What GPA do colleges look at?

Answered

In the USA, 99% of colleges consider your entire high school coursework and grades from 9th, 10th, 11th, and part of 12th. The other 1%, very competitive schools like Stanford care more about 10th-12th and re-calculate the Stanford GPA if you apply. Certain State University systems like the UC schools recalculate the UC GPA based on their own criteria so they can compare apples to apples.

Ideally, the very best-prepared students have a 4.0 unweighted GPA or a 95.00+ out of 100.00 Scale. But if you have a bad semester or two, do not worry as long as you can show an upward trend in your grades culminating in perfect grades prior to applying.

So if there are 3 applicants who have grades like (3.5, 3.7, 3.9, 4.0), (4.0, 3.7, 3.4, 3.0), and (3.9, 3.9, 3,8, 3.9), colleges will pay more attention to applicants 1 and 3 and think applicant 2 is struggling with school and perhaps other issues.

For the most part, colleges will evaluate you on the GPA that is presented on your high school transcript. Some schools do not have weighted GPAs, other schools have both unweighted and weighted and some only have a weighted GPA. This is why they all ask your HJ counselor to submit a school profile with a grading table so they know which courses are weighted and how much they are weighted.

With rampant grade inflation in America, someone with a 3.76 UWGPA might have a 4.72 weighted GPA and only take 6 APs and another student might have a 3.95 UWGPA and 4.35 WGPA taking 12 APs. So clearly the numbers do not tell the whole story and its wrong to assume that the former student is a better student even though their weighed GPA is through the roof.

Good luck.