Even unweighted varies by school. So what’s the difference?
The difference is putting all kids on the same scale and differentiating by the classes on their transcript. The only minor difference is between schools that have 90-100 as As and schools that have 93-100 as As. If all schools weighted the same this conversation would be null but schools have done all sorts of strange things to a system that used to be pretty straightforward. It’s probably not a big deal to the colleges who have been dealing with this for over a decade, but there are plenty of kids (and parents) who come on here and post and claim there kid has a 4.0 when really that kid could have a 3.3 or some such. I see it much more with kids interested in UofM, because they use unweighted GPAs and it can be surprising to some kids that 3.8 or 3.9 is the norm for acceptances and that is an unweighted 3.8 or 3.9 so a whole lotta As and maybe only one or two Bs. Our public doesn’t weight for that very reason…the top kids are applying to UofM so why weight the GPA is the Administration answer when questioned why “we” don’t weight. UofM will accept 3.8 - 4.0 kids of ours with APs or “our” rigorous classes on their transcript and probably not accept 3.8 - 4.0 kids missing those classes (which are spelled our on the school profile).
It might be fun for kids to game their own school, but in general they aren’t “gaming” colleges especially if more than one kid in the graduating class is applying to the same college.
@itsgettingreal17, that’s why you have to use caution when looking at GPAs. Consider them estimates, not hard and fast numbers. Our school only supplies a weighted GPA, but the transcript only has unweighted grades. I’m pretty sure at the selective colleges, the admissions officers are looking at the transcript not the GPA - whether it’s weighted or unweighted. They are looking at course rigor and seeing if the A’s are in AP Calc or basketweaving. From what I’ve heard at many school that GPA just gets turned into a number that puts you in one of two piles that will matter - great or good enough academically. They aren’t making decisions based on tiny differences and I’ve seen them skip over kids with higher GPAs for ones with more to bring to the table.
What colleges do not consider music as “academic”?
The unreliability of HS GPA across high schools and when comparing with college frosh admission profiles also means that many people posting on these forums place an excessively high importance on SAT/ACT scores, merely because they are convenient and comparable across all test takers, even though they may be only a small part of the admissions criteria for a given college.
True many people may think that - but for many kids whose high schools are neither inflationary or deflationary their percentiles may be fairly accurate - e.g. an 90th percentile kid nationally is reflected in their GPA or their SAT/ACT score could reflect on the inflationary or deflationary aspect of the high school. I’ve always believed rare would be a kid with a lower percentile SAT/ACT score and a super high GPA in the absence of an LD or conversely a very low GPA and a super high SAT/ACT which is fairly commonly perceived as a kid whose heart wasn’t into academic structure 
a message in and of itself. A test-freezer kid would test-freeze all through high school during exams, not just one Saturday in one month in my opinion. I recall one poster years and years ago whose kiddo scored a 19 on the ACT which is not college ready but had a 3.9 GPA…that says alot about the high school and the kiddo. This comparability was true for my kids and true for many kids whose parents we are open and honest with about such things back when we were going through the process. A super high ACT/SAT isn’t going to necessary overcome a low GPA and a high GPA is not necessarily going to overcome a low average ACT/SAT. They go hand in hand along with the high school profile and the kids application. They are all pieces that paint a picture and together give the parents a roadmap about just where their kids should be applying.
Reach schools should be a stretch not a Hail Mary taking into consideration all the factors that make up an application including what a raw unweighted GPA really means to the application totality. I believe common data sets use unweighted GPAs and is stipulated as such. I found those very useful when looking for colleges with my kids. But not good for the parent an kid who looks at them and thinks that that 75th percentile is a weighted GPA. It happens all the time on the UofM forum when the kid discovers that 4.1 is really a 3.5 or 3.6 or lower unweighted which is no man’s land for that college when 79.6% of the entering freshman class has a unweighted GPA of 3.75 or higher.
There’s no perfect, succinct way to capture the academic performance of a HS kid.
There’s clearly a lot of variation in weighting systems, but even unweighted GPAs are not strictly comparable across schools (or perhaps even within them). That said, uwGPAs are, IMO, somewhat more consistent and comparable than wGPAs. And yes, I assume that most selective/highly selective colleges reweight or otherwise reassess a transcript versus simply accepting a school-reported uwGPA or wGPA.
That said, colleges may be under their own forms of pressure in how THEY might report HS grades of the students they accept, or under time pressure if forced to evaluate massive #s of applicants. Or, simple human nature might come into play and a reader who sees a reported 4.2 GPA may perceive (subconsciously, perhaps) that the kid in question significantly outperformed a kid with a 3.9 or a 3.6 or even a 3.2, without necessarily considering all that goes into that.
Real life example - a few years ago I/we were considering a tiny private school that was fighting grade inflation hard. My memory is a little hazy, but I think the general effect was that among the high achievers supposedly going there, even a 3.1 or 3.2 was considered very good - perhaps the equivalent of a 3.8-3.9 uwGPA, 4.2+ wGPA at a solid public HS. I was told that the school in question made efforts when its students applied to colleges to show the colleges how tough their grading was, how a 3.1-3.2 was really quite good at their school, etc. But I was, and remain, skeptical about this from a college admissions standpoint. I just think its quite likely that an admissions officer comparing a 3.1 uwGPA from this school to a 3.8 uwGPA from a public is not going to consider them equal achievements, even if they DO in fact represent comparable effort and achievement.
