The post Weighted GPA or Unweighted GPA? first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

The admissions office at College of the Holy Cross shared its in-house analysis form with the New York Times, allowing a peak into how carefully colleges look at your transcript.
The form can be found here.  It’s interactive, and quite helpful to see exactly how admissions officers evaluate things.

Notice that they look not only at the GPA but at the curriculum you are taking. How rigorous is it?
Also notice that the admissions offices do keep track of your contact with them, including whether you visited, attended a college fair, or spent the night.
As you can see, your curriculum, your GPA, and your class rank are all very important.

Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant in Denver

The post Your Unweighted GPA and How Colleges Read Transcripts first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

First let’s look at the logic behind giving certain courses added “weight.”

Unweighted GPA and Weighted GPA

Why do high schools give extra weights to honors, Advanced Placement (AP), and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses?

Readers of some of my other posts related to GPA have expressed confusion. I have stated that admissions folks at selective colleges are most interested in your unweighted GPA.  So these extra weightings are, in effect, stripped in order to come up with your core academic GPA.

So why do high schools give these extra weightings, only to have them taken away by colleges?

Answer:  Class rank.

High schools face a problem: how to rank kids by GPA when they have very different curricula? One student is taking Calculus III in senior year, while another is just getting through Algebra 2. Both earn an A in their respective math classes. In order to give the first student a higher rank in the graduating class, schools need to add a little something to the value of that A in Calculus.

Class Rank and College Admission

Colleges do like to know where students rank in their high school class. Some schools report rank right on the transcript, which is helpful shorthand for college admissions officers. Class rank, then, is a reflection of both academic performance (grades) and the rigor of the curriculum—in comparison with other students at the same school.

But some high schools do neither calculate nor report class rank. This some schools do not give extra weight honors classes.  Some weigh AP classes more—or less—than honors or IB courses. There is no standard practice among high schools in the United States.

Should this lack of standardization worry you as you apply to colleges?

Answer:  Not really.

College admissions folks, especially at the most selective colleges and universities, are quite accustomed to comparing apples to oranges. Most sophisticated admissions operations will also have a bead on specific high schools (often specific officers are responsibile for certain cities, regions, or states), and most high schools submit “school profile” reports along with your transcript, to help college admissions officers interpret your grades. Ivy League schools even have some complicated formulas they use that factor in class rank, test scores, and GPA to come up with a number that helps them to compare apples to apples.

So what should you take away from this discussion?

Summary

1.  Understand the difference between your weighted and unweighted GPA and its importance in the admissions process.

2. Understand that the grades that count the most are those in your academic core subjects.

3. Understand that class rank is important in the process (but no so much that you should fight tooth and nail for that one-thousandth of a point difference to move up a notch–more on that later!).

4.  Know that admissions officers have seen all this before, and they are professional (but not scientific!) in how they do their job.

For more on GPA and class rank, you might want to check out this post here.

Mark Montgomery

College Counselor

The post Weighted GPA, Unweighted GPA, Class Rank, and College Admission first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

I thought I would take the opportunity to provide more clarity about how a GPA is used in the college admissions process.

But an initial word of caution is in order: the generalizations below must be treated as such. Many individual readers are looking for hard and fast rules about how their grades will be treated by admissions officers. The fact is, every case is different: different colleges, different students, different years…the number of variables is enormous. So use these general rules as your guides, not as gospel.

Your transcript is your number one most important document in the admissions process. This is the proverbial “permanent record,” at least as far as colleges are concerned. The courses you have taken and the grades you have earned tell a college most of what they need to know about you as a student. More than your test scores, more than your extracurriculars, more than your community service, and more than your teacher recommendations, your transcript documents your past and is a pretty good predictor of your academic future.

The rigor of the courses you take is as important as the grades you earn. If you hope to gain entry to the most competitive colleges in the country, you have to take the hardest courses offered and do well in them. So every student should take the most difficult courses they can handle—and get the best grades possible. See this post for more information on academic rigor vs. grades.

Your academic core courses count more than your non-academic electives. The GPA recorded on your transcript takes includes your performance in gym, choir, keyboarding, health, and the like. These courses may be required for graduation, but they are not usually part of the requirements for admission. College is not a vacation resort: it is an academic experience. So you will be judged on your academic performance in the core courses: math, science, English, social studies, and foreign language. See this post for more on calculating your core GPA.

If you take honors, Advanced Placement (AP), or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses, you may be given “extra credit” in your GPA to compensate for the rigor of these courses. Schools do this primarily to reward high performing students with a higher class rank (which is explained in this post). But an A is an A is an A.  If you get a B in an honors course, it is never the equivalent of an A in some other course. Don’t rationalize and try to convince yourself otherwise.

Colleges do look at grade trends, so if your transcript has some blotches on it, you always have an opportunity to make improvements. Bad grade in 9th grade life science? Do better in 10th grade chemistry. Colleges like to see students who pull themselves together and begin performing to potential. You will not be able to erase the stains, but you can make the overall picture more attractive.

So what’s the bottom line? Simple rules

1. Take the hardest courses you can.
2. Get good grades.
3. Don’t rationalize poor performance.
4. It’s never too late to get your academic act together.

Mark Montgomery
College Counselor

The post GPA Explained–With Some Simple Advice first appeared on College Admission Counseling.