I’ve never seen this addressed here. My kids’ school uses weighted grades for certain challenging courses, AP and IB. I recently learned that some students have figured out the system and have learned to work it to their advantage in terms of GPA and class rank. They might take as many weighted classes as possible - 4 out of a 7 period day - take two other electives for unweighted grades, and then sign up to be an office assistant or teacher’s aide for the remaining period, thus reducing the number of unweighted grades diluting their weighted A’s. Did I say this clearly? Do you follow?
My son did things very differently. He is a top student and loves music. He had to work very hard and get very creative in order to keep all the ensembles that were important to him on his schedule. Most years, he has had to double up on a class in order to make it so. In other words, he was signed up for two 6th period classes… he would go to Chemistry one day, and choir the next and so alternate, splitting his time. That meant that he then had 8 classes in a 7 period day. If you also factor in a men’s choir that meets before school and orchestra, which has rehearsal in the evening, but is for credit, that meant 10 grades in a 7 period schedule!
Let me be clear - he wasn’t padding his grades with easy music classes. He was taking the most rigorous coursework offered at his school and getting all A’s. But he was doubling up on classes to fit his ensembles into the school day. Consequently, he was outranked by classmates who took fewer classes which diluted their GPA’s by less. How have others communicated a student’s exceptionality in a situation like this?
@community2605, I don’t have an answer for you. But I understand what you are saying.
My kids all took the PE for their sport in high school, and were talented enough to play on their varsity teams all four years. Taking PE instead of an academic subject was mandatory in order to participate in varsity sports at their school. However, it did mean that they HAD to take a full year, all four years, of a class that had a maximum weight of 4.0, while kids who took all AP’s did not have to water down their grades in this way.
I can assure you that this did not hurt my kids’ applications/admissions results. However, I THINK (not sure) that there is a space on the Common App that allows you to provide an explanation of anything you feel was not covered in the overall common app. This could be the place to explain that you did try to take the most rigorous schedule available to you, albeit some of the courses were for the purpose of pursuing your interests even if they hurt your overall weighted gpa.
Also, keep in mind that most colleges consider applicants’ unweighted gpa. The weighting really goes more to showing the college that you pursued a rigorous educational path.
Edit: I know for a fact that the UC application DOES have a space that permits the student to provide additional explanations regarding whatever they want.
This is a problem created by the inappropriate weighting systems that most high schools use and has been discussed on threads before. In many schools, like ours, getting an A in an elective is equivalent to getting a B in an honors or AP class. Thus, students who fill out their schedule with electives will have a lower GPA than students who take study halls instead. The mathematics of the weighting system considers a study hall more rigorous than an elective, which of course is idiotic. One would hope that college admissions officers are well aware of this issue. I also hope that they pay attention to the number of credits being earned when they look at overall rigor.
Your school allows a student to take two classes in the same period? Attendance is required in our school and surprisingly few absences will result in a fail.
Is your son, or any of the other students, applying to colleges where class rank is critical?
Obviously, your high school failed to realize that its weighted GPA and class ranking system creates a disincentive to choose a more rigorous schedule with extra courses. Gaming the class ranking system this way is something that students would do for near term reward (e.g. admission or scholarship at a college that prioritized class rank) at the expense of education. Unfortunately, such misaligned incentives are not limited to high school (see pre-med and pre-law behavior in college).
It also does not say much good for the value of the high school’s classroom instruction if he can attend only half of the chemistry and choir classes and still do well in those courses.
Every kid in our school system who took chorus or band or dance, even at the highest level offered, lost out on honors and AP GPA bumps which aren’t offered for those classes. Therefore none of those kids was ever going to come out of high school with the highest GPAs in the grade.
So who went to Harvard from S2’s class? A music/drama kid and a band girl. They did not have the highest GPAs in the class.
@mathyone and @ucbalumnus - I understand what you’re saying about attendance. Not many students do any doubling up and he had to get special permission from each teacher. I guess he has a good reputation and they knew he would do outside work to stay on top of things. But you’re right - half the instruction and in-class practice should be a huge thing.
My daughter’s rank was affected by having many extra credits in unweighted academic classes diluting her weighted GPA, and the fact that her school did not allow AP classes until junior year. Only AP classes were weighted at her school. There are a lot of students moving in and out of the school and her rank was bumped because two students came from other high schools that allowed AP classes before junior year, thus giving them more chance to have a higher number of weighted grades. It did not affect her admission and she ended up with a great scholarship.
I would have a conversation with your GC about your kid’s recommendation letter. I have mentioned this a few times on CC, what’s important for many top tier schools is how the GC is going to rank your student. http://www.du.edu/apply/media/documents/2012CASSR.pdf
For the categories below:
Academic achievement
Extracurricular accomplishments
Personal qualities and character
Overall
Will the student be ranked:
Below
average Average
Good (above
average)
Very good
(well above
average)
Excellent
(top 10%)
Outstanding
(top 5%)
One of the top
few I’ve encountered
(top 1%)
Your kid will read relative to students at his school. It will be more than just weighted GPA. Adcoms will take into rigor of course work, as well as grades, into consideration. If your kid is taking 10 courses and most kids are taking 6 or 7, adcoms will see that on the transcript.
