Even unweighted can be meaningless to some extend. In our school nobody has 4.00 unweighted because the scale goes A+=4, A=3.7, A-=3.5 and there is NO student with all A+ simply because they are several humanities teachers that refuse to give A+. So if I am to give you my kid’s unweighted how are you to draw conclusions without this context? And if I am going to recalculate and give a 4 for all type of As then how I make the distinction between students that have mostly A+ from those that have mostly A-? There is a big difference between those students at our school. So in general gpa alone without context only passes limited information.
http://gpacalculator.net/high-school-gpa-calculator/
But unweighted gpa is easy to figure, weighted is harder because that can vary by school.
Unweighted is a straight up average of the numeric values of each class per credit - AP, honors, doesn’t matter. Only the grade and the # of credits.
Class1 - 3 credits - B (3.0)
Class2 - 3 credits - A (4.0)
Class3 - 3 credits - C+ (2.3)
GPA = 3.11
…etc.You can get the grades to numeric values at http://www.collegeboard.com/html/academicTracker-howtoconvert.html
The only GPA we receive is weighted on 100 point scale. That is what shows on all report cards and transcripts. there is no A+, A, A- no 4.0, 3.5 etc. to try and get an unweighted GPA requires pulling a full transcript and then applying a guesstimate to the grades on what it should be and then backing out AP weighting. Every student is on the same grading scale and it calculates to the third decimal. Honestly it is very different from what I grew up with but the grade bands are much wider as well (90-100 = A, vs 94-100 when I was a kid). It makes for very easy comparison because it is just a straight grade average based off the transcript. It also means a 104.xxx is very easily compared to any other student regardless of how you got there. The primary factor for who ends up top 10 is often how many AP classes and only secondarily whether or not you got a 98 or a 97. this years Val had a 108.3++. that was higher than we thought was possible given the required unweighted classes but he took some regular classes DE which excluded from calculation. tend s to push AP over DE for top students due to the weighting for sure.
If honors classes are worth 4.5 and AP classes are worth 5.0, then that means the classes are weighted.
If no one can have a 4.0 because no one can get an A+ and if an A=3.7 and an A- is 3.5, then the classes are weighted.
Our school district weighs AP, PreAP, IB, Dual credit all the same with an extra 1. A=90-100, B=80-89.
PE is required and first level of foreign language are not weighted and calculated in the GPA. . So no one can have an un weighted 4.0.
I don’t think that’s correct. If a student didn’t take any weighted classes and received straight A’s, their GPA would be 4.0 (unweighted). Since some unweighted classes must be taken, no one would be able to get a 5.0 weighted GPA.
Our kids attend a private school that does not weight, does not rank and doesn’t offer AP classes so it takes a lot of guesstimating to try and make sense of GPAs vs what colleges present as their class statistics.
The general point is that using the weighted average to determine match/reach schools can be a problem. Someone told me their kid had a 4.3 which I thought was amazing, and meant the kid got all As with most being AP/Honors classes. At our HS that would be a top student (A top grade, with 0.5 for honors/APs but with limits on honors/APs offered). But I later found out that the top GPA at that HS is a 5.3 because the school awards A+ grades and adds a 1.0 weight to APs and honors. The 4.3 contained a lot of B+s which were weighted to a 4.3. Great GPA, but not enough for the tippy top schools where the kid thought she had a shot because her GPA was in the range of accepted GPAs reported by the colleges.
Our HS reported both the regular and the “academic” GPA. The latter including the 0.5 weighting for honors/APs and did not include gym etc. At our big state U, they only asked for the actual grades so the weighting did not figure in the GPA.
What do the colleges report in their accepted student profiles? Is there any standard?
Re: #87
Yes, exactly why high school based weighted GPAs are typically useless outside of the high school.
Unfortunately, there is no standard, so colleges report whatever they like.
Which is why for students lucky enough to have a system like Naviance, it is much more helpful to look at results from one’s own HS than to look at the college’s acceptance history in general.
@mom2and Agreed, but if you go to a small school (or are interested in a college that doesn’t attract much interest form the kids in your school), Naviance is also of limited value.
I’m not sure if someone said this, but our Powerschool only shows weighted GPA, plus what is in that and in Naviance does not match (Naviance is a little higher for some reason).
We’d have to calculate his unweighted GPA.
As for usefulness of Naviance, there are about 300 kids in each of our graduating classes, so unless your kid is smack in the middle, and the school is local, there aren’t enough kids applying as pantha33m said, which means you don’t get data points for fear of privacy issues.
I remember seeing a kid with 1200 on the SAT Math plus Reading who got into Yale. The story was that he was a recruited wrestler and had excellent grades but was a terrible tester. Individual circumstance made the school results almost useless.
Yes, but if the school has naviance you can get some idea of the range of schools your student may have a good chance at and see how the school of interest compares in terms of the general accepted student stats.
Our naviance uses the academic GPA (includes bump for honors and APs and only academic subjects (not gym)). Our system reports for the last 5 years. The outliers are pretty obvious and one has to assume those kids were either recruited athletes or had some other special hook. There were certainly some far away or unusual schools that did not report data, but most of them certainly did. Of course for the tippy top schools, like Yale, there were far more rejections, some wait lists, and a few acceptances. I am surprised that with 300 kids per class it is not giving you good info on a wide range of schools? If your kid is not in the clear accept range, that would suggest the school is a reach for that student.
My dd’s class size is about 125, so Naviance doesn’t help us either, unless you’re looking at the state uni. Most of the schools on dd’s list only had 1-5 kids applying at her schools (some had none) and we got the same privacy message.
@shortnuke, yes, you are correct…my mistake. I guess no one can have a perfect weighted 5.0 then.
Your daughter is in a tough spot taverngirl as there is no good way to determine her chances especially as your HS may not be known to the colleges of interest to her, except for the college data set. OTOH, she may represent some geographic diversity? Even at our big high school, there were some small schools, usually at a distance, for which there was no data.
Our Naviance only uses weighted GPA which, of course, doesn’t tell the whole story even within the realm of GPAs. Someone could have a 5.0 with all As and no honors/AP classes or they could have a 5.0 with some As, some Bs, and a few Cs that includes many honors/AP classes. I count on the guidance counselors to know their stuff. They have the information about the actual kids who are those dots on the graph and can tell us if our S19 stacks up against the kids who were admitted.
And we all know that Naviance only tells part of the story. It’s just GPA and ACT or SAT. No essay, recs, ECs in those graphs.
I would caution people who are calculating unweighted GPAs because their school only reports weighted ones to also do a calculation using only academic courses. There was a huge difference in my younger son’s unweighted GPA if you left out all his orchestra courses (which were all A+s).
Our HS has 2000+ students and our Naviance has plenty of data points… for the schools that most kids apply to. My D applied to a smallish LAC in PA – one that does not get a lot of applicants from around here. We had no data due to privacy issues. What we were able to do is find extremely similar schools and look at those. Not perfect but helpful. In general, we found Naviance to be extremely accurate and could see both W and UW GPA numbers.
D’s school only provides a weighted GPA.