<p>Yes, unfortunately the situation is like that in my school; you are penalized there for taking electives.</p>
<p>This seems ridiculous to me. At my school we have an ‘Academic’ GPA which I believe is out of 5.0 and an ‘All-Subject’ GPA which I believe is out of 4.0. The names say it all.</p>
<p>Our school will only weight 4 classes per term. The other two classes will be non-weighted.</p>
<p>I had an idea recently that perhaps schools school add the grade points from each class. That way, a student could take a non-academic class in addition to the regular course work and not be penalized. Here AP classes are weighted higher than Calculus III and Organic Chemistry at the local college…also students taking Medical Terminology, Intro to Engineering, and other more technical courses receive standard-weighting.</p>
<p>D/school has three tracks. Honors, A and B. You are “placed” in one of these after you take the placement test before freshman year. The school offers no AP or IB. Honors track is significantly more difficult (as it should be right?) The problem is there is no weighting, but they do rank.
Now I know that all colleges say they look at the application in a holistic fashion, but given the thousands of applications they read, it will take a special admissions dean to really see un-unweighted rank and then remember that the student took all unweighted honors classes.
Now, I think that for admission, this will be taken into account, but for some scholarship cutoff points the top 5% statistic drives me crazy because she is almost automatically eliminated.
She was ranked 39th out of 476, but if the honors classes were weighted she would have been top 5%.
We received an acceptance today from Stonehill College and based on her marks she was awarded a presidential Scholarship. The web site describes this as an award given to the top 10% of the HS class. To be accepted into the honors program and receive an honors scholarship you needed to be in the top 5%.
If she really wants to go to Stonehill I can contact the admissions office and see if they would consider her for honors placement and award but thats not the way it should be.
BTW, SAT = M740 R680 W720, very involved and varsity sport 4 years.
So I can see where unweighted honors can do harm.</p>
<p>Yeah, and it sucks.</p>
<p>I’ve never been allowed to take an art class because of it.<br>
I love art and I’d like to paint, but my parents don’t want my GPA dropping…and neither do I - at my school you could not take an art elective all four years and still be in the top 5%.</p>
<p>But with the music program, I guess enrollment was so bad (because people wanted high GPAs) that they added an “honors music” system, where you can still get a weighted grade.</p>
<p>I wish our school had some of the systems mentioned here :(</p>
<p>WGPA here is calculated by UWGPA + (weighted classes with at least C grade)/[(semesters in hs)(7 classes per semester)]</p>
<p>Thus, unweighted classes only hurt in the sense that you don’t get the weighted credit. And people who take weighted classes before high school (accelerated to Honors Geometry in particular), gain an advantage in WGPA.</p>
<p>My school ranks by weighted GPA, and in a sense, the non-honors elective classes keep everything in balance. My school isn’t very competitive (only between the top 3 students; our grades and courses have created a noticeable gap between 3 and 4) and we don’t have very good electives. But between me and the other top 2 students, we haven’t had very many electives. If we weren’t ranked by weighted, there are a couple people with 4.0’s who haven’t taken the hardest course load. One of them only had 4 periods all through junior year, and only one honors course. That would not have been fair.
