Weighted GPA for Dual Enrollment

[goldberry]

I was not going to do a weighted GPA for DD, but a scholarship she is particularly interested in requires it.  

 

So, this year for Dual Enrollment she took College Algebra (A), and a foreign language (B).  Do I give extra weight to the college classes across the board?  Or just core college classes like math, english, science?

 

Do I give an extra point?  extra half point?  This just seems so arbitrary to me, that is why I was originally going to do unweighted.

 

Edited, because it's not a duel!

Edited February 9, 2016 by goldberry

[Matryoshka]

This seems to differ widely based on area, but around here it seems most commonly it's a half point for honors and an extra point for AP and DE.

[Alessandra]

Can you look on line to find what schools in your area do? Our local schools list the weighted points in the curriculum guide. They do multiple weights for regular, honors, AP, etc.

[DebbS]

I would weight all of the dual credit courses - not just the core ones.  If the scholarship people want to reduce the weighted grades for evaluation purposes, they can do that. If you don't show the highest GPA that you can reasonably show (and extra points for a college course is reasonable), then, if her GPA doesn't fall in with the top applicants, they may pass over even looking at her qualifications closely.

 

 

[goldberry]

So next year (senior year) she will be taking all dual enrollment.  All those courses should be weighted?

[Matryoshka]

So next year (senior year) she will be taking all dual enrollment. All those courses should be weighted?

Yes, I agree, weight all CC classes if you're going to weight any.

[Luckymama]

Your weighting scale should be part of the documents you provide when she applies to college. Once you choose a scale, stick with it for everything :)

[Mom22ns]

Agreeing if you weight any CC classes, you weight them all. I did one extra point for college level classes whether they were CC, AP, CLEP. Some schools do as much as 2 points for AP. I think most do 1 point for DE though. 

[Joules]

I follow what our local county school does.  It's easy to justify it that way.  They give 1 point for AP and DE for all courses, however the transcript has two separate GPAs: one that is for all courses and one that is for core courses only. 

[SparklyUnicorn]

Could someone explain what this means?  This is all new stuff to me. 

[Grantmom]

I agree with most of what was posted above.  I went through a similar dilemma recently.  I wasn't going to weight anything at all.  I thought it was more straightforward to just put it all out there, unweighted.  However, when I looked at common data sets for schools, I saw that lots of GPA rankings were weighted.  So, I decided I wanted to have my kids compared to his peers on a somewhat even scale.  I decided to just use the system that our local schools use, because all of the schools in my area do it the same.  They give one extra point for AP, an extra three-quarters of a point for DE (which I thought was strange, that it gets less than what AP gets, but that's what they do), and an extra half of a point for honors.  The honors is a little harder to designate, but I've just been calling something honors based on their description of honors classes, or in the case of an online class, whether or not they consider it an honors course.  For example, Derek Owens has Physics and Honors Physics.

 

I will calculate both weighted and unweighted GPAs, and include the unweighted GPA on the transcript also.  But when asked for the GPA, we will use the weighted GPA.  I will also include the above scale on the transcript.

 

I do think it makes sense, now after a lot of reading and consideration.  I agree that whatever you do, pick a method and stick to it.

[Kim in SouthGa]

I weighted my dd's dual enrollment courses by .5 point.  Initially I was going to do 1.0 point, but the scholarship program she was in required .5 for dual enrollment and 1.0 for AP.  Not sure why. 

[goldberry]

Could someone explain what this means?  This is all new stuff to me. 

 

Sparkly, when calculating grade point average, the standard 4 points for A, 3 points for B, etc. is unweighted.  A weighted system gives more points to either honors, AP, or college courses.  It's confusing though, because different places do it differently, and some only weight core classes and not electives or foreign language.

 

It makes sense somewhat though, so kids don't lose points by taking a harder class but getting a slightly lower grade than they would have in a regular class.  It's supposed to reflect the level of work involved.

[Mom22ns]

Could someone explain what this means?  This is all new stuff to me. 

 

A weighted GPA means instead of a 4.0 for an A, courses that are deemed worthy (AP, DE, sometimes honors) are given more points. Most often 5 points for an A, 4 for a B etc. It means that a B in a college level class is worth the same credit as an A in a standard level class. It is typically a way of distinguishing top students in class rankings. There is no standard for weighting grades. Your school may do it differently from the next one over, and the one after that may not weight at all, making weighted grades even less meaningful than grades in general. Many colleges unweight grades in order to eliminate this unevenness.

