<p>It seems like most people here, list their unweighted GPA always. Do colleges care about this more than they do your weighted GPA or what</p>
<p>i'd say so</p>
<p>Well, not all schools offer weighted courses. 4.7 GPA sounds impressive on paper, but at another school that offers no honors or AP courses such a number would be impossible to attain. Hence, why people write the unweighted GPA. 4.1 GPA Weighted and 3.5 GPA unweighted is on the bad side for instance.</p>
<p>Sprtn117 is right... My school doesn't weight so I don't even have a weighted average to list. And when you're comparing your weighted average to mine, it's impossible to use weighted.</p>
<p>the highest your weighted gpa can reach at my school is 4.27; each school's gpa system is different. so unweighted offers an objective way of measuring gpa</p>
<p>Mopst schools look at the UW gpa only. They look at APs etc as a sign of the toughest courses taken.</p>
<p>Think about how arbitrary W GPA's are. At some schools they'll add 10 points to your grade just for the class being "honors." I mean, what the hell? Do they honestly expect colleges to think that their "honors" Spanish 2 is not just harder, but 10 points harder than my Spanish 6? Furthermore, my AP History class is a lot easier than my pre-calc class, yet that's where they decide to add 10 points. If colleges only considered W GPA's, they'd see that last quarter I had a 94 in pre-calc and a 108 (98 + 10) in history. . . . .</p>
<p>so basically they look at GPA and strength of schedule separately?</p>
<p>They hold you to the context of your school. Mine offers somewhere in the teens number of APs but doesn't weight my GPA. As a result, I'm taking a lot a APs because it will look bad if I don't</p>
<p>because colleges will see this and kind of put everyone on the same level..im sure they look at both though....</p>
<p>Our High School doesn't even weight grades.</p>
<p>some schools weight some dont. its easier to compare people on the unweighted scale</p>
<p>At least for chances threads, it's because weighted GPA can mean almost anything. Two people can have the same unweighted GPA and wildly different weighted GPAs. It's a way to communicate the quality of your grades without going into the specifics of your school's individual weighting system. </p>
<p>For adcoms, I bet they care somewhat about weighted GPA--no one complains about seeing a 4.0 weighted GPA (unless the school is on a 6pt scale!) But really they're looking at the transcript-As, Bs, how high, how low, etc. You don't really get that from weighted GPA, I don't think.</p>
<p>Many colleges will recalculate an entirely new GPA for you using only the classes they find relevant and the points they determine should be allocated for each course.</p>
<p>im a little skeptical about this way of looking at classes/grades, because i have taken the hardest possible classes at my school and only have about a 3.85 UW, while my rank is in the top 20 out of over 300 students for weighted GPA. surely top schools won't give admission priority to some guy who never really works as hard as I do but maintains a 4.0 UW GPA because his school does not offer AP's, for example...? </p>
<p>I think that the quality of the school would also have to be considered along with schedule strength and UW GPA, including course offerings. Am I right?</p>
<p>people post UW GPA here because it's easier to compare across schools where weighting has entirely different contexts. A 4.5 weighted means far different things at one school as another. But just about everywhere you go, a 3.8 will signify about the same level of achievement. But for determining class rank, where weighting is the same procedure for all, the weighted GPA is often used, which IMO is as it should be.</p>
<p>Well, if they do look at everyone equally...then why does my magnet school send 3-4% to ivies while my local school sends less then 1%?</p>
<p>Yes, but it's not perfect either. Why should they penalize a kid because his HS is not very good so long as he did well and gets matching high test scores? Rule #1 in life--it ain't fair.</p>
<p>Both numbers are relevant, but neither tells the whole story. You really need to know about the courses and the high school to do an evaluation--and supposedly good college adcoms DO know about a lot of high schools. (Note that two identical unweighted GPA's can mean very different things, if one of them is loaded with extra PE, band, etc.) (Disclaimer: I know that in some schools PE and band are not automatic As.)</p>