My electives requirement for the high school has totally been fulfilled by taking courses that have overflowed from the requirement levels. We need 3 years of math and 2 years of science, and by the time I graduate, I’ll have 4 years of math and 6 years of science, so I already have 15 credits over the 95 required. But I don’t think I’ve had a lack of interest and seemed as I’ve only taken honors courses, because I really enjoy science, and I’ve taken almost every science class offered at my school, and only one of which didn’t have the choice of honors. I did, however, have a hard time trying to fit in my VPA UC requirement.</p>
<p>We do have a problem with senior year requirements like economics and government. There is no AP version, and they are only a semster long. They aren’t weighted, so I had to find a way for it not to effect my GPA. I was able to knock out the goverment from a college course, and I placed the economics in the third trimester (as by third tri, Val will have been selected, so it does’t influence rank), so I was able to get a 5.0 for first trimester, and I have the ability to get a 5.0 for the second trimester, but only a 4.8 for the third trimester. As someone said before. It pretty much is a game. If mine and the second ranked girl’s scheduling was the same, I’m sure we’d be tied. </p>
<p>If I went back though, I think I would have enjoyed doing one of the classes at my school out at the farm we have; they are supposedly top ranked along with our vocational program. However, In my four years, I’ve never been able to set foot upon our enormous farm land.</p>
<p>We’re from Texas too, and that is the case at our school for electives. I did not worry about it because my son’s were not in a competitive ranking battle - and it turns out for most colleges, they recalculate the gpa anyway.</p>
<p>But one thing our HS does is weight what they call “pre-AP” classes. These are the classes that are the pre-req for the AP classes. Honors gets multiplied by 1.2, pre-AP and AP get 1.2. (100 pt system)</p>
<p>So, overall, I think the system is pretty fair. It rewards kids who take the most demanding curriculum. (I don’t know the rules for classes taken off campus…)</p>
<p>S1 was comfortably in top 10%, but nowhere near val or sal, and S2 is below top 10%. I suppose S2 would have had a fighting chance to break into top 10% without some of his un-weighted electives, but to me, it was more important that he had the right mix of classes that met his needs and passions. But if either of my kids were more “elite”, where rank would matter, perhaps I would have helped them pick a schedule of classes to maximize their gpa.</p>
<p>My school is exactly the opposite. We’re completely unweighted and on a 100 point scale, so its not at all uncommon for students to take electives such as cooking, quilting, and vocational classes to bring their GPAs up. Since an AP class counts the same as gym, art or auto-body (which are all all but automatic 100s) many of the top students don’t take anything resembling the most rigorous courseload.</p>
<p>Although I’ve gotten almost all straight A’s (darn honors trig.), my GPA is quite a bit lower than my friends due to being heavily involved in music. ): Luckily my school decided to drop the class rank from our transcripts so the AP/artsy students don’t get screwed over.</p>
<p>At my school extra stuff like Marching Band, Wind Ensemble, college courses, or any Sports that are on your transcript are nonweighted (4 credits) as opposed to the 5 credits you get for honors/AP classes. If they are included on the transcript of a top student, then it will hurt their GPAs. However, this would prove to be an advantage to a kid who isn’t doing too well in their classes.</p>
<p>Our school seems to discourage trying extra things such as fine arts and many other non-weighted courses. The top students will take study halls before taking an unweighted class. Needless to say, most don’t usually take band, art or other electives. We encouraged our son to participate in band because of his interest in music, for example, and that alone probably kept him from being val or sal. No student with a higher class rank took any unweighted classes, so draw your own conclusions.</p>
<p>My school seems to be the same as most schools people have described. Honors and AP classes are 5.0 out of 4.0 and scholarship classes (which are the middle level classes) are 4.5 out of 4.0. I think it’s better than unweighted GPA’s though, even if it sort of penalizes kids for taking arts or music classes.</p>
<p>Yes, I’ve definitely seen kids penalized the way OP describes. Not necessarily because of sports being graded, but the same concept applied to other classes. I have also seen kids take study halls to get around it. </p>
<p>Our current school adds bonus points for honors and AP that simply accumulate over time. I don’t like it much but at least it encourages more classes and more difficult classes to be at the top. The kids game this system by taking a ton of extra classes online to accumulate more points. It’s not unusual to see weighted GPAs above 8.0</p>
<p>at our school, yearbok, choir, theatre, and forensics are all classes.
so my schedule (senior) consists of 4 “regular” classes and 4 AP classes, making my gpa lower than all my friends’. bitter? just a little bit :p</p>
<p>My school does this with music (orchestra, band, chorus, etc.)</p>
<p>So we have the option to take either a music thing to go with an honors/AP science or a study hall. Study halls aren’t graded so you get a higher GPA if you go that route…</p>
<p>Our school doesn’t rank but does list the highest GPA in our class so that kinda screws me over…</p>
<p>It wouldn’t even matter, except for the fact that you can probably get more scholarship money if you are the valedictorian. It is really aggravating.</p>
<p>My kids school does this too. They also have a hefty gym requirement, having to take 2 gym classes each year, so 2/16 classes (block schedule) each year is gym. The girl who will likely be valedictorian, and astute grade grubber, got a note from a doctor at the beginning of the 9th grade that she was “injured” and could not take gym. So she filled in those gym classes with AP classes and is far ahead of everyone else in GPA (and then doesn’t take all the AP tests at the end of the year). Pretty smart, huh? Doesn’t effect my D either way, but I imagine the Sal to be is a little miffed.</p>
<p>I love music! 
i went to a band banquet tonite! My school has a concert band,symphonic band, jazz band, and the choir. But the choir and the band do NOT get along…at all.</p>