Do non UC schools weight grades in ninth?

[domesticidyll]

I have a rising ninth grader, and am wondering how useful it would be, admissions wise, to designate a few of his classes as honors. Do non UC schools value this designation in ninth?

 

(We use a charter, so I can't designate anything retroactively. And I'm pretty set on what he actually taking, the question is just whether to try to persuade the charter to label honors level.)

 

The classes I'm fairly confident are honors level are aops, lukeion Latin, and a fairly rigorous mom English. Possibly history if we use the AP version of his world history text.

 

Thanks!

[GoodGrief]

Generally, schools will look at the unweighted GPA. But they will consider the rigor of all classes taken, so designating as honors in ninth is fine. It will help if he has some way of validating the honors designation, like test scores, but that is not absolutely necessary. If the charter won't approve the honors designation, having the test scores will be valuable.

[Pen]

Some do.  But I'm not sure if that applies to homeschool designation or just to brick and mortar school designation.  For example, I am in Oregon and know of at least 2 unis that weight honors and AP classes more (9th-12th)--but they expect homeschoolers to take SAT board area tests to validate homeschool grades so far as when I looked into it, and I don't think give that much credence to homeschool transcripts.  Perhaps it would be different via a charter which would count equivalent to brick and mortar, I don't know.

 

I think you should probably contact individual colleges of interest and ask them.

[8filltheheart]

Yes, some schools do. I haven't had to "prove" their classes were honors beyond providing course descriptions. (IOW, they didn't take subject tests to verify.) Schools have accepted our homeschool transcripts as submitted.

[teachermom2834]

We have found schools recalculating their own weighted GPA in core classes. So it does help to have the honors designation even if you aren't sending a weighted GPA yourself. The schools that have done this with my boys just take the transcript at face value. They aren't taking the time to determine if our homeschool honors is really honors level or if AOPS math should be weighted. They are quickly scanning the transcript and weighting it based on what it says.

 

Personally I would rather not fool with weighting grades or even designating honors (I'm not even sure which of ours would be honors and it doesn't really matter to me). But it can hurt a student ,especially with automatic merit aid at stake, to not designate honors.

[Corraleno]

I would (and did) designate the courses as honors and provide both a weighted and unweighted GPA. Some schools will just use whatever GPA you give them, so you don't want to short-change your DC, especially where merit money is involved. Schools that don't weight, or who reweight with their own formula, can still do that.