 

Most homeschoolers (on these boards) don't weight grades. I didn't plan to (and didn't for dd), but ds is attending a Univ. that specifically told me to weight them for scholarship consideration and warned that homeschoolers sometimes miss out on scholarships there because of their failure to weight grades. There is a good chance you will never need to mess with such a thing, but now you know - just in case. :)

[katilac]

Yep, I've been beating the drum in favor of weighting classes (when applicable) since we've gone through the college app experience with oldest dd. That means classes that would generally be considered honors or AP in your area, and all DE classes. Go with the formula used in your district; colleges that do it differently will reweigh themselves. 

 

Weighting grades never hurts and frequently helps. Some people object to it in a homeschooling context because "honors" is often used to compare classes within a school, but it's really not that hard to honestly figure out if a certain class can legitimately be weighted. Consider the textbook. Consider how it's being used (many high school texts have basic/average/advanced schedules). Google syllabi from a variety of high schools and compare. 

 

We did not weight foreign languages and a couple of electives, because we did not go above and beyond. We did not weight one science class, because we did not do enough of the work on the hardest track. So I definitely think people should be thoughtful and fair about it, but there is no reason to put yourself at a disadvantage when a tremendous amount of money is at stake. 

 

Colleges can and often do recalculate grades to remove weighting, which decreases GPA, but I have yet to see the college that recalculates in a way that increases GPA. Be honest, be fair, but don't shoot your student in the foot. 

[plansrme]

I'll throw out what our local school does, as I am intimately familiar with (which means, I've had a fight with them over) their procedures.  The schools in our county only weight a DE course if its prerequisite is the highest level taught at the local school.  Accordingly, Chem I at the university is not weighted because AP Chem is offered at the school but is not a prerequisite. Chem II would be, because the prereq is either Chem I or AP Chem.  Calculus II is weighted (5 points--the DE classes that are weighted are all given 5 points) because the prereq is AP Calculus BC, which is the highest level of calculus at the high school.  English II is weighted because AP English Lang or Lit is a prereq, but English I is not weighted.  If there is no high school equivalent to the prereq or there is no prereq, a committee decides whether to weight or not.  Astronomy, for instance, would have to get committee approval to be weighted because there is no high school prereq.

 

I don't disagree with this policy at all.  It makes good sense to me.  My fight was over getting them to apply it; they wouldn't weight my daughter's classes, and she was taking some hard stuff.  For all the good it did her GPA, it could have been four remedial math classes.  (They did finally fix it.)

[Sebastian (a lady)]

Yep, I've been beating the drum in favor of weighting classes (when applicable) since we've gone through the college app experience with oldest dd. That means classes that would generally be considered honors or AP in your area, and all DE classes. Go with the formula used in your district; colleges that do it differently will reweigh themselves. 

 

Weighting grades never hurts and frequently helps. Some people object to it in a homeschooling context because "honors" is often used to compare classes within a school, but it's really not that hard to honestly figure out if a certain class can legitimately be weighted. Consider the textbook. Consider how it's being used (many high school texts have basic/average/advanced schedules). Google syllabi from a variety of high schools and compare. 

 

We did not weight foreign languages and a couple of electives, because we did not go above and beyond. We did not weight one science class, because we did not do enough of the work on the hardest track. So I definitely think people should be thoughtful and fair about it, but there is no reason to put yourself at a disadvantage when a tremendous amount of money is at stake. 

 

Colleges can and often do recalculate grades to remove weighting, which decreases GPA, but I have yet to see the college that recalculates in a way that increases GPA. Be honest, be fair, but don't shoot your student in the foot. 

:iagree:

 

This is very similar to what I did for DS1.  I also had a college ask if he was taking AP or Dual Enrollment classes and recommend weighting his gpa.  Another school indicated that they have so many different gpa schemes come in that they don't consider the gpa much as an absolute number (in other words, it might be useful to compare students within one district, but not across districts or states).

 

I only had one type of weighting (1 point bump for anything weighted).  I didn't try to differentiate between honors, AP, DE, etc.  I only weighted home-developed courses if they were AP level.  I also specified exactly what type of courses in general were weighted and which courses in particular met that general criteria.  

 

My transcript fit onto one page, but also had a second sheet with it where I laid out my gpa calculations.  I listed each class, the grade, the quality point unweighted and weighted and then the reason for that course having a weighted grade.  

 

I had enough room on the main page of the transcript to put in a box that gave details of how many credits were completed each year, with the cumulative weighted and unweighted gpa.