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Me Again--To weight or unweight


isaelijohjac
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If you weight the GPA, one of the first things that many admissions people do is unweight the GPA!

 

The admissions people can tell from your descriptions if the classes are AP or dual-credit, so why would you weight?

 

 

Not weight.

The college will unweight your weighted grades anyway and use their own formula.

 

Zactly.

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Do we know that this is actually true--that they unweight? I have heard that it's not true and that up against other kids it's best to compare and most schools weight.  I'd appreciate any insight.

I have had her transcript done for a LOOOONG time and she is ready to apply, but I am finding myself in this dilemma.  Thank you.

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Do we know that this is actually true--that they unweight? I have heard that it's not true and that up against other kids it's best to compare and most schools weight.  I'd appreciate any insight.

I have had her transcript done for a LOOOONG time and she is ready to apply, but I am finding myself in this dilemma.  Thank you.

 

Can you call the school(s) your dc wants to apply to and ask? 

 

Can't hurt.

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Most high schools do weight for purposes of class rank.

 

The colleges have to unweight things -- otherwise the GPA's of the students would represent completely different things. One school could say an A in an AP class is worth 5.0 while another could way it is worth 4.5 and another, which uses a 12-point scale, could say an AP class is worth 13.0! So the college have to unweight things so they know what they are comparing!

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I've had (some) college admissions directly tell me they look at grades alone and use their own scale for GPA.  I've also had some tell me they only look at the 4 main subjects and foreign language when considering students via GPA.  They eliminate all other classes unless the student is looking to major in those.

 

But, of course, each college will do what they feel works for them.  My guess is that those colleges that don't recompute things also don't care for GPA all that much because, yes, schools use a huge variety of scales and it would be downright difficult to compare weighted scores to weighted scores.

 

We opted to not bother with weight.

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I had heard the "don't weight" advice over and over and had no intention of weighting GPA. THEN, I met with admissions from ds's first choice university. They told me the biggest mistake they see homeschoolers make is not weighting GPA! They take the GPA as given. If you provide a weighted GPA, they will use it. If you don't, they will use the unweighted GPA. They DO NOT recalculate it for you. When it comes to scholarship awards, putting your student's unweighted GPA against the other students' weighted GPAs really hurts! I added a weighted GPA do ds's transcript.

 

Moral of the story - Ask the intended college!! The one ds applied to actually states their policy of using weighted GPA if it is provided on their website.

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I had heard the "don't weight" advice over and over and had no intention of weighting GPA. THEN, I met with admissions from ds's first choice university. They told me the biggest mistake they see homeschoolers make is not weighting GPA! They take the GPA as given. If you provide a weighted GPA, they will use it. If you don't, they will use the unweighted GPA. They DO NOT recalculate it for you. When it comes to scholarship awards, putting your student's unweighted GPA against the other students' weighted GPAs really hurts! I added a weighted GPA do ds's transcript.

 

Moral of the story - Ask the intended college!! The one ds applied to actually states their policy of using weighted GPA if it is provided on their website.

I had a similar conversation at Miami University (Ohio). They asked if the kids were taking AP or CC classes and suggested weighting them. This was part of a conversation about merit aid categories.

 

On a related note, VA Tech told us they were required to report average gpa but gave them little importance because there were so many different weighting systems. They cared more about test scores.

 

Given that there are entire states where grades are weighted it seems that admissions offices should be pretty good at unweighting if that's what they want. I've yet to hear of a school that would disregard an app because it was weighted. But also I don't know of schools that will go to the trouble of weighting for you.

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