<p>Our high school does not weight grades, nor does it officially rank. But they do declare a val, and I think that is completely bogus. A few years ago, the kid named val had never taken a single honors or AP course. (As I am fond of saying, that will be fair 'round about the time the kid who wins the “scholar athlete” award has never been on a varsity team. Which will happen when Hell freezes over.) </p>
<p>Another thing is that it is quite possible for colleges to estimate class rank at our school by looking at the GPA distribution on the School Profile information. The problem with that is that it refers to last year’s graduating class, which can be very different in terms of achievement and size. And, of course, since the grades are unweighted, the comparison is essentially meaningless. But I bet they look. The kids who really get it in the neck are those with a tough course load but a B or B+ average, because they will not be in the top 10th. </p>
<p>At our HS, the truism that it is best to get an A in AP classes for college admissions definitely applies, because there isn’t going to be any weighting to pull your B up to an A.</p>
<p>Some posters on this thread have said that all schools worth worrying about recalculate the GPA anyway. That is not true, unfortunately. Yale, just to name one, does not. So if your school counts gym grades as equivalent to grades in AP Calculus, that’s too bad for you.</p>
<p>I’ve always been in favor of weighting, but some of the horror stories told here give me pause. Obviously, there are kinks that need to be worked out.</p>
<p>My kids go to a public high school - 5 years ago they changes the grading system - prior was 90-100 = A = 4.0, 80-89 = B = 3.0 etc. AP and dual credit classes were given weight at 10% - i.e and 82 would be a 90% and a 4.0.</p>
<p>Now it is an A+, A, A- etc system. 90-92 = A-, 93-96 = A, 97-100 = A+
A+= 4.33, A= 4.0, A- = 3.67 etc…
they changed the weighting - now AP’s are weighted 10% of the GPA. So an 87% = B+ and the weighted GPA is 3.66 instead of 3.33.</p>
<p>Honors courses are not weighted at all.</p>
<p>Last year was the first class to graduate under the new system. The GPA’s went waaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy down. They did not change the NHS gpa requirements and the number of student who qualifed for NHS is way down.</p>
<p>The problem of splitting hairs for the valedictorian/salutatorian was eliminated.</p>
<p>I have found having 3 seniors in 4 years and doing the college search that most selective colleges take apart your transcript and recalculate your GPA. My kids benefited from this tremendously.</p>
<p>They are hurt when applying to programs and scholarship that just go by the GPA on your transcript.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that you just can’t compare GPA’s between schools - it’s like comparing apples to oranges.</p>
<p>All of my s’s colleges ask for both. 1 flatly states that they will re-score you gpa (his didn’t get re-scored, instead they placed his uw in as his gpa…his w is @.7 higher.<br>
What I find more interesting is your the 1st person that still has a 90 as an A. We moved during s’s soph year to another state and both schools weight and use the 93 as A-. I know in the end that the gpa would be the same for both due to calculations, however, I am curious of how many other schools do that system still. I just thought all hs are not 93-100, 85-92, etc. If you think about it our students fail at 69, do your students fail at that percentage too?</p>
<p>Our transcript also says A-90, B-80, C-70, D-65. But no one talks about letter grades and the school doesn’t translate our grades to the 4.0 scale. If the college wants to they have to do it themselves. I don’t think it matters much - I think if the scale is A=93+ teachers tend to give more 93+ grades depending on how many A’s they think a class should have.</p>
<p>Actually your last statement I disagree with. Both of our schools are very strict on the #'s Classwork counts for only 10% of grade, the rest is test scores for math, hist, sci and foreign language. Eng is more subj. They also have EOC’s -state driven for every class, which counts as a test, thus again can’t skew the grade. BTW these 2 schools are night and day Northern Virginia and rural North Carolina. I would think they are being force to operate in the same matter due to no child left behind</p>