The NCAA only considers core courses for GPA - math, social science, natural/physical science, English.
Foreign language isn’t always considered either.
http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/eligibility_center/DI_and_DII_Worksheet.pdf
and
http://www.nationalscholastic.org/ncaa_clearing_house
As to which colleges don’t consider music to be core, I don’t know.
MidwestDadOf3, that intensity of instruction should be reflected in higher SAT/ACTs scores than one would see in a 3.1 weighted high school student.
It doesn’t bother me if they don’t include band, choir, art, theater, phys-ed and other non-core classes. A kid that is going to college for art or theater or instrumental is probably in an audition situation anyway, and those colleges look at transcripts differently. Taking them out of core Reading/writing/Arithmetic formulas is another way of having a foundation for evaluating kids headed for college in something other than fine arts. Same with engineering and other pre-professional majors. I recall the admissions officer at UofM saying that admissions looks closer at STEM classes and grades and look close at math and science related sections of ACT/SAT for kids wanted to go into engineering and that’s a uni that gets close to 50,000 apps a year so makes sense they are going to look at what pertains to the kids’ college major choice.
Yes, a 3.1 GPA kid from the harsh grading school would presumably have ACT/SAT scores more comparable with a 3.8 GPA (at a more conventional HS) kid or whatever. But will the admissions officer recognize that the 3.1 kid (with, say, a 33 ACT) is pretty comparable to the 3.8 + 33 ACT kid from the different high school? Perhaps, but the admissions officer also might view the 3.1 kid as a slacker: smart (hence the 33 ACT), but not applying himself particularly well in HS (hence the “low” GPA).
The school profile should reflect that very few kids at that school have GPAs in the higher ranges. Most school profiles show what percentage of kids are at each quartile or each decile. if there is a high percentage of kids at higher deciles than the kid with the 3.1/33 ACT then that is a different story and perhaps the kid is challenged with a more difficult curriculum but has good retention. If the college is in the same region of the country there is also a very good chance that regional admissions person is familiar with the school. It is my opinion that none of this happens in a vacuum.
There are slacker kids. I personally know 2. One with a 2.something who no one paid a moments attention to during high school until he scored a 36 on his ACT on the first take. He subsequently went off to engineering school only to quit in December of his freshman year and happily spent the winter skiing out west and is now somewhere for rafting season. And I imagine there are kids that get passed over who have great potential, fortunately enough studies indicate that those kids tend to do well no matter where they land even if it’s not the “caliber” of school their hidden intelligence might be indicate. I happen to think too much importance gets placed on landing at the stretch school or worrying about stuff that can’t be controlled.
The school in question has graduating classes of like 15-20 kids. It’s in Missouri. While WUSTL or perhaps Northwestern or U of Chicago admissions officers might be familiar with it, I doubt the typical admissions officer at Harvard or MIT or UVA is.
Yes, school profiles can help with this issue. My contention is that school profiles are limited. Humans instinctively scale things to norms. If you put something on a very different scale, even if the scale is explained, I think often folks won’t fully rescale to compare with the norms.
As a lesser issue, some schools and/or scholarships may use hard coded scales. i.e. To be eligible for a particular scholarship or automatic admissions criteria, you MUST have a 3.5 or whatever.
Basically, IMO, this school was fighting a lonely battle it shouldn’t have been fighting. The odd/harsh grading scale was not the only reason we didn’t enroll our kid there, but it was a factor.
@ucbalumnus - I don’t know, but for many orchestra would be considered more of an EC than a course. And while they may want to see one art course, the 16 A+ (semester) grades made a huge difference in my kid’s GPA because our school counted all those music courses. I did not think we could count on colleges to think those outweighed the C+ in Chemistry freshman year, or the many B+ grades in math and science, not to mention steady B’s in Latin. I felt he was really a B+ student despite a 93 unweighted, 97 weighted average, and top 6% class rank. He got into Tufts, Vassar and U of Chicago thanks to being interesting, writing good essays, and having teachers who loved him. But he didn’t get into Harvard, Brown or Georgetown, nor did he really expect to.
Our school reports at least 6 GPAs on the transcript (weighted vs unweighted, academic vs all, and 9th+ vs 10th+).
But, the kids and parents are not at all aware that some colleges see an A- as 3.7 vs A as 4.0. That isn’t how the UCs do it. Our high school treats all As as 4, all Bs as 3, etc because that’s what the UCs do. So, a kid with a bunch of A-s actually has a much lower GPA than they would guess for Ivy/similar colleges.
Our class percentages are never reported outside the grade portal. Our students would compare poorly based on percent, as classes give almost no extra credit. The teachers also aren’t aware that not all As are the same to some colleges, as it seems the default essay grade for many humanities courses is 95% to mean “Assignment completed; I didn’t have time to grade it in detail, but it looks fine.”
@mathmom2 Orchestra, art, and drama are academic courses in California because they meet the UC system’s “f” requirements of the a-g requirements. That’s the requirement that trips up many out-of-state applicants to the UC system. Non-academic courses are Health, PE, and some job training courses.
Same reason they might mention a gross income instead of a post-tax income? I dunno…
Of course, finding post-tax income can require a complex calculation (more complex than finding unweighted GPA), usually done once a year in April. A rough estimator can be found at http://www.tax-rates.org/income-tax-calculator/?ref=nav_income .
But it does seem to be the case that when people discuss income tax and post-tax income on these forums, they tend to overestimate (and complain about) income taxes and therefore underestimate post-tax income.