GPA for common app

Answered

Hi @amy45339,

Thanks for your question.

The common app is asking you to self-report your GPA as it is reported on your official high school transcript with the grading scale. It is asking for your most current cumulative GPA NOT your Senior GPA. So if you are applying to a college ED/EA/SCREA by Nov.1 deadline or rolling admissions now, you are going to report your GPA with 6 full semesters if your schools use the semester system or 9 trimesters if your school uses the trimester system like a lot of private day and boarding schools. If you are applying for RD by Jan 1, Jan 15, then you will have 7 semesters and 10 trimesters of grades to report. By the time mid-February rolls around, your HS counselor will send the college a MID-YEAR report with the most updated grades which is a snapshot of where you are in the middle of senior year. This is important for college admissions officers because they want to know if you holding steady or in a senior slump of sorts not caring about how you end up by graduation.

So if your school doesn't have a weighting system like my last HS, Deerfield Academy, then you would write in your GPA like 94.80 and then state your grading scale which in my case was 100. If your school doesn't have a weighting system and you earned a 3.97 unweighted GPA, you write in 3.97 and then select 4.0 from the drop-down options.

If your school only uses a weighted GPA, then write in your WGPA as 4.44. Then select from the drop-down what the scale is like 5.0 scale. Some schools have a 6.0 scale, a 7.0 scale and I've even known of an 11-point scale.

Just do your best to be as accurate as possible because your HS counselor is going to send the colleges on your list the official transcript with your current cumulative courses and grades. They will also send a school profile that will explain the grading scale and how weight courses are treated compared to regular courses. Some schools give out 2.0 pts for an IB, 1.0 pt for AP, and 0.50 for an Honors while other HSs give out the same 1.0 pt for an IB, AP, or Honors. And some schools are even more complicated than that. They will give out a 1.0 pt for a language course above Level 3, even though it's not an honors class. Or they will give out 1.0 for Pre-Calc. or 1.0 for Accelerated Chemistry. So the job of your HS counselor is to explain to the college admissions officers what they are looking at when they review your transcript and grades.

Your job is to be as consistent as possible with what is going to be sent by your HS counselor. So you do not want to write in a 4.0 GPA just because you think you are going to ace all your senior year classes. That will not reflect well if a college admissions officer reads something speculative about your grades and course rigor.

I hope this is helpful and good luck.