1000s of kids are like yours, online classes, unweighted classes, sports and such. Its the game. I can only assume you are more concerned than your child since he is not posting. I would not worry about it since there is nothing you can do. Life is about choices work within the system and take the classes earning the highest rank or take classes that don’t. Is it fair? I don’t really know. I imagine it is, since everybody knows the rules and all have the same opportunity to use those rules to achieve the highest GPA. I guess you could fill out the common app and explain the injustice to your son. Or you could just let him fill out his apps and let his record speak for itself. He sounds crazy smart and dedicated.
On a side note I was able to achieve the highest GPA and #1 class rank by doing all of the things you are highlighting. Taking AP’s and avoiding/minimizing none weighted classes, so I guess I am one of the kids you are talking about. I did play 2 varsity sports for all 4 years but they were after school activities so they did not hurt my GPA.
I will repeat what I have said here before - my daughter’s graduating class valedictorian took a study hall senior year so that he would not have an unweighted elective lowering his GPA and risk losing his rank. My daughter took four years of unweighted chorus and had no chance at a top spot because of it.
I wasn’t aware of “the game” until D’s sophomore year of HS. It does seem to put music kids at a big disadvantage. Many of the music kids in our school have to take summer school in order to fit in more than one music class. Summer school classes can only be taken “standard”. So, many kids that could certainly handle AP coursework have to choose between that and continuing on with their music. These kids also often waive their lunch to fit everything in. Freshman year is the only year my D had a lunch.
Now, here’s where I think it hurts the most…scholarships. We have run across schools that have scholarship requirements that include rank of top 10%. So, a student can have a super high ACT, an unweighted 3.8 - 4.0 GPA, and won’t qualify for the scholarship that their classmate - that took a lunch, a full study hall, an (insert elective) as pass/fail instead of for a grade, and never suffered through summer school just so they could take an extra class that’s not required to graduate - will qualify for. In our district, kids in the top 10% can also automatically go to our community college for free.
I think admissions recognizes this and those students will have just as good a chance of being admitted to a school (if not better) than the “player”, but they may lose out on $$.
In Texas you have to play the rank game if you want to go to the state flagships. Texas has automatic admission for top X%. Rank is also used for competive majors and scholarships. Number 1 gets full tuition scholarship for the first year at any state college.
It’s pretty straightforward in that the weighted classes count for more gpa points. However, there are games played where some kids are able to get away with skipping an unweighted mandatory class.
It is a trap for the unwary because the stakes are not fully laid out for parents and kids new to Texas school system. My kids school mention the auto admit rule but no one tells you how to make it work to your advantage. Summer credits are unweighted which might be expected. Counter intuitively, dual enrollment classes are also unweighted. There is no cap on the number of “electives” that can count against you. That is, if you have more than the required number of credits for graduation you’re better off snagging a zero credit slot such as office assistant or late arrival/early dismissal. (We don’t have study hall.)
Community2605 - from looking at your other posts, it appears that your son got into his top choices despite not having the #1 GPA and is going to Yale this fall. Congratulations to him !
I agree that the whole weighted GPA thing has its problems and can be gamed. However - at least when it comes to selective college admissions among near straight A students - I really wouldn’t worry about this. The gamers usually just end up gaming themselves.
Students want to go to places like Yale presumably because they think these schools are filled with smart people. Well, then they should realize that the people in the admissions office aren’t stupid. They know how to read a transcript, and they know that if kid X is getting all A’s in 6 classes, and kid Y is getting all A’s in those 6 classes plus two more (and had to double up to do it), then kid Y’s schedule is more rigorous despite what the GPA calculation says. Someone who’s just trying to manipulate the system won’t benefit. All you have to do is put the transcripts side by side - it’s obvious. Doesn’t mean that kid X won’t get admitted, but it won’t be because they pulled the wool over someone’s eyes.
(Same thing with kids who do things like take AP Environmental Science rather than AP Chemistry - it’s a perfectly valid choice depending on your interests, but don’t think for a second you’re tricking anyone if that’s what you’re trying to do. And frankly, I’ve never understood this obsession with being the “valedictorian” that some kids seem to have either. For some reason they think that colleges like Yale actually care. But if a kid becomes valedictorian only because they gamed the GPA system, then a college that’s doing its job will be able to see that the #5 ranked kid is actually the better student. )
So gaming doesn’t work, at least when it comes to selective college admissions. But it can matter if you live in a state where the top 7% of the class is mechanically auto-admitted to the state flagship, or if there are scholarships that depend on being in the top 5%-10%. It might also matter if you’re in danger of falling out of the top 10%, but in that case you probably aren’t aiming at highly selective colleges.
It is astonishing to me that the vast majority of schools use such an obviously flawed ranking system. If John takes one elective and Jane takes two electives, the usual method of averaging the weighted and unweighted grades together has the effect of giving John more GPA boost than Jane even though they are taking the exact same weighted classes–this makes no sense.
A poster on a previous thread on this topic said their school uses a different weighting system which does not penalize kids for taking electives. It doesn’t reward them for taking electives either, but at least it doesn’t give less of a boost to the kid who takes electives than the kid who doesn’t when both are taking the same number of weighted classes.
