Don’t most colleges look a student’s unweighted GPA?

[Mandy in TN]

Don’t most colleges look a student’s unweighted GPA in a 4.0 scale.

 

Or have you found that since your child was homeschooled that colleges pay little attention to the GPA and focus on test scores?

 

Mandy

[K-FL]

Well, in our case I didn't weigh the GPA. I figured it "straight," but the transcript showed noted the cc classes she had. They did look at it because some of the scholarships req. a certain GPA &/or test scores.

[JFSinIL]

I think so - but if you have an AP or CC class on the transcript the college folk KNOW it was harder than an regular high school class, and will judge your kids, say, B in one of those classes as a potential A in a regular class. If that makes sense. A transcript with a middling GPA (if unweighted) but several AP/CC classes will look good (hey, the kid tried harder classes and pushed himself!) than a straight 4.o with NO AP or CC. At least that is what I have been reading.

Edited April 21, 2009 by JFSinIL

[Janet in WA]

All of the colleges to which our sons applied asked for unweighted GPA. They were fine with seeing a weighted GPA, but they also wanted us to provide an unweighted one. These institutions made their own decisions about "weighting" based on the kind of courses (and/or test scores) that were behind the grades. These colleges also expected unweighted transcripts from traditional high schools.

 

I think homeschoolers often feel it would be beneficial to dress up their transcripts, not realizing that colleges see TONS of transcripts and they can read between the lines (or weighted grades) for themselves.

[coopers5]

what some of you are saying......

If we want to have an unweighted GPA ready to give to colleges (at the risk of sounding completely ignorant here) do you simply prepare it without raising any of the points for AP or honors, or whatever?

And then the weighted one (which is the way our particular home school accountability association generates our transcripts for us) is just figured with points that are raised for the APs or honors or CC courses? correct?

 

See, our transcripts show the numerical percentage grade the students get, along with a marking that shows whether AP, or dually weighted college course, and then just a totaled GPA elsewhere on the form.

 

I just wondered if the trends were changing because with my two that have gone on to colleges, we weren't asked, as I recall, for anything "unweighted." And they applied to a good handful of schools, and filled out many scholarship apps.

We were asked, from time to time, for GPA based on a 4.0 scale. Our state happens to have a weird scale. But I have heard recently that actually many states do. Or different schools work on different scales, even, from one another.

 

Question for anyone who can answer: When you do figure a GPA based on 4.0, do you guys just give 4.0 for A's (no matter the percentage), 3.0 for B's, etc.? Or do you break them down more than that?

 

I am curious.

 

Thanks!

Jo

[LoriM]

The local admissions officers here at our school literally don't "care" if the scores are weighted or not, but freely admit that the area public high schools submit weighted scores routinely. As a mathematician and statistician with years of experience helping managerial-types interpret data (LOL), I decided that if the local high schools were submitting their best students with higher-than-4.0-GPAs, then my honors student would *also* get a higher than 4.0 GPA when appropriate. I awarded 5.0 grade points for courses taken at the CC and for the honors courses she did at home.

 

I agree that they can certainly "unweight" if they want. But I didn't want to give an unfair disadvantage to my superior student by presenting her with "only" a 4.0.

 

I would have done something *entirely* differently if we had been in an area that did not use a 5.0 scale, or if we were competing at other schools. But we knew we wanted to go to this one school, where I had a good relationship with the admissions officers, and knew what they were seeing across the board. :)

[Gwen in VA]

What we did --

 

We stated our grading scale (93-100 = A; 84 - 93 = b; etc). Then ALL grades were done according to that scale, so in any classes where they received number instead of letter grades I scaled the grades accordingly.

 

We gave the same weight to courses done at home, courses done at the CC, AP classes, and classes done at William &Mary. My dd earned all A's, so her GPA was a 4.0 even though some of her classes were AP and some were taken at William & Mary.

 

We wanted the admissions people to feel that we were "straight shooters" so we didn't adjust the points given for the grade in the GPA.

 

Caveat --

1) With our younger kids we will do the more conventional A= 90-100 scale.

 

None of the nearly 20 colleges the kids applied to questioned this approach, but on the other hand none of them contacted us for any reason whatsoever (other than to say that my ds's application was late when actually they had misplaced it!)

[Kareni]

I used a grading scale of 90-100 for an A on my daughter's transcript. To calculate the GPA, I use A=4.0, B=3.0, etc. I do not use any pluses or minuses. In fact, even the grades my daughter earned at the community college (which did have + and -), I converted to a strict A or B. Since we had to send her community college transcript to all the colleges to which she applied, I knew that the colleges could see the grades from there. I did not weight anything. I think the transcript looks cleaner with no +s or -s!

 

Regards,

Kareni