Why do many students and parents only list the student’s weighted GPA, without any context of how it is weighted?
Do people not realize that weighted GPA is useless to others who do not know how it is weighted, or do they assume that every place uses the same weighting system?
“Do people not realize that weighted GPA is useless to others who do not know how it is weighted, or do they assume that every place uses the same weighting system?”
I have wondered the same thing. I used to think that WGPA was the same, but then I started to see GPAs of 4.0 where the students had grades in the lower 90’s, and GPAs over 5. It has become very clear that weighted GPA is pretty much meaningless unless we also know the underlying grades (in which case weighted GPA becomes redundant).
Same frustration here. At least give me raw GPA. My D’s school didn’t weight which was fine. Common app you list the level of the class and the college can sort it out.
I think they like the higher number. 
And they don’t realize that most colleges unweight to evaluate the application.
“I think they like the higher number.”
To be honest, I think that a few just make numbers up. There was one post where the student said that they had built a fusion reactor.
The only GPA that our school gives incoming seniors is weighted - the honors and AP classes have a different scale that goes above A=4.0, so many kids have more than a 4.0 (mine included). It also gives more weight to those classes in the calculations.
For what it’s worth, after my incoming senior’s class the school stopped weighting GPAs. I will find out the full effect of that with my incoming freshman.
I will have to ask the guidance counselor if they have an unweighted score. I’m curious.
our school doesn’t even give the weighted until senior year so any time I write my son’s average its unweighted bc I don’t know how to calculate weighted.
My school didn’t do unweighted.
Most people are just lazy and post whatever number from their school transcript. I always ask for uwGPA in response.
I can’t believe I didn’t understand that then, but of course I do now.
So when my D was first looking, she used the website college data. She put in her weighted GPA. That made sense to her. No, there was no awareness that every school can do it differently. She knew that she got a bump in her grades because of her AP and honors classes. It isn’t explained by anyone when you start looking that UW GPA is used. She assumed her weighted GPA was the important one because she did know that colleges considered rigor. Plus, her grade report always had the weighted GPA. So it’s not difficult to see why many students assume the weighted GPA is what matters. In fact, it was only after I started using CC that I was able to figure it out.
Every School is different some use a 4.0 scale and others use a 100 point scale some weight differently than others. Some only use certain classes for GPA others use all classes… Colleges know this so they recalculate GPA based on their own system. I think weighting is easier for a colleges to figure out than comparing students from schools that only report letter grades on a 4.00 scale to students that from schools that report on a hunderd 100 scale. On a 4.00 scale a student could have a 4.00 with 95’s in all their classes, should that be looked at the same as a kid that has a 98.5 GPA on a 100 point scale?
There is nowhere to hide on the 100 scale, and students are clearly differentiated. Forget 95s, some schools give As for a 90. At a school with that scale, a student can graduate with a 4.0 by barely scraping by with 90s for 4 years, whereas low 90s on a 100 scale are considered good, not great grades. Also interesting,I just read on another thread that a student had 2 89s and was able to ask and receive As from the teachers for “extra credit.” Wow.
There may be some schools out there that recalculate gpas, but for the most part they don’t. S1 directly posed the question to several top schools and was told that they evaluate the transcript as is-it is all about how you perform in the context of your own school. They make no attempt to compare your grades to students at other schools.
At the minimum those who list weighted GPA need to say out of what - my daughter’s HS the weighting was out of 5.3 which is very odd but if you said my kid has a 4.3 out of 5.3 it would at least give some context. I also laugh everytime somebody says they have a 4.2 out of 4.0 weighted GPA - if you can get to 4.2 then it isn’t out of 4.0!
^ It’s not always so easy to say what it’s out of. My school had regular classes on a 4.0 scale, honors on 4.5, and AP on 5.0. So technically I ended up with a ~4.5/5.0? I guess? But you couldn’t get much higher than that because there were required regular classes (health, gym), regular electives (band, chorus, art), and a limited number of APs. You couldn’t reach 5.0 because you couldn’t take all APs, so 4.5/5.0 sounds worse than it actually was, which was good enough for top 10 in the class.
Calculating an unweighted GPA from a report card or transcript should be a simple math problem.
If you think students are going to go request a copy of their transcript and wait however long it takes for a busy, verging-on-incompetent guidance office to get it to them, then spend the time creating equations to find the unweighted GPA, JUST so they can post on an anonymous internet forum and get bad advice from other high school students…
I didn’t know “unweighted” was even a concept until I came to this website. The school never referred to our GPAs as weighted. They were just our GPAs, and calculating them seemed so complicated that I never would have tried to figure it out by myself.
I think that any complete stranger’s GPA (weighted or not) is probably “useless to others” - not sure if it’s worth the energy of being annoyed about it.
Our school district calculates weighted GPA and provides no other GPA on the transcript. All the Naviance data for the school is based on weighted GPAs. I do agree that people should probably just look at that data rather than asking high school students and their parents what their chances are of getting into college X based on GPA alone. Obviously a lot of other data points are considered.
My D16 qualified for scholarships based on that weighted GPA so at least some colleges do take it at face value. Some public colleges in my state report average GPAs above 4.0 so it’s safe to assume they are not using an unweighted mark.
There are online calculators that will do the math, so I think people either don’t know that they may need the UW or they don’t think the UW sounds impressive enough. Some might not know which courses to use to do the calculation, but that seems like something that could be easily Googled.
Our high school transcripts listed both the weighted and unweighted GPA and the student’s rank under both scenarios.I think that gives some context when it is being reviewed.
Additionally the school profile lists the AP courses offered and the extra weight given for them. It also lists the number of students taking the different AP exams and the average score. The distribution of weighted GPAs is also charted.
Speaking of grades: At my D’s school they have two semesters each yr. They get a final grade at the end of the first and last semesters, which is on the transcript. Do colleges just look at the final grade in June?