In the system described by this poster, the unweighted GPA is calculated first, and then a small bonus is added for each weighted class taken. So, if John takes 1 elective and Jane takes 2 electives, but they both take the same number of AP classes, then they both get the same GPA boost. I think most people assume this is what the usual weighting system achieves, but it’s not.
It’s rather dismaying that the vast majority of educational administrators haven’t figured this out. In some schools, rank is just a silly status thing anyhow, but as mentioned above, for some students it may mean the difference between admission or rejection to colleges and getting or not getting large scholarships. You would think something of such importance to their students would merit a little thought and research by administrators on how to calculate this measure in the most fair possible manner, and considering this system is in use in some places, I can’t understand why most schools persist in rewarding students for not taking the most challenging program.
“It might also matter if you’re in danger of falling out of the top 10%, but in that case you probably aren’t aiming at highly selective colleges.” Actually, that is an issue at our school. Because of grade inflation, whether or not a student makes the top 10% is largely determined by the number of electives and study halls they take. If a kid is serious about the arts or decides to take two foreign languages, they could easily be bumped out of the top 10%. There is no reason to assume such kids are not aiming at highly selective colleges.
That may help the rank but not course rigor. It is actually more common to game the uwGPA by taking only easy classes. Then again, it will be reflected in course rigor. At the end, neither way is good for the student. They should just focus on the right classes and course rigor. One should not pick AP Stat instead of AP Calc BC simply because it eould help the GPA. Focus too much on gaming the system is a waste of your time.
@kiddie@dbandmom@mathyone - Study halls considered more rigorous than unweighted classes? Preposterous. Thank you for helping me confirm that this system is not quite perfect.
@ucbalumnus - The question of whether or not any of the relevant students were applying to highly competitive schools is a good one. We live in a small town in the midwest, an area seriously underrepresented at the Ivys. We do not know one other person who applied to an Ivy right out of high school and got in. The two students who landed above my son in the rankings are going to state schools. So this question comes largely from a place of utter cluelessness, which is only because few in this area apply, and, at that point, none had been accepted.
My son finished HS this June and graduated 3rd. He’s proud to have gotten into an Ivy and received a generous scholarship to facilitate his attendance. We simply didn’t know what it might take for him to be accepted, since we’d never seen that kind of student up-close before.
I have yet to see a weighting system that rewards kids who take multiple electives. Even our system which leaves electives out of the GPA ends up encouraging kids to double up on AP maths and sciences. In the example @mathyone refers to if in the place of Jane’s second elective John takes another AP class then his rank will be higher than hers. Ultimately the school benefits by bumping its AP participation rate which boosts its USNWR ranking.
Since most kids even at the top of the class do not go to highly selective schools, focusing on rank is not a waste of time. Most kids end up at state schools or less selective privates where rank matters very much.
In the case of the OPs son, it appears he was rewarded for his dedication regardless.
Through the comments here I am discerning two other interesting topics… Philosophy of education and the role of the parent. While doing the college search with my son, I identified and generalize two different characteristics: The love of learning and the love of achievement. They aren’t the same thing and, I have to admit, I respect the love of learning more than the desire to achieve. Apparently some of this ideology rubbed off on my son, which is why he felt so strongly about pursuing his passions even though it would cost him a few hundredths of a point or so in his GPA in the long run.
As for whether or not I was the one who felt strongly about this more so than my son, I’m not sure that’s the case. I knew that getting into an Ivy League school was a goal of my son’s from a very young age. I don’t think that my role should be to do the work for him, but to help him see the ladder rungs he doesn’t have the maturity or life experience to see for himself. Since my own life experience has nothing to do with Ivy League schools, I came here a lot, and still do, to see what I can learn from others. I presume this is what the parents thread is for.
The more I learn about the process the more fascinating I think it is, which is why I am still interested in the topic even after the prize of the Yale admission has been won. You guys are all smart people who have interesting things to say! Thank you! I’m Way sleepy and I’m going to bed. See you in the morning.
The high schools in my area have largely done away with class rank, valedictorian, etcetera. Nevertheless, the high school profiles they release provide colleges with generalized “bands” of percentiles where gpa’s generally fall. Therefore, a college can estimate where the student generally fell in the class, but can also look at the transcript to judge rigor (and hopefully realize that subjects like “softball PE” were taken not for an easy A, but out of necessity).
Our HS has changed its weighting system over the years. Nonetheless, it is still fairly easy to game - something my kids did not do. All classes count in the weights. When S was in HS, there was not enough difference between AP and general classes. I didn’t realize this until his junior year when he had to take a PE. His quality points for 100 in weightlifting (requiring only that he show up appropriately dressed each day) were the same as his 93 in AP Chem. Kids who padded their schedule with easy electives came out on top of the ranking system. He used elective periods to double up on sciences, etc.
They changed the weights somewhat by the time D attended the HS. The popular thing among kids trying to game the system was taking dual credit classes instead of APs. In our area, the dual credit classes are a lot easier, yet receive the same weight as the APs.