UW1 or W2

halcyonheather
Sun, 22 Mar 2015 22:53:58 +0000

The essential purpose of weighted GPA is to rank students fairly within a single school, but people discuss it outside this context and it often creates more confusion than it’s worth. For example, people on here will report their weighted GPAs without giving any context, as if these numbers mean anything without knowing how they’re calculated. Other people see weighted grades as a kind of extra credit—they think their 4.5 weighted GPA is “better than perfect” because they’ve taken 4.0 to mean “perfect” regardless of the scale, but obviously colleges won’t see it that way.

Weighted grades allow individual schools to decide which of their classes are hard enough to merit weighting, and this is useful to colleges because it helps them evaluate applicants’ course rigor by looking at which courses were weighted (as opposed to simply looking for AP and honors labeling). One problem, however, is that weighted grades can deter people from taking unweighted art and music classes, as well as dual-enrollment classes in some cases. For example, a student might choose to take AP Statistics rather than a university multivariable calculus course because the latter could lower their class rank if it’s not weighted.

I generally believe that grades and course rigor should be evaluated separately. Honors classes are often harder than regular classes, but we can take that into consideration without trying to quantify it. The valedictorian is the person who gets the best grades, not necessarily the person who achieves the most academically. I don’t think you can discover that person by crunching numbers.