<p>What do you think? Which one is more beneficial to students?
Currently our school releases unweighted GPA ** AND ** class ranking done according to the weighted GPA. They are looking at possibly changing this.
What do you think benefits students most?</p>
<p>If the ranking is based on weighted scores, then I prefer unweighted and ranking. If your school is considering removing rank, then weighted is better. The biggest problem that I see with weighted is that each school does it differently, so the number is meaningless unless it is taken in context to the scale. At DS school Honors and AP are both an extra point. In the district next door, Honors is 1 point, AP is 1.5 and IB is 2 points. So when a kid has a 4.0 wighted, I have no idea is she is a straight A regular student, a B Honors Student or a struggling IB student. If I have unweighted 3.5 who is 10th in her class, I know where she is compared to her peers.</p>
<p>Many of the colleges that my kids applied to said they would recalculate their GPAs based on their own criteria. They asked for a description of each class taken and the grade achieved from the high school. Basically they wanted a course catalog and a transcript. So, from that point of view it doesn’t matter which one is given.</p>
<p>Back many moons ago when I was applying to colleges, I was told by one admissions counselor that they got a GPA from your high school and then put into context with other student’s GPAs from your school that had attended their college and how they performed. In other words, some high schools are tougher than others. Don’t know if colleges still do this, but I would suspect so.</p>
<p>Our school doesn’t weight on transcript and does rank - although they “say” the ranking is weighted on the transcript so go figure. it would take a math genius to figure out the calculation. They claim UofM “likes” to see it this way. Which kind of makes sense. UofM has historically just wanted GPA on a straight 4.0 scale but also likes to know where the kids line up in the class based on rigor which is what our “system” does. Personally I think ranking the kids is a stronger signal of their caliber in context which could potentially help some and potentially hurt some unfortunately.</p>
<p>Some universities will do auto-admit based on whatever GPA is printed on the transcript. University of Oregon, for example. If a school provided both weighted and unweighted GPA, then the university would just take whichever one was higher. There might be some automatic merit scholarships that similarly would be willing to use the weighted GPA for eligibility. No consideration of rank! In these cases, not printing the weighted GPA is a disservice to the students.</p>
<p>Personally, I am fine with what our school does. They report both weighted and unweighted GPAs and then provide the rank which is based on the weighted GPA.</p>
<p>Our school does not weight gpa and my son ran into some issues with merit scholarships at Indiana University because of it. We were able to work it out and get him the money he qualified for but my understanding is that they aren’t so flexible these days. I would definitely want the weighted gpa if given a choice - colleges will either take it as it is or they will un-weight it.</p>
<p>With only about a dozen weighted classes, and no weighting for honors at all, nobody in the district earns GPAs like the ones thrown around on CC. Weighted GPA, as someone said earlier, is a meaningless number since every school does it differently. Unweighted + rank sounds about as fair as anything.</p>
<p>Seems like any university that uses weighted GPA for admissions or merit scholarships should specify a weighting method (like what UC and CSU do) in order to make weighted GPAs more meaningful across high schools (how do you know what a 5.4 weighted GPA means?). But it appears that many do not.</p>
<p>It would also make more sense if class rank were determined using a consistent GPA calculation method. It is odd that Texas public universities do not specify to Texas high schools a GPA calculation method for class rank determination, since they use class rank but not GPA in their admissions process.</p>
<p>When do schools release the ranking? At the end of the year or at the end of four years? - my oldest is a freshman so I’m still learning these things…</p>
<p>My daughter’s went to a private school where all the grades were weighted (though not by much) and there was no class rank except for the Val and Sal. This definitely worked to their advantage in college admissions (IMO).
My son goes to a huge public hs which puts 3 GPA’s on the transcripts, an unweighted, a district weighted and a cumulative (school weighting…2 pts for AP, 1 pt for honors) GPA. I have no idea how the OOS colleges will look at this. I am not sure how the class ranking is done either.</p>
<p>
I don’t understand this. How can you apply context to an unweighted GPA but not to a weighted GPA? It seems to me that there’s an equal amount of mystery in both cases. It could be that the unweighted GPA is based on “easy” classes, just in the same way a weighted might be based on “hard” classes. How do you know enough to decide?</p>
<p>^^ Its the “10th in her class” that gives a hint of where a student is and how difficult a program it is (ie the fact that she is 10th with a 3.5 indicates that the school doesnt inflate grades and that the program of study is pretty rigorous, of course the other missing piece is the number of students in her grade.)</p>
<p>So true! You don’t know. I remember that one of my girls didn’t get into the National Honor Society because her GPA was a 3.6 and she needed a 3.8. She was taking all honors and one AP class. My friends daughter, in all regular classes, got into NHS AND got into our state’s flagship university (my daughter was rejected). I had a feeling that it would play out like this but there was no telling my daughter that “playing it safe” (for her aspirations) might have yielded more rewards.</p>
<p>If your rank is based on the unweighted GPA then the 4.0 student with no course rigor can easily outrank the student who is loaded with APUSH, BC Calc, and AP Chem who got a couple of B’s along the way. Weighted and unweighted GPA with rank without rigor tells very little.</p>
<p>Our school weights AP classes and IB classes equally, but IB students with all As wind up with the higher rank because their electives/non-academic classes (i.e IB Art, IB theater) are also weighted, and there are no corresponding weighted AP classes. Surprisingly enough, there are not very many kids in our school who maintain a 4.0 without taking advanced classes.</p>
<p>My DD’s school weights AP/IB with an extra point and honors with half a point. Surprisingly, the stronger students tend to be the AP students as evidenced by NMSF status and class standing. The school does not rank but the top students are junior marshals and inducted into the Cum Laude Society. Students need to qualify for AP classes by grades/assessments while until a change this year no prerequisites were required for the IB Program.</p>
<p>I appreciate all your responses.
Thank you!</p>
<p>I have done a little consulting, and asked around, and have yet to find a college which accepts a high school/prep school’s “weighting”. They either used unweighted, or weight it themselves.</p>
<p>I wish my school used weighted GPA, at least for rankings. I have a ~3.7-3.8 GPA, which is top 1/3 for my school, but my counselor said I’m taking a course that’s in the top 3% for rigorousness. With my 7 AP’s, I’d probably look much better with weighted, because a lot of kids here take easy classes and get A’s to have a high class rank.</p>