<p>I know the UC's do this in the app ... do a lot of other colleges recalc GPA after dropping PE, Leadership, Debate, Year Book etc. type classes and weight GPA for Hons and AP classes?</p>
<p>Specifically, I'm interested in what these colleges do:
Brown
Dartmouth
Cornell
Northwestern
Notre Dame
UMich</p>
<p>My school does not rank, but they'll report a profile like this:
4.0 3%</p>
<br>
<p>3.75 25%
3.5 45%
3.0 75%</p>
<br>
<p>I'm not sure what colleges will do with this unweighted profile.
I'll barely make it to the top quartile unweighted and I'm worried
I may be wasting my time writing those essays if the class rank
is going to blow me out of the 20% that get admitted to selective schools.</p>
<p>They’ll reweight it. They pretty much have to do that because high schools are so different in the ways they weight. Some don’t at all, some are on a 5 pt. scale, some on a 6 pt. scale, some only weight APs but not honors, some weight differently for honors than AP, some schools often few or no APs, some offer APs but not honors.</p>
<p>Colleges have to strip the weighting and re-do the calculations to be fair to all applicants. Ranking is something that can only be considered in the context of you in YOUR school. Outside of that it makes no sense at all.</p>
<p>Eldest son’s college said they recalculated gpa on a 4.0 unweighted scale, considering academic/core courses only. School also assigned a rating to difficulty of the curriculum the applicant had taken.</p>
<p>^^They also take into account rigor/difficulty of your school. Some people say they have taken large numbers of AP’s. At some private schools, you can’t do that because they don’t even allow AP’s to be taken until the junior and senior years, and then it is still limited. However, the regular level courses at his school are more difficult than some public school AP’s (and do prepare students for the AP exam). The GC’s at my son’s school say that this particular school gets about a 0.5 “bump” on all grades.</p>
<p>Good to know–I may do more digging in each schools website to see if I can find a more definitive answer. DS’s school is rigorous–the honors classes are lot more work than reg…and the AP…OMG! …</p>
<p>Some high schools also report weighted grades on the transcript, while others report the unweighted grades.</p>
<p>While I think it is safe to say that most colleges recalculate GPAs, it is also true that many do not. As zoosermom notes, many colleges will tell you that on their websites but it is frustrating how many are vague on the subject.</p>
<p>I hope I am not misspeaking here, but I believe Stanford and many others recalculate and consider the GPA for core academic courses only. And they do it like this:</p>
<p>EXAMPLE:
Student 1 has a B+ for every single core course. Recalculated GPA = 3.0
Student 2 has an A- for every single core course. Recalculated GPA = 4.0</p>
<p>So, although the percentage difference between B+ and A- could be quite small (even one tenth of a point, ie, B+ = 89.9% and A- = 90.0%), if the school assigns 3.0 to any “B” and 4.0 to any “A”, then you had better do what you can to get as many A’s as possible.</p>
<p>Our son’s school transcript to date shows
every course, semester grades and final grade per course,
whether the course is regular, honors, or AP,
the GPA per year weighted in both 12pt and 4pt scale,
and then a cumulative GPA weighted in both 12 pt and 4pt</p>
<p>then there is a block for test reporting…</p>
<p>fogfog – I don’t think there is a “typical” high school transcript. All four local high schools that I am familiar with – three in NYS and one in MA – do it differently.</p>
<p>Colleges generally use final average for the year unless there are core courses that are only one semester long. For example, in NYS the common senior year social studies core is comprised of a semester of economics and a semester of psychology. Each course earns a half unit (Pre-calc or Physics, on the other hand earns a full unit).</p>
<p>“Certainly regular, honors and AP can’t be computed the same?”</p>
<p>They can be at colleges that do not recalculate GPA. On the other hand, those schools will note the rigor of classes selected so that the student who chose the most rigorous curriculum will get a leg up on the applicant from that student’s same high school who took the easier route to their degree.</p>
<p>Gosh I would feel just awful if after DS took such a heavy heavy load in order to challenge himself and learn…that he would be penalized…but not seeing the beneift of the weighting in the transcript etc</p>
<p>He does complain that a girl in the top 10% of their class “takes all regular classes”…he has been taking all Honors, and now APs…</p>
<p>I would hate to see after all this work for his efforts to not be rewarded.</p>
<p>wow, just goes to show you how different the schools around the country are. At my kids’ school, those with 3.5 and greater are the top 10%. That’s one reason I take the perceptions of grades on CC with a grain of salt and use Naviance to help us figure out which schools are realistic.</p>
<p>At my S’s HS, AP courses are the only ones that are weighted. For example, a junior can choose one of 3 English courses: regular (college prep) English, honors English, or AP English. It is only the AP class that is weighted on the transcript (eg, a B is worth 4.0). </p>
<p>Therefore, in my opinion, there is no real incentive to take any honors classes, since they aren’t weighted and are more difficult than the corresponding college prep classes. Why not take the college prep class and get an A, rather than take the honors class and risk getting a B?</p>
<p>and yet MIT said they would rather see a B in a Honors or AP than an A in a regular class…
sigh
will be a real injustice if the kids who took the easy route prevail</p>
<p>fogdog-- in my S’s case he will likely have to take the easy route. He’s got an auditory processing problem that I think would make it difficult if not impossible for him to take any AP classes (let alone honors). That would be fine if his HS didn’t offer any AP anyway, but they have a slew of AP classes…</p>
<p>I think colleges like to see that you have some rigor in your curriculum, but a friend of mine whose D is a freshman at Cornell (and who got accepted to a number of top schools, including Swarthmore, Duke, UC Berkeley, etc.) says that the best strategy is to optimize both rigor and GPA. So for my S, that means no AP but classes with reasonable rigor (eg, Spanish 3). Definitely no fluff (eg, catering/foods/basketweaving).</p>