<p>Our school adds 10% to grades for Honors and 20% for AP. I am not sure but I’m fairly certain the cut-offs are at the 10s (90 for an A, 80 for a B).</p>
<p>Does anyone wonder how the admission boards can work properly with everyone having different systems. Our school gives a 6 for AP, 5 for Honors, 4 for Std. Funny thing is they give only 4 and 5 for Jump Start (s spends 1/2 day at school, 1/2 at CC) Read through the lines, they believe the CC is easier and not = to AP, am I missing something here the AP is suppose to be college level. If your kid goes to the CC after hs, and then transfer the credit is picked up by the college. If they take an AP get and A, but only a 3 the college does not give u credit. I can’t wrap myself around that. Many of our students elect not to go to jump start and do AP (above scenario) to raise their GPA. My ownly problem with the district I am in anyone can take honors or AP, in our VA school you had to be in the gifted program by 9th to be able to take AP/IB In other words you would be out of courses to graduate since you were accelerated and have to take the AP to earn enough credits.</p>
<p>It does answer questions, I have to pay $83 when he registers for the AP at school, if he passes they refund the money to us. It also answers to me how there are kids that will grad with 23+ AP’s (I was always floored by the # 8 courses per yr = AP’s only since 10th) At our school you must take Honors first before you can take AP, in other words add in mandated electives (state req) you can’t graduate with more than 8 AP’s (2 hist, 1 eng, 1 math, 3 sci, 1 art)</p>
<p>I’m not sure of all the ranges at our high school, but I do know that a 92 is a B+ and a 93 is an A-.</p>
<p>Since our school neither weights nor ranks, I just plugged my son’s unweighted GPA into Michelle Hernandez’ Academic Index calculator. I then added on a few points, which he would certainly get, since he’ll graduate with 8 APs and everything else honors where possible, and his AI shot up. Apparently a mere 4.0 or so isn’t that great, since the calculator assumes weighted grades. If schools do use this, it is definitely going to be a strike against kids whose schools don’t weight grades.</p>
<p>bulletandpima - 60% is passing being a D-.
Schools can use any grading system they want - this varies even in our county where there are 18 public school districts. </p>
<p>My senior applied to the University of South Carolina - they recalculate your GPA based on the core courses you take - throwing out the fluff and weight your Honors and AP classes. My daughter GPA on her transcript showed a 3.2 - relcalculated it became a 3.8.
Her transcript only shows one GPA they don’t get a seperate Weighted GPA.</p>
<pre><code>My s has no fluff, all honors and AP’s except mandated electives (he took latin, arc., psych—no basketweaving). His cores end with 5 lang, Discrete Math (Calc), Physics, AP Eng, AP Hist (world & US) etc. Yet his gpa was not changed due to how our system works.
That is my point. 69 is an F here, and every core course to grad must take an EOC (lang, sci, math, hist., for lang, and apprentice fields —arc/construction drawing). Thus, there is not national scoring program…Scrap no child left behind, implement a nation wide program that every state must comply with…can anyone say SAT!
I can’t speak of USC since my s didn’t apply, but I will keep my fingers crossed that she gets it. Afterall, isn’t that we want for all of the posters!
</code></pre>
<p>At my kids’ school, an A in a regular course was a 4.0 , A in honors was a 4.5 and an A in AP was 5.0. They also did the 97-100 was an A and thus received the top point value and so on.</p>
<p>School did rank. On college applications I think they asked for w. and uw. Don’t know about SAT form.</p>
<p>I think the weighting encourages the students to push themselves more.</p>
<p>I agree. My kid’s school uses 4 (regular) 4.5 (honors) and 5 (AP), i.e. they add .5 or 1.0 point for difficulty. They report weighted and unweighted grade points, and class rank using both weighted and unweighted grade points. I find this interesting. Kid’s weighted and unweighted rank are within 10 of each other. I take this to mean that, for someone with good but imperfect grades, the rank is affected by weight but not hugely.</p>
<p>Same here. Both honors and AP/IB weighted up. So colleges don’t give you brownie points for a high “unweighted” rank, even tho ALL ACADEMIC CLASSES ARE LABELLED HONORS.
