This is a great question! I’ve also never understtod how anybody is supposed to meaningfully use a weighted GPA. Weighting systems are so different. The public my own kids attended didn’t weight for honors at all, weighted APs but offered only 8, and weighted some dual enrollment courses but not others! Within the context of the school, where everyone was on the same system, the number had meaning (and kept the school from having 10 vals a year), but to anybody else? How can you compare a kid who can’t get to 5.0 with one that goes to a school that weights practically everything and can?
I can’t say much, though, about student who doesn’t understand the difference. The local Catholic school doesn’t weight but gives A+'s, so their scale is 4.33. Kids from that school often don’t seem to understand the distinction. I can easily see how students might think weighting systems are somehow uniform.
Fwiw, my employer prefers unweighted, but takes whatever the school reports; then again, it’s not a terribly selective place.
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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.[/unquote]
Like @bearcatfan my kids’ high school only gives out weighted GPA (which aligns 100% with UC GPA, fwiw). @intparent do big schools with 100,000 applications/yr really have the manpower/time to unweight GPAs and then re-weigh them according to their specifications?
Only GPA I knew existed when we started was the one the school gave us the weighted GPA. I had no ideal when we started looking that colleges figured it differently. Even if you do calculate a unweighted GPA it still may not be the way the College calculates it. Just a lot that people don’t know when they start the process.
It varies widely from school to school. Florida State and Pitt use different systems for students to self-report their grades, and the system calculates a weighted GPA based on the entries. UofSC has some method of calculating weighted GPAs as well. I think in all cases they confirm the self-reported entries against the official transcripts to ensure that the students reported their grades accurately.
I’ve been toying around with the idea of recommending a “CC-GPA” that could be used exclusively within the CC community. The idea would be to focus on the courses that colleges specifically look at (e.g. your highest weighted 4 math courses) and standardize the weighting for honors, AP, IB, DE, and other types of courses. It could be useful for acceptance, scholarship, and “chance me” threads (I usually ignore the “chance me” threads, but others seem to like it). It could eliminate the need to list out 3-4 years of curricula for each person.
I think people just don’t know. Personally, I had no idea until I started on CC that there were so many different grading scales and so many ways to weigh (or not) grades.
@JenJenJenJen you can edit the post for 15 minutes. I’ve made that error with html several times on here!
@ucbalumnus I concur! If a student’s GPA is high enough to matter for this discussion, he or she should be able to calculate GPA on a 4 point scale. So what if the schools says honors A is 4.5 and AP is 5. An A is 4 points, a B is 3, etc. Excel even makes the math easy.
@planner03 a 100 point scale doesn’t help without class rank. What if the top student had a 94.5 avg and the top 10 cutoff was a at 92? The good news is colleges see that in the school report. We don’t have access to that info on CC when a student posts their average.
What would be good, is some schools count A- as less than 4 points. A student should include that info when posting if it’s relevant.
It is very easy to look at a transcript and eyeball to figure out the inweighted gpa. A good starting place is if you don’t have all As then you don’t have a 4.0.
Our HS only uses unweighted GPA so that is what my kids used on their application/resume etc. As noted above admission officers see the full transcript.
Well, if colleges only looked at unweighted, then competitive students would be more more inclined to NOT take the more challenging curricula. AP classes are weighted because they are tougher!
AO’s did not just fall of the turnip truck. They can quickly scan a transcript and know that AP Physics C is not in the same league as CP Oceanography. Additionally, the GC rates the rigor of a student’s schedule.
I don’t care the grades are UW but it is an issue with ranking based on GPA. Rank needs to consider rigour in my kids school IMO. Full IBD/all AP kids with a 3.9 plus are outranked by 4.0s who never took more than foundation and won’t go to college, ranking uni’s are not parsing that IME. If you don’t weight, then don’t rank.
Rank can take weighted into account because everyone is on same system. But for college apps, colleges need their own system to compare GPAs across all schools. D’s HS was college level with APs only for language and Calc AB and BC. GPAs all unweighted
All applicants is a large group. Some are rejected regardless. It’s going to matter for certain merit awards or top schools. It may happen. By looking at rigor of schedule rather than a calculation. The point is a HS’s weighting system isnt what matters. UC provides their calculator to obtain a UC GPA.
There was no weighting as all courses were considered at honors level. Only 2 AP classes were offered. The HS has approximately 350 kids and is open to any student in the county. You had to apply and be accepted. I would guess 95% went on to a 4 year college/university and the remaining 5% to community college for financial reasons.
If you could take all weighted classes theoretically you could have a 110 WGPA at our high school, but since most ninth grade classes weren’t offered in honors versions, and required arts and health weren’t generally weighted either it was pretty hard to know what the actual highest possible GPA was. I do know that the valedictorian of my older son’s class had the highest WGPA the school had ever had, and it was 106 point something.
Our school gives unweighted on report cards. I can see weighted on Naviance. They say that transcripts include both and ranking is only provided for college apps when requested by students. I’m unclear whether ranking is done based on weighted or unweighted (my older is in 10th grade, I expect to clear that up next year when we start having meetings about college stuff).
At the same time, for schools like my kids, saying you have a 4.0 doesn’t mean what it does at other schools.
Every class at their school receives numerical grades out of 100.
Their HS grades as follows:
Honors/AP/IB classes are maxed at 6.0 for 100, 5.9 for 99, 5.8 for 98, …5.0 for 90, etc
“On Level” classes are maxed at 5.0 for 100, 4.9 for 99, …4.0 for 90
There is obviously significantly more rigor and work required in an AP vs on level class and the extra point is how that is handled.
A student with a “4.0” would be a 90 average and probably wouldn’t be in the top half of their class of ~700 students. GPAs are calculated to 3 places such as 5.455 for ranking purposes. The students can be separated by a thousandth of a point. Top students have to strive for perfect scores, as in a 100, in all classes and have to minimize the number of on level courses over their HS career to have a shot at a high rank.
