Math skills aren’t required to figure out weighted vs. Unweighted averages. Arithmetic skills will suffice. Usually taught in the 4th thru 6th grades in the US.
I think it’s false that “most” colleges use unweighted GPA only, although it’s probably true of most of the schools that CC is focused on (the most selective). All of the schools DD17 applied to used weighted GPA, and one specifically told me they would use “whichever was higher” for their scholarship calculations.
I really think it’s up to the AOs to figure all of this out. Even within our public school conference, grading can be so different. Our high school is uber-competitive and has the same grading scale as the two closest public high schools, yet class rigor is very different.
Within our district, there are neighborhoods where parents can choose which high school their kids attend. It’s a choice between our school with no grade inflation, 32 AP classes offered, and 22% of the 700+ graduating classes getting a 34 or higher on the ACT…or the other school that is less rigorous. When classes are offered at the same level, they aren’t the same. A given student might take Chemistry Honors at both schools but our high school’s class is way different and harder than the other school’s class. Surprisingly (or maybe not), some parents choose the less rigorous school so that their bright student can stand out.
Another nearby school let’s kids take a pass on semester finals if they have an A for the two quarters that roll up to the semester grade. At our high school, it’s definitely possible to get an A for the quarters and get a B in the class if you don’t rock the final.
I think AOs know the schools in their given states. And the profiles of each high school helps them decode the weighted or unweighted GPAs.
Sure, IF someone shows you how to do it.
Figuring it out by yourself is a lot harder and more intimidating when, again, your school doesn’t use the term “weighted,” you’ve never actually seen your transcript, and no one has ever explained to you how it all works.
Like I said. When you know something, it’s easy to be like, “Why doesn’t everyone else?” But I’m saying not everyone gets the same education in these topics. My school had little college guidance at all. Nobody told me to apply to more schools than I did; nobody told me whether my list was appropriate for my stats; nobody helped us with the financial aspect or even once uttered the words “weighted” or “unweighted.”
And when you’re busy figuring out the whole entire process by yourself with the help of a website that is sometimes accurate and sometimes not, the last thing on your mind is making an Excel spreadsheet to get rid of people who aren’t satisfied with what you’ve given them.
If you can figure out how to login to this website, you can surely figure out unweighted average, no spreadsheets required.It is just not that hard, certainly easier than registering for the SAT. Whether students want to know or admit to their unweighted average is a separate matter.
…I don’t think that’s true at all. We grew up logging into websites. I joined a virtual pet site when I was eight or nine.
Good for you if you’re mathematically minded enough to create equations you’ve never been taught, but I am telling you for a fact it’s not that easy for everyone.
Oh, good grief. Four points for an “A”, three points for a “B”, two points for a “C”, one point for a “D”, zero points for an F. Use semester grades only. Add up the points, divide by the number of grades, multiply by 100. It may not be the way every single school does it, but it will give you a general idea.
@homerdog D20’s school sounds very similar. And, yes, Little Tutu had a class where she had two low As for her first and second nine weeks, made a solid B on her final and got a B for the semester. Second semester she squeaked by with the exact score on her final she needed to keep her A in one class and made it by two points in another.
To be clear, all selective colleges weight grades one way or another. The question is how do they do it. Do they accept a high school’s weighting or do they impose their own view, based on AP or self-described honors courses, school reputation or profile, etc, and do they do it subjectively or mathematically? I do not believe there is one answer for all colleges.
Nobody tells them how to do that. They just smugly type, “It’s a simple math problem! If you can’t do that, you won’t be getting into Ivies!” and move on feeling like they’ve actually contributed.
And when we still have adults who attempt to convert percentage grades to a 4.0 scale directly, despite it being pointed out time and time again that it doesn’t make sense (really? A 95% average is a 3.8? Where I’m from that might well be a 4.0), I don’t think the condescending attitude towards kids who don’t know how to calculate GPA is warranted.
I don’t disagree with you and there seems to be a lot of agreement on this matter concerning high schools. However there was a recent, lengthy thread where the majority of posters insisted that more selective colleges are not more rigorous and admonished anyone that felt otherwise.
I just don’t understand why there is so much talk on CC about the rigor of individual high schools, but that it is considered nonsense when it comes to colleges?
