“I feel not weighting GPA boosts the ego of students that do not challenge themselves and stick to regular classes and easy electives even though they are making good grades.”
If the weighted GPA meant something I would agree, but it’s a meaningless boost to their GPA that colleges do not care about. Colleges look at an individual student’s class rigor when making admission decisions. So that should be the motivation to challenge themselves with harder classes, not the inconsequential boost in the GPA.
Our HS doesn’t rank per se, but does (as I think most schools do) report what range of weighted GPAs are in which decile. The college may not know if a kid is #10 in their class, but knows if they are in the top 10%.
Not sure I agree that weighting is completely meaningless. It really doesn’t make sense for a kid that challenges him or her self with honors or APs to be ranked (even if just in percentiles) than the kid that glides through with the easiest classes.
College definitely take into account the reputation/difficulty of the high school and their experience with the students that came from that high school, for typical suburban kids. That would be different for URMs or first generation college students or other kids with a hook or a very good story. But the top schools are still looking for kids that did extremely well despite the odds and have the test scores to show they can succeed at an elite U.
My HS had weighted grades, and I graduated in 1971! It is not a new concept.
The local HS does not weight or rank, technically, but they do declare a val and sal. It has happened that the val hadn’t taken a single honors or AP or IB course.
I found out that the guidance department does calculate deciles for students who need them for certain colleges, but because they are based on unweighted grades they are grossly unfair.
BTW, it is a myth that all colleges and universities recalculate GPAs. Some do, some don’t. Yale doesn’t, for example.
If most colleges re-calculate GPA (I believe most do, and I’m pretty sure they do not all do it the same), then I can’t really defend the need for high schools to calculate a weighted-GPA. Except for ranking…that’s a good reason I guess. Our HS is weird, they provide the weighted GPA, but not the unweighted GPA. Plus, they don’t rank. I don’t understand that at all.
I would be quite surprised if Yale did not, in some way, adjust things, such that Kid 1, attending strong public school, taking lots of APs and such, who had an unweighted 3.8 and a weighted 4.3, ranked 12th of 300 kids, is not given a preference relative to Kid 2, attending a comparable school 30 miles away from Kid 2, with comparable courses, with a straight 3.8 GPA (no weighting), and ranked 11th of 280 kids.
To say that Kid 1 significantly outperformed Kid 2 in the above scenario (GPA reported as 4.3 vs 3.8) would be fairly silly, and I doubt Yale’s admissions department is that naive…
^^I would agree, but that is different from actually recalculating a GPA. The last time I was at a Yale info session someone asked, and they said they do not.
^I call BS on Yale then. Their analysis is just another way of saying that they recalculate the GPA. It’s two ways of doing the same thing…I don’t care if they do it in their head or estimate it on a napkin.
I feel you are over generalizing here. In the case of the universities in my state, they use the same GPA weighing system you described as part of their admission criteria. So yes the universities do care about the weighted GPA, they care a lot because it is their weighting system.
Perhaps you have come across some colleges that do not use that weighting system, but the college admission landscape is very diverse and you will find many that do. My D’s school weights and it makes sense since they send so many kids into the state university system that judges them based on that weighted GPA.
Some states have scholarships to their Flagship State U. that are directly tied to class rank, for the highest ranked student(s) to get a full (or perhaps half) tuition, or automatic admission, etc. For these situations, a weighted GPA is the fairest way to reward students for taking more rigorous courses, especially since all students know the rules going in, so they can make their choices for elective classes appropriately.
I would call what you are talking about, @CaucAsianDad, “re-weighting”. Yes, colleges calculate a GPA based on information from the HS. I think OP was talking about weighting at the HS level. Why do it if the colleges are just going to ‘re-do’ it?
The issue is weighted GPA is handled so differently depending on the institution or region it is impossible to make generalized statements. In the specific case of my D’s school they use the the exact same “re-weighting” as the state universities. So in my D’s case the OP is wrong, for others the OP is on target.
DD’s school do not weigh. Actually, her school does not calculate GPA, no rank and they do not send average school GPA nor individual GPA. Transcript only bears letter grade for each subject.
“No system is perfect.” True, but some systems are clearly better than others, and it’s surprising how many school administrators lack the basic algebra skills to understand that their flawed system is rewarding students who do less and penalizing students who pursue more challenge. When a study hall is better for your GPA than a B in an AP class, it’s hard to take this system too seriously. This can easily be fixed, and some schools have done this, but they seem to be a small minority. The rest of schools don’t seem to care that their system makes little sense.
The problem with such an approach is that a college receiving a transcript from an applicant from such a school has very limited context for interpreting the transcript. The fact that there is no calculated GPA is not too hard to overcome.
Add up the As, multiply by 4, add up the Bs, multiple by 3, and so on, and divide by the number of grades awarded (Tweak for minuses and pluses and other stuff, if you want…)
So let’s say that spits out 3.3. Is that good or bad? Maybe the school gives out 70% As, and a B is basically a sign of failure/weakness. Or maybe they’re “old school”, somewhat literally, and only give out As to 2 or 3 kids per class, plus some Bs, and a non-trivial % of Cs and Ds (and even an F or two).
A response might be that colleges can compare the current applicant to previous applicants they’ve received from this school. But it’s quite possible that the college has received few or no applicants from that school in the last few years (especially if the H.S. and the college are both small and not geographically close to each other). And even if the college has gotten a few applications, if they haven’t matriculated anybody from the H.S. for a long time, if ever, then they’re still pretty limited in the context within which they can frame that latest applicant’s transcript.
My kids’ school doesn’t have study halls, so they avoid that issue. Everyone takes s full schedule (7 classes)and they must take 5 academic classes the first 3 years and 4 senior year.
@MWDadOf3 I am just saying what my DD’s school is doing. They have their own reason why they do not release GPA and individual GPA.
I know how to calculate GPA and it is very obvious every college knows how to calculate GPA under any circumstance. I don’t believe there is a one best way to evaluate GPA across vastly different high schools.
My kids’ HS just went back to weighting GPAs (and ranking), both were stopped a decade or so ago.
The reason they started again? Merit scholarships/auto entry at our state universities are often based on GPA - weighted or unweighted. They felt our kids were at a disadvantage without weighting. Rank came back for scholarship reasons.
"I feel you are over generalizing here. In the case of the universities in my state, they use the same GPA weighing system you described as part of their admission criteria. So yes the universities do care about the weighted GPA, they care a lot because it is their weighting system.
Perhaps you have come across some colleges that do not use that weighting system, but the college admission landscape is very diverse and you will find many that do. My D’s school weights and it makes sense since they send so many kids into the state university system that judges them based on that weighted GPA."
The state public university system in the state we are in (WI), has no publicized process for weighting students HS grades when they make admission decisions that I am aware of (nor do the 2 colleges that my son has applied to out of state). Also, every school district in the state uses their own grading system (there is no “state mandate” directing districts how they should grade students). I’m pretty sure this is true in most states. The district my son is in has used 2 different grading systems since he has been going to High School. They started with standard scoring (grading from 0-4 and weighting AP classes). They are now using a system that uses a scale of A, A/B, B, B/C, etc. (and still weighting AP classes).
Can I ask what State you are in and how you know about the state university’s weighting system in terms of admission? Is it published on their web sites somewhere? Not saying I don’t believe you, I have just never seen that kind of information shared by a University.
Their analysis is just another way of saying that they recalculate the GPA. It’s two ways of doing the same thing…I don’t care if they do it in their head or estimate it on a napkin.