Teachin'Mine Posted March 9, 2010 Share Posted March 9, 2010 These are the GPA's listed on VCU as the middle range for students who qualified for their best scholarships. Admittedly I was shocked. I'm guessing that high schools are giving out 5's for A's in honor and AP classes. How do we compete with that??? Are you giving grades higher than a 4.0? Our daughter is using an accredited home school, and they don't give anything above a 4.0 for their classes. You can do independent study and those courses will be noted on the transcript and count towards credit requirements, but their grades will not factor into the GPA. Their grading is tough too, so 4.0 even is rare. How much will this affect chances for scholarships when you're competing against GPA's in the mid 4's? I know GPA is only one thing used. SAT's and ACT's count as does the level of difficulty of the courses, but this was an eye opener. I feel like my dd will be at a disadvantage in qualifying. Yes I know I'm thinking ahead ... but I can't help it. :tongue_smilie: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teachin'Mine Posted March 9, 2010 Author Share Posted March 9, 2010 Oh no - I meant for this to be posted on the high school board - I must have posted in the wrong section. Would a moderator be able to move this please? Thank you!!!! :001_smile: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kareni Posted March 9, 2010 Share Posted March 9, 2010 My understanding is that college admission officers routinely re-figure GPAs of students to their own standards -- this can mean discounting PE and various elective courses from the overall GPA as well as eliminating the extra points frequently given to Honors and AP classes. I assume this means that the converse is true and that they can weight more heavily courses if they wish to. Given the skepticism with which "mommy grades" are often greeted, I elected to not weight any grades on my daughter's transcript. Instead, I noted on her transcript which courses were AP level, and I also included a key which showed which courses had been taken at the local community college. All courses were described in the attached course description package that was included with each application. She applied to ten schools and was accepted at eight and wait-listed at a ninth. (The tenth school was an Ivy league.) At those schools which offered merit scholarships, she was offered a goodly number. I do not believe she was disadvantaged by not weighting grades. Regards, Kareni Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dana Posted March 9, 2010 Share Posted March 9, 2010 Colleges do re-weight grades which is why applicants generally have to include the grading scale as well. Our state legislature changed the grading scale a few years back so we have a "uniform grading scale" where a 100 is a 4.0, a 99 is a 3.9, a 98 is a 3.8, etc. Honors go up by one point, AP up by closer to 2. So saying our grading scale is all out of whack is very kind. And my understanding is that all schools (even homeschools) are stuck with this weighting. Sure makes me think about moving to a different state when we hit high school. :confused: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teachin'Mine Posted March 9, 2010 Author Share Posted March 9, 2010 Dana that's horrible! I wonder how many kids that pushes to become perfectionists. Anything less than 100 isn't even 4.0. You've got to wonder who comes up with these "bright" ideas. :confused: It sounds like schools are used to working with both inflated grades and ones which have been too stringent. That's encouraging at least. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dana Posted March 9, 2010 Share Posted March 9, 2010 Dana that's horrible! I wonder how many kids that pushes to become perfectionists. Anything less than 100 isn't even 4.0. You've got to wonder who comes up with these "bright" ideas. :confused: It sounds like schools are used to working with both inflated grades and ones which have been too stringent. That's encouraging at least. It sure makes the grade-grubbing worse' date=' I imagine. You can't say, "Well, a 94 is an A just like a 99 is." No, they actually [u']are[/u] different. Makes no sense to me. And I know some school districts don't allow grades lower than a 50 to be assigned to students (saw it during my time student teaching). I've got some time before we hit high school (although I'm sure thinking about it!) and sure hope the legislature changes the uniform scale at some point. Meanwhile, my plan is for all our classes to be called "honors" for the extra weighting, using "extra credit" (that I know is given at the high school level - I have friends who taught for years), and using as many extra tests as possible to provide justification for my grades (SAT II, AP, CLEP), but gaming the system as much as is needed - and let the colleges interpret the scores as they will. I know how the system is gamed at the high school level - teacher's grades changed after the fact, even some possible cheating on AP exams (tests not submitted one year until they were "found" months later), so I'm going to just do what I can and work to get my son focused on what he's learning and not on the grade (I'll game that later). Still cranky with the system overall. :glare: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KnitWit Posted March 9, 2010 Share Posted March 9, 2010 I was told by several admissions offices that they *unweight* GPA's. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TravelingChris Posted March 9, 2010 Share Posted March 9, 2010 I weigh grades my self. That said, since it a small part of her curriculum, it doesn't make that much of a difference. I believe at the end of last summer, she had 4.06 weighted and 3.96 unweighted or something close to those. While she may end up with a few more weighted classes, it won't be much more. Here, I give half a point raise for honors and one point higher for AP or College courses. