Class rank only reported in weighted GPA

3SailAway
Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:46:31 +0000

Thank you to everyone for your responses! I guess our real question is, do colleges know that certain high schools have a system which makes GPA more about how well you play the game, rather than rigor and grades?

My son took the same English and history classes as the kids who got the Honors designation. Honors is not a different class, it’s a designation added when the student writes an extra paper, or makes a presentation. This can also be done for classes like band and Latin. If you play your cards right, you can get a very high GPA without ever taking the hardest classes. For example, my D21 went to the same high school and finished with a 4.8 GPA, despite never taking Physics, Calculus, AP Bio or AP Chem.

To answer some questions in the thread, this is a public school in a high SES area with many parents who are laser-focused on prestigious college acceptances. We have Naviance, but the bulk of applications have gone to schools S24 is not looking at, so its not very helpful.

With S24, what you see is what you get. He knows that some kids did not read the books they wrote their honors papers on, but he would not consider skimming, or continuing to play an instrument he doesn’t love to boost his GPA.

As far as what schools he’s looking at, I think I’ll start a separate thread for that. None of them are in the top 50 National Universities, but his two reaches are between 40 and 50 on the Liberal Arts list. My thought from this thread is that he should consider adding a few more state schools. I will be hoping that it’s common to re-compute GPA rather than use the high school’s weighted GPA, and that colleges are wise to the fact that “Honors” means different things at different schools.

I appreciate all the insights.