When I first started reading CC many years ago I was baffled that so many kids had a 4.0. I had thought it meant you were perfect - no or few mistakes on anything for all four years. Our school does not give letter grades, just numbers out of 100,. There is a huge difference between getting a 99 or 100 in a class and getting an A that is a 92 or 90 but considered a 4.0. Why would a school want to diminish the achievement of a student who gets top grades by lumping them together with students who are barely in the 90s?
“Why do many students and parents only list the student’s weighted GPA, without any context of how it is weighted?”
Not only students and parents do this, but the schools they apply to do it too. A couple of examples:
https://honors.uga.edu/p_s/first-year_profile_this_year.html
https://honors.ua.edu/programs/computer-based-honors-program/
I wondered when I read these in particular, how did the school come up with average GPA they are publishing here? My kids’ school only weights APs and dual credit classes, not honors. If they were averaging his GPA in here with the same cohort, would they adjust for the honors classes he has taken that isn’t in his weighted GPA now on his transcript?
They would do this to account for the large degree of inaccuracy, error, and bias inherent in the teaching, testing and grading processes. So many factors can affect a student’s score that differentiating between a 98 and 92 is meaningless.
Some teachers are better at covering a specific topic than others. Teachers grade differently. Teachers offer different amounts of extra credit. Students make dumb mistakes on tests that don’t reflect their actual comprehension of the subject. Some students receive more “benefit of the doubt” than others when essays are graded. Some students miss more classes than others due to scheduling conflicts (e.g. team activity that forces them to miss afternoon classes). The list goes on and on.
Even using a 100-point scale doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. When my school changed an “A” from 96 to 94, the teachers just made the exams more difficult. One teacher flat out said that they have a general idea of how many kids should make A’s, B’s, and so on, and they can - and will - change the rigor of the classes accordingly. That same school now considers an “A” to be 90, and the same percentage of kids get A’s as they did back when it was 96 and 94.
D20’s school reports both weighted and unweighted grades. The rankings are based not only on weighted grades, but also rigor (and character - if you break the honor code you are automatically disqualified from being an honor graduate). To be considered an honor graduate, students are required to take a certain amount of pre-AP and AP classes. The honor graduates are most definitely rewarded for taking the difficult classes.
Echoing others: my school didn’t give unweighted and I didn’t know that was a thing until I got on here. My parents still have no idea what it means.
Not everyone is as highly educated or as knowledgable about these things as long time CCers. Clicking your tongue at people who aren’t aware of these things is pretty elitist. Why not just explain to new people what it is and how schools recalculate.
You don’t need a wGPA to show course rigor. They ask for your class schedule anyway and the grades are shown on the transcript. Also, they may recalculate your wGPA if needed.
Honestly, I wonder how much of an impact weighted grades even have on college admissions. For those colleges that aren’t selective, I would think they wouldn’t care that much about rigor. For those colleges that are selective, I would think they would expect (and even demand) the rigor.
Re: #46
The CSU system in California includes some less selective schools. It uses a recalculated weighted HS GPA to plug into a formula with SAT or ACT superscore.
Also doesn’t CSUs not include freshman year grades?
For high schools that use weighted GPA to determine class rank, it’s important. Scoring a perfect 100 on exams obviously requires a different level or prep than making an “A”.
My kid’s HS went from unweighted only to weighted halfway through my youngest’s time there. The school preferred not to weight, saying they wanted kids in APs because they wanted to be there, not to up their GPAs.
But our state colleges have admissions/scholarship levels based on GPA and they decided our kids were at a disadvantage there so they went to weighted.
In both cases, selective colleges looked at grades and rigor together, the GPA really didn’t matter. Before we went to weighted, they knew what classes were harder and which were easier and evaluated that applicant accordingly.
Re: #48
Yes, the CSU recalculation of HS GPA does not include 9th grade, although subjects taken in 9th grade must be passed with C or higher grades to count toward subject requirements.
Our HS only reports the weighted GPA on on the report card and online access to grades…if you want the unweighted number you have to request an official transcript…it costs $3 and takes about a month to receive…The transcript lists no less than 4 GPAs. One is a 6.0 scale weighted GPA, this is the official one used by the school District for ranking purposes and the one that is available on the report card. But there is also a weighted 4.0 scale GPA and unweighted 4.0 scale GPA and also the 100 pt scale GPA. I am so confused by what GPA score to report. It is just easiest to use the one the is listed on the report card and be done with it.
Yes. The school profile generally gives admissions officers enough for them to eyeball the gpa and determine the unweighted value and the list of classes taken to determine the rigor.
Even unweighted GPA can tell you little. A 3.75 at a school which gives an A- a 3.66 weight is different than that same GPA at a school that doesn’t use - or + grading. Universities that are very GPA dependent often recalculate entirely. My daughter panicked at a UMich info session when she thought her GPA would place her under the middle 50 percent. Until she realized recalculation put her at the top of it.
My kids’ school only ever gave us the weighted GPA. Alao, the transcript only had semester grades. So to figuring out the unweighted was kind of a pain–because you had a bunch of half credits.
So, no, I was t going to do all that just to avoid annoying people on CC.
I always find it funny when a kid who is aiming for the most selective schools says they don’t know their UW gpa because the school doesn’t report it. If you think you have a shot for the top schools, you should have the math skills to figure out the UW number or create a simple excel spread sheet to do so. Lol!
Usually the same kids who say that they “anticipate” getting 1550+ on the SAT. Well, I anticipate winning Powerball this week, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen. 
Can some of you math people point the rest of us to an online calculator that might convert these weighted GPAs?
Our school uses an additional letter grade for honors/AP course - an “O” - that is worth more. So the traditional A-F grading scale is complicated by that. Our high school, like mentioned above, also reports semester grades even for year-long courses.
I will ask the guidance counselor, but I’m curious what I might figure out on my own.
Easy to look down on those kids when you’re confident in your math skills and understand how weighting works.
Not so easy when you think you’re bad at math (in my case, thanks to a discouraging algebra 2 teacher), and/or have just learned that “weighting” is a thing. I didn’t touch Excel until college. Nobody taught us how to use it before that.
Somehow despite all my shortcomings I did in fact get good SAT scores. 