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yolanda in Mass Posted March 10, 2010 Share Posted March 10, 2010 These are the GPA's listed on VCU What's VCU? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yolanda in Mass Posted March 10, 2010 Share Posted March 10, 2010 Dana that's horrible! I wonder how many kids that pushes to become perfectionists. :iagree:Or something less than humble students? My son commented that the kids on his baseball team would routinely comment that they had to go home and do honors history or math or [fill in the blank] homework. He thought that was rather odd since who on earth would ever say that except a kid who wants to impress? Or parents who tell me that their students are not just taking Spanish' date=' but [u']AP[/u] Spanish. Sheesh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teachin'Mine Posted March 10, 2010 Author Share Posted March 10, 2010 What's VCU? Sorry Yolanda - Virginia Commonwealth University. Of all people I shouldn't be using abbreviations as I seldom know what they are! It came up in a different thread about what SAT scores are needed for scholarships. In looking up the link, I found these GPA's listed. Years ago, there was only a handful of kids taking AP classes. Now it seems like the majority of college bound are in honors classes at least and many in AP classes. I was checking out the scores kids get on the SAT II tests and the percentile the scores put them in. It was really shocking too. On some of them the kids need nearly 800 to to be placed in the top 90 pct. Years ago, 700 was really good! MsPolly I'm glad to hear that some colleges even the playing field by un-weighting the GPA's. :) I've seen parents talking about their kids classes, but I'm surprised the kids are doing that. I guess being smart isn't something that kids feel they have to hide anymore - so that's good. But some humility is good too. :) TransientChris I think that makes sense. By the end of the year, I'll have to make up a transcript for what we've done so far, and as of now I'm not really sure what I'm going to do for the grading. I'm thinking I won't go above a 4 since that would make it mesh with the rest of her transcript. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robin in DFW Posted March 10, 2010 Share Posted March 10, 2010 Personally, I think there needs to be a standard criteria for this so gpa's are not all over the place. jmho, Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brigid in NC Posted March 10, 2010 Share Posted March 10, 2010 It is typical in North Carolina for grades to be weighted this way, so that's how I weighted grades for my ds: Regular class A=4.0 Honors class A=5.0 AP/CC class A=6.0 I put both weighted and unweighted on his transcript, and indicated the weighting method. I think colleges expect to see weighted grades on transcripts -- although I doubt any would require it. Lots of schools (most?) re-weight the weighted grades based on their own formula. ~Brigid Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yolanda in Mass Posted March 11, 2010 Share Posted March 11, 2010 Okay, now this is getting ridiculous! Why not 6.0 or 8.0 or a bazillion.0? It will probably get to that point as our competitiveness keeps increasing. As for "Honors" classes, given that there is no standardized test such as for AP, one school's honors can be another school's regular class. I remember reading about this on another board and it's for that reason honors courses don't mean a whole lot. Heck, I know my son's Spanish is head and shoulders above our public school's honors, but I'm not counting it that way since there is no objective standard. Yolanda Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newbie Posted March 13, 2010 Share Posted March 13, 2010 Okay, now this is getting ridiculous! Why not 6.0 or 8.0 or a bazillion.0? It will probably get to that point as our competitiveness keeps increasing. As for "Honors" classes, given that there is no standardized test such as for AP, one school's honors can be another school's regular class. I remember reading about this on another board and it's for that reason honors courses don't mean a whole lot. Heck, I know my son's Spanish is head and shoulders above our public school's honors, but I'm not counting it that way since there is no objective standard. Yolanda My first laugh of the day, I love bazillion.0/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
choirfarm Posted March 13, 2010 Share Posted March 13, 2010 I had trouble when I moved the summer before my junior year. i moved from a regular 4 point school to a super competetive school that graded something like this: A+ in honors 15, A in honors 14, A- in honors 13, B+ in honors 12, etc A+ in a regular class 12, A in regular 11 etc. I told my hubby who was 3 in his class without taking any honors classes that he wouldn't have been on the scale at all in my 2nd school. The top 20 places were joint hundredths of a point away from each other. I enjoyed my first school so much. In math, if you got stuck you talked to your friends and you all understood it together. I understood math. Then I moved and took TRig and no one would help you because you might beat them in GPA. I floundered for several reasons that year. But, it was funny. I think I was in the mid 20's in class rank for college applications, but by the final rankings I was 13 because everyone blew off the last 6 weeks because they had already been accepted and gotten scholarships at colleges. I hated a lot of things about that school. Of course moving from a place you lived all of your life to somewhere new at 16 wouldn't have been fun. But I hadn't ever heard of a keg party until I moved there. No one I knew drank at my old school. But I digress. Christine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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