UW vs. W GPA questions

In general, colleges care more about your unweighted GPA which typically is on a 4.0 or 100-point scale. The reason for this is that every high school in America has its own recipe for weighting classes and it would be unfair for admissions officers to evaluate applicant A from a high school that doesn't weight classes with applicant B whose high school gives out 2.0 bonus points for an IB class and 1.0 bonus points for an AP and 0.50 bonus points for an honors glass. Applicant A would have a 4.0 regardless of whether they take 12 APs and Applicant B might have a 4 .67 for taking 1/2 as many difficult classes. So the first pass of grades evaluation is based on a UWGPA, not a WGPA. Some schools only produce weighted GPAs so the school profile that the counselor submits with the transcript helps the Admissions reader comprehend the weighting formula. This also allows them to compare multiple students applying to the same college with different GPAs.

It gets more complicated with some private boarding and day schools that might use an 11.0 or 9.0 or 7.0 scale and offer comparable classes to APs/IBs or college courses but their catalog description might say 500-599 is a 1st-year college course and a 600-699 level class is a 2nd-year college class. In this case, the college admissions officer must have a unique relationship with the school to determine how their peers compare to each other and how to evaluate these students against other schools in the same league or consortium of schools.

Since your school grades you on a 4.0 scale and you have some sort of weighting system, whoever reads your file will first look at your 3.7 and then evaluate your WGPA however that is presented on the official transcript. So you might have a 3.7 UWGPA and a 4.15 WGPA or something like that.

Don't worry about how students from different cities and states get evaluated just be concerned about how strong a student you are compared to your peers in your school. So that is why some schools use class rank as well. You might be ranked 10 or 25 or 100 depending on how big your school is and the overall performance of your peers at your school.

Therefore it's important to have an open and transparent discussion with your high school counselor about how they view your transcript and academic record and the kinds of ECs you are doing compared to other students at your school. Many students ignore the opinion of the high school counselor but in many cases, they know how many kids got into this school or that school.

Some high schools use Naviance and if you are lucky enough to have access to Naviance, then you can log into your account yourself and see how strong an applicant you are relative to your peers applying to the same kinds of schools. You will see how many applied to a certain college and home many were accepted, waitlisted, or rejected. And you can see the GPAs and SAT or ACT scores corresponding to their results.

Good luck.

Hey there!

I'm pretty sure most colleges look at weighted GPAs. I know in my state, some of the private universities have above a 4.0 average in their accepted students, and that simply wouldn't be possible with an unweighted GPA. I'd definitely recommend reaching out to the colleges your looking at- but just looking at their websites may have the answers you need, depending on where you're looking at (maybe under an "incoming alumni" tab?).

Hope this helps!