She really liked UCLA and UCSD. She had little interest in the other campuses. She’s also looking at the Claremonts, and while they’re amazing schools, she really wants a R1 institution, which isn’t a huge thing amongst SLACs.
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If you need help figuring this stuff out, feel free to ask (or send me a private message). We are in-state CA and I already have one kid at a UC.
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@Gumbymom is the resident UC expert here and can help explain.
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oh wow! What a nightmare!
ok now I am a bit concerned. A lot of S26’s As are A-s. We are starting to think about colleges. Do we keep that into mind when looking at the average GPA of colleges ?
Ah, that makes sense that it’s aligned. I believe we are on other things too, such as no 9th grade honors classes as UCs don’t accept those as honors level.
Hm, it never occurred to me though to think about recalculating with - and + for OOS. I’m not sure what that would do to GPA. Edit: the +s and -s basically even out on their academic classes so I’m guessing overall the GPA is about the same.
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I don’t know—but I have heard several times over the years that colleges recalculate gpas according to their own guidelines to help equalize the very different ways that high schools do this (like we have seen here on this thread).
So if the schools calculate 4 for an A, 3.7 for an A-, 3.3 for a B+, someone who has, say 4 As and 4 A-s, would have a 3.85 (and our high school would call it a 4.0) Seems worth anticipating that possibility.
The UCs are very clear about not using + or - but I haven’t seen other schools make it clear how they calculate an applicant’s GPA and how they then report their average accepted GPAs in their CDS reports.
Anyone else have experience here?
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My older one had almost all As in high school, but it was a mixture of A-/A/A+s. He had a really successful admissions cycle, with selective OOS colleges as well as UCs(got into all of them). So for our sanity, I think its better to just stick with whatever GPA the transcript shows and go from there. Because admissions are a like a black box, hard to predict which college does what.
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The whole ‘grade inflation’ effect. I think it makes the case for using SAT and ACT and AP exam scores to try to parse out which students are “A” students and which students are “a” students. But then many schools went to test optional scenarios.
We’ve now seen professional schools try to reconfigure / re calibrate college grading scales using their own +/A/- scales to segment the A+ (100-98) from A (93-97) from A- (90-92) throng. LSAC has been doing this since the 1970s and does this reconfiguration for the Law Schools where by(+) gets a 0.33, a flat grade is 0.0 neutral and a (-) has a -0.33 deduction from neutral. Though the reconfigured GPAs aren’t reported in the common ranking profiles (like US news etc), it’s still helpful to know that fighting to stay a 93 vs a 92 or fighting to go from 97 to 98 does potentially have some significance at some point. Point of discussion with my son, as he was goinginto the last month of his first semester and trying to determine how best to allocate his time… “Don’t sleep on your 93 class…”
I get all this but there is something broken about a 1% difference in grade in one subject being so important.
In my old high school system you got graded on your actual percentages and the average of those was used to calculate your overall letter grade average. (So you didn’t lose the nuance you do here by first translating each subject to a GPA and then averaging the GPA.) seems some schools here do this but not many.
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- A lot of colleges recalculate GPA. So it kind of doesn’t matter how your HS calculates GPA.
- The vast majority of colleges in the US have 60+% acceptance rates.
- Focus on having a balanced list of schools to apply to, including one true safety, which would be a financial safety, and acceptance safety, AND a school your kid would like to attend.
…then the GPA stress sort of goes away. 
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AP scores are released in July. Most students start college in August or September. The college receives the final transcript in plenty of time. Bear in mind that unless a student has a provisional admission requiring more than proof of high school graduation, the college is unlikely to be concerned about minor changes in GPA. The college will care about 12th grade AP exam scores in cases where the student is seeking college credit for those courses.
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That is really awful. Those poor kids! Ugh.
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I will explain how the UC’s calculate out their 3 GPA’s. First of all they use only UC A-G course grades (core courses) in their GPA calculation taken the summer after 9th grade to the summer prior to 12th grade. They do not use + or - grades so an A+ or A- is just an A.
