Do we need to send in our Unweighted or Weighted GPA for college?

Answered

The previous answer is incorrect.

You only should submit your WGPA if your school does not calculate a UWGPA. Colleges prefer the UWGPA.

Colleges want you to write in UWGPA either on a 4.0 scale (or whatever base scale your school uses). Some schools use a 100.00 pt scale, so if your school uses that then select 100 from the drop down list and type in your UWGPA on a 100 pt scale (e.g. 92.25 which means you had a 92.25% out of 100.00% average UWGPA). Other schools like some boarding schools use a 7.0 or 11.0 scale like Andover or Exeter, so select either 7 or 11 and put your GPA in like 6.76 or 10.2.

From the required school profile that HS counselors have to submit which details the grading system and available coursework including Honors, APs, IBs, etc, admissions officers can easily figure out what your WGPA is and corroborate that with the official transcript that your HS counselor has to send in which 95%+ of the time has both the UWGPA and WGPA on the same piece of paper.

The reason that colleges normalize all GPAs into Unweighted GPAs and ask for UWGPAs (if you have them) on both Common, Coalition, and their own application portals is because that way they can to an "apples to apples" comparison. The goal is to evaluate tens of thousands of applicants using the same baseline GPA.

Each school has its own system of weighting GPAs. For example at my school, APs get a 1.0 pt boost but I know of other students that get either a 0.0, 0.25, or 0.50 pt boost. I know some schools in the South give students a 2.0 pt boost for APs and IBs and even a 1.0 boost for honors. If colleges tried to evaluate someone from Georgia with a 5.62 WGPA (3.9 UWGPA), with someone from Michigan who has a 4.0 WGPA (4.0 UWGPA), they might think that the Georgia student is a better student but that isn't the case.

As I pointed out, the variety of weighting honors, APs, and IBs varies from school to school creating a huge difference in the resulting WGPAS up to 2 whole points. Many colleges know this is a problem so they recalculate GPAs internally prior to evaluating applications. I know this to be the case for UC schools and Stanford.

To answer your specific question, you can address the Weighted GPA in the add'l information section of the application if you feel it necessary. If you have taken many honors and AP courses, that will be enough to inform the admissions officers of your course rigor and that you've challenged yourself as much as possible. The school profile is almost always enough for them to figure out that if you had a UWGPA of say 3.7 and a WGPA of 4.6 that you checked off all the boxes in terms of course rigor. If you doubt what I'm stating is true, then you can also explain your WGPA in the add'l info section and why this is important to you.

Furthermore, when you look at College Admissions stats and admissions profiles on their websites, you will almost always see admitted GPAs in terms of UWGPA, not WGPA. Lastly, the Common Data Sets that almost all colleges submit to US News World & Report for their rankings, Petersons Guide, CollegeBoard, etc. always state GPA in terms of an unweighted 4.0 scale. When colleges produce the CDS annually, they internally convert WGPAs or those on a 100 pt scale to a 4.0 scale prior to recording the UWGPA percentiles on their CDS report.