>
<p>Weighted vs. Unweighted: as sybbie said (again), unweighted is a simple average of your grades; weighted is an average of grades that include bonus points for honors or AP classes.</p>
<p>Take these together, and you can have four kinds of GPA:</p>
<p>unweighted cumulative;
weighted cumulative;
unweighted current;
weighted current.</p>
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<p>Right, although this works better in theory than it does in practice. Schools differ wildly in the way they give quality points for honors and AP classes. If your school gives +1 for honors and mine gives only +0.5, your weighted GPA may be higher than mine, even if I have earned better grades than you overall. So weighted GPA is a good way to take the rigor students’ schedules into account within one school (or school system), but it doesn’t work too well if you’re trying to compare students from two different school systems. Of course, all colleges already know this fact.</p>
<p>IMO the main reason for a weighted GPA is for high schools to come up with a fairer way of ranking students. Many colleges care a lot about rank, but they are less likely to care about a weighted GPA - some will take your courses and come with their own rated GPA. Others will look at your course load and decide if it looks rigorous enough and then look at the grades.</p>
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<p>I completely agree. In fact, I meant to say that. I know I was headed in that direction. But then, I guess I…</p>
<p>Oh, look, something shiny!</p>
<p>Sidebar: What’s really interesting is when your HS ranking is not in consonance with selecting Val/Sal. Our HS uses weighted GPA for ranking but not for selection of Val/Sal. Doesn’t seem to make sense to me…</p>
<p>Now back to your regularly scheduled post…</p>
<p>That does seem odd. At least there’s the consolation that the importance of being valedictorian has a very short half-life.</p>
<p>^The Dean of the Computer Science school at Carnegie Mellon talked regularly about how he just missed being valedictorian. :)</p>
<p>He must be a man of some experience. You’d think something of some significance would have happened in the interval!</p>