The UC’s give extra Honors points for each semester/yearlong/quarter/trimester (whatever the grading term is at the HS) for an AP, IB or UC Transferable DE/College course taken during this time for OOS applicants. HS designated “Honors” classes are not weighted for OOS applicants since they are not UC approved, however I want to note that several of the California HS Honors classes are also not approved so OOS students are not disadvantaged necessarily with the GPA calculation.
The 3 UC GPA’s are as follows:
Unweighted maximum 4.0
Capped weighed maximum 4.4 with a capped 8 semesters of Honors points
Weighted uncapped maximum 5.0 with unlimited semester of Honors points
Not only will the student’s GPA be calculated from the self-reported transcript information, but all classes and grades will be reviewed for completion of the UC A-G course requirements, HS course rigor and the student will be compared within the context of their HS course offerings.
GPA is only one of 13 factors considered in the UC application review: How applications are reviewed | UC Admissions
I like to use the RogerHub Calculator for the UC GPA calculations: GPA Calculator for the University of California – RogerHub
I hope this helps and you are welcome to PM with any other UC questions.
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I’ve just been thinking a bit more about our trip to Boulder, and the importance of seeing different colleges because you don’t always know what’s important till you see it (and of course students can change a lot over a year at this age.). Before we went, C26 could not care less about a rec center or a rah-rah football etc school. Once they saw the (totally awesome) rec center they turned to us and said “I can’t be here four years and not use this” (never had much interest in gym, rock climbing, ice skating but it’s all there…). And also asked us if it would be ok to get the sports pass if they got in (this is about the only thing not included in the fees*, $250 a year to get into women’s and men’s basketball and men’s football games). I think they had already imbibed the kind of spirit you’d see at games. So now, future college visits have something else to be compared on.
*I detailed this in the college visits post, but my husband still can’t get over the fact that they give free bus rides to ski in season 
. I love the 24/7/365 airport bus service not just for no added cost but also because it doesn’t matter then if flights are late, suddenly need to get to the airport etc. buses around Boulder and to Denver also free, as is laundry, rec club and all games other than those mentioned. Happy to pay for the sports pass given all that. It’s definitely cheaper than what all those cost D19 over a year!
I also liked that the guide said “well we say free, but your parents have paid for it as part of the fees”!!!
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Another item for students to also consider is that for AP scores being sent to the college you attend, your high school doesn’t send those…you, the student, have to request through College Board to have the scores sent to the school.
The high school would send a final transcript to the college. But every high school handles this differently…some high schools do it automatically without the student needing to take action. Others might require the senior to submit a formal request to the counseling office for that.
Just a quick question about this - if a school reports a 0-100 number AND then shows how they translate that to a letter grade, what do the UCs do? I would assume (and it’s probably a big assumption) that they let the high school translate the numerical grade to a letter grade of A+, A, A-, B+, etc. and THEN they take those letter grades and collapse them so that the A- is now an A and the B+ is now a B. So they wouldn’t consider the numerical grade at all and treat it as internal to the high school.
Is that about right? I ask about UCs because they seem to have the clearest articulation of what they’re doing.
Student’s self report their courses and grades on the UC application based on their HS transcripts. If the numerical grades are converted to letter grades, then the student would report those grades. The UC application does not allow you to enter +/- for the grades.
This is what the UC admissions states about non-letter grades:
Non-Letter Grades:
If your school uses a non-letter grading system, check with your high school counseling office for a conversion scale to the A-B-C-D-F system. If no conversion exists, list the grades as they appear on your transcript and indicate your school’s grading system is not A-B-C-D-F.
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Grade inflation coupled with score inflation as a result of the test optional policies…
I wish that schools would require score submission for all applicants but allow applicants the option to suppress the scores if they don’t want them to be taken into consideration for admissions review, but should student be accepted, scores can be included in the CDS for all admitted students so it provides a complete picture of the student body.
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Ours uses a 4.3 scale. No weighting at all.