Most ■■■■■■■■ thing ever.</p>
<p>Our school district uses a %age grading system and weights AP/Honors classes by 10 and 5 percentage points respectively. It uses the weighted gpa to determine class rank.</p>
<p>I think that some of the problem is with grade inflation. When an A is relatively easy to achieve, the result is a very small gpa difference between students in the top decile. Those student aiming to get into the top tier of the ranking cannot afford a mediocre grade in any class.</p>
<p>Our district is reasonably rigorous in its course grading which means that a student can have a few minor slipups without it significantly impacting final class standing. Our DS had an uwgpa of 91.00 in his academic classes, which under many letter grade systems would be a B+ or A-. But this gpa placed him in the top 5% of his class. In fact in his infamous CalcBC class, his final grade of 83 was better than the class average which was somewhere in the high 70’s. And yep he did get a 5 on the AP exam which he chararacterized as a piece of cake.</p>
<p>Personally I do not have a problem with class rank. I know some districts use a decile ranking but what about the student who just misses placement in the top decile? That doesn’t seem quite fair either.</p>
<p>No national scoring program - states with state based education system - mostly in the south have state standards with their EOC’s - Like North Carolina. I don’t think states will give up this “control” to the federal government.</p>
<p>Here in the Northeast/mid-atlantic education is very localized. All decisions on courses, content, grading systems are made locally. And they vary widely.</p>
<p>GPA is only good to compare kids in the same school - but even then it is faulty. My kids took all honors courses and got no weighting - and kids who chose to take all Academic (college prep) got higher GPA’s because the classes were much easier and graded easier. </p>
<p>Class rank is useful in comparing how a student does compared to their peers - it better than comparing GPA’s but not much.</p>
<p>One of my kids didn’t get in NHS - despite getting decent grades in all Honor’s classes - her school looks at 9th and 10th grade - does not weight honors and she only had a B+ - unweighted. Kids got in who never ever took an honors course because their GPA was over 3.5 - talk about ■■■■■■■■.</p>
<p>I am really confident that most colleges look at gpa and transcripts - they recalculate GPA based on courses they took.
USC (south carolina) does this as does Elon university and I know St Joe’s in Philly has done this for years.
I don’t think in college applications our kids are being “cheated” by school calculating GPA’s in a screwy method.</p>
<p>I am confused how would you give class rank without weighting GPA’s. As u stated your child took harder courses, but has a lower GPA, thus weighting would have benefitted them and raise the rank and GPA.
I also agree I know from experience that The SA’s all re-weight the GPA’s, application states it. It didn’t affect my son because our school does both weight and unweighted. U of Penn also recalculates for AP’s and honors due to the fact that as we have seen through this thread every school has a different point system. UMD also takes both.
Finally to the person (can’t remember who) colleges do care about the weighted grade. At UMD you can get into specialized programs if you have certain mins, 1 of them you must have a 4.02, another is 4.25(ns). So if this is in the application process then they are stating that courses are given weights</p>
<p>Oh yep - lots of kids who took an easier schedule - i.e. not one honor’s course and got a class rank higher than mine.<br>
but they are all going to local colleges…they don’t have the course work to go anywhere else. not fair really but the payoff comes later. It is a thorn in my side but I tell my kids that high school is just high school. </p>
<p>The SA’s also look at the strength of your schedule. If you aren’t taking the most challenging courses your school offers then you probably don’t have much of a chance even if your GPA is a 4.0.</p>
<p>The bottom line - when kids come on this forum and say stuff like my GPA is a 3.4 or a 4.3- you really have no idea what that means. It is just a number taken completely out of context.</p>
<p>If GPA is 3.4 uw and 4.3 w it does mean that they are taking harder courses, that would be why they are over the 4.0 score.</p>
<p>However, as stated earlier in the thread some schools are not making their own AP courses which bother me.</p>
<p>Side note, a good friend took great pride her sonwas given NHS and top 10%grad. cords for ranking because of his GPA. ( My s has been NHS/BETA his entire acad. life — only non honor/College Board AP approv. was state mandated elect, PE, comp., etc) He never took 1 AP or Honors. finished w/st mandated req. (4 Eng, 4 Hist, 3 Ma, 2 Foreign) rest were horticulture, weightlifting, teen living which he got 4.0’s in, that would be why he made NHS and top 10%.</p>