I hear you, but our high school has that very type of conversion printed out on the school profile that is sent with student transcripts, only a 95% is a 3.5!!! (4.0=100, 3.9=99, 3.8=98, etc. So there has never been, nor will there ever be a 4.0 at our school.
And posters don’t understand how gpas can be confusing?
Bodangles, if there are really high school students who can’t calculate a simple average (even with the help of a calculator), they could always google for an online tool that will do it for them. They will have far bigger problems surviving in college if that is an insurmountable problem.
I don’t think I ever thought about unweighted for our DS since the auto admit cut offs to the UT and TxA&M from his HS based on class rankings would be calculated on the weighted. I didn’t realize that other schools somehow even went over 5.0
It’s not necessarily that they can’t
figure it out. It’s that there’s no reason to do it for the sake of pleasing random people on CC.
I did figure my kids’ unweighted GPA once or twice just out of curiosity. But I didn’t commit it to memory or go refigure it every semester. So no, I would not have mentioned it if I was ever talking about my kids’ stats.
As someone who has been saying for several posts now that I would have struggled coming up with the calculation on my own, I find it interesting that you continue to condescend to people like that, “if they exist.” My record of A’s in chemical engineering appears to contradict the theory that everyone who couldn’t do something you, an adult with many years of experience, find easy will be a failure at life.
Sure, I could do it NOW. Sure, I could do it after being told how. Sure, I could do it with a calculator. But it’s just not worth the effort to get an official record of grades just so someone on the internet doesn’t get to feel good about being smarter than me.
@bodangles isn’t your highschool weighting system explained in your school hand book? Our school clearly lists which classes are weighted and for how much and which classes don’t factor into GPA at all, even how transfer grades are converted if not listed on a 100 point scale. Our school only reports weighted GPA but I keep track of my kids unweighted GPA, our school reports on a 100 point scale but I also can convert and keep track on a 4.0 scale weighted and unweighted. Really it’s not difficult.
To figure out gpa you need to know how your high school correlates grade (most will do A =4.0, A- = 3.67, B+ = 3.33, B= 3.0 and so on. You also need to know how many credits a particular class is worth. Most of the time it is 1, but some electives could be .5. And you need to know if only the final grade is used or if semester grades are used.
Then it is a simple average with the denominator being credit hours.
Here is an example.
Susie has the following grades
Math A-
Science B
History B+
English A
Basketweaving A
Assume all these classes are worth 1 credit each.
GPA = (3.67 + 3 + 3.33 + 4 + 4)/5 = 3.6
Now assume Mary at a different high school, has the same grades, but basketweaving is only a .5 credit class
GPA = (3.67 + 3 + 3.33 + 4 + 2)/4.5 = 3.55
Since basketweaving is only half a credit you use half of the grade which is 4/2 = 2. and the denominator changes to 4.5.
When I was in high school (non-elite public school, about a third of graduates went to four year colleges), it was common knowledge how to calculate GPA (grade point average) with A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, F=0. The high school reported unweighted GPAs, but it was also well known that taking honors or AP courses meant that you would get +1 to the grades when applying to state universities (California) which (at the time) had you fill in all of your courses and grades on a paper application and do the weighted (by their method) GPA calculation on the application.
I figured out a long time ago that there are measurers and other people who don’t appreciate that habit or skill.
My DH and a friend of mine can both tell you the distance in miles between our houses, to certain stores, when exactly a certain train goes by, etc. Then there are people like me who have just come to accept that I don’t care enough to exert any energy at all on data like that. It amuses them to do it, while I’m thinking, “I have a job and that is not it.” 
Now I will talk all day about the qualities of different shades of gray paint or running if-then scenarios in my head.
@ucbalumnus I was talking about this website there, as shown by the sentence following the one you quoted. In a Google search for “simple math problem” on this site, I found several examples of users telling the OP to just figure it out, sometimes leaving hints as to how, sometimes not.
@3scoutsmom The closest thing I could find online just now is the booklet of available classes, which says the same thing I said earlier – regular is on a 4.0 scale, honors 4.5, AP 5.0.
on a related topic, it bugs me when I go into a store and something is 25% off and the store associate tells you today you can take an extra 25% off, so you will be saving 50%.
No, it is not 50% off!
I’m not even a math person, but retail math (and gpa calculations) are fairly basic arithmetic