<p>Or is it not?</p>
<p>Quite a lot of people across the country graduate with a 4.0 each year.</p>
<p>Yes. And is it weighted or not?</p>
<p>AMCAS don’t weight. ;)</p>
<p>…even though a 4.0 makes no guarantees, whether it deals with med school or not. other things besides grades outside of class are important even in getting a job out of college, but a 4.0 won’t hurt if you have other goodies to go along with it.</p>
<p>I had a 4.0 unweighted in undergrad, along with a few other kids in my graduating class. A lot more had weighted 4.0s, but as someone mentioned that doesn’t matter to AMCAS. It is, I suppose, because it wouldn’t be fair to those schools that don’t have +/-, but quite honestly counting A-s makes it unfair to those who do. /rant/</p>
<p>^D.s college subtract for “-”, but does not add for “+”. Oh, well, it really does not matter. It probably does not matter between 3.8 - 4.0 anyway - waste of time to focus on this difference.</p>
<p>“Weighting” in the grade context usually refers to a high school’s (ridiculous) practice of giving a +1.0 to an Honors or AP class. AMCAS definitely doesn’t do this – and, for that matter, neither do the more selective private colleges. They prefer to independently consider difficulty of coursework and grades earned, a much more sensible practice if you’ve got the manpower to do it. Obviously larger schools can’t afford to do this.</p>
<p>AMCAS does consider +/- grades, with one exception: the A+ is counted as a 4.0. A B+ is a 3.3, a C+ is a 2.3, etc. The A+ is the only exception here. If that’s what poster #3 means by “weighted,” then AMCAS is … sort of weighted.</p>
<p>^BDM, but some schools (D’s) subtract for “-” and it makes a difference between, for example, being on Prsident List or being on Dean’s list, and everybody is using number of semesters to be on whatever list in all kinds of applications for scholarships and resumes… And unfortunately no credit for “+”. I am not saying that Med. School will care, it will not.</p>
<p>
Haha! I actually advocated this while in high school. However, 2 reasons for it do kind of make sense - 1 is that it does balance out the relative difference in difficulty, though. Honestly, that way students get, ratio-wise, about the same amount of marginal GPA for relative difficulty increase, making it more fair across the board. 2 is that most students in high school, at least not until their junior or senior year, don’t really mature as a student yet. Many don’t even mature until they hit college. So this kind of offers like a buffer for them, eases things in. Haha, sounds kind of wimpy.</p>
<p>Smaller, private universities accomplish #1 in a vastly more sensible way – by separately looking at grades and strength of coursework. I agree that it’s necessary for large-scale universities to “compress their data” in this way, however.</p>
<p>But if you think about it from an algorithmic standpoint, you’ll see that weighting is a stupid process. You’re compressing two separate and independently useful variables into one. It’s just not the case that a B from an Honors class is precisely equal to an A from a regular class. It’s not even the case that two A’s from regular classes are the same. And when each high school weights differently, things really start to fall apart.</p>
<p>Just major in something easy and get a high GPA, simple as that.</p>