1
a year ago
Admissions Advice

Recalculating grades

So I go to a private school where they kind of do whatever they want. We don't have A+ and the lowest class we can take is an honors-level class. That's fine with me except for the fact that they don't have honors classes weighted because it's our lowest class. Are colleges going to recalculate this so we get like a .5 boost or am I taking all honors for nothing? Even the accelerated classes which are accelerated honors classes arent weighted. We are a year ahead of normal schools. I don't really understand what taking away weighted boosts and A+s does other than hurt their own student's gpas, or maybe im just overthinking it lol.

10th
10th-grade
honors-classes
1
2

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2 answers

1
a year ago[edited]

You are asking the wrong question here because college admissions officers are not going to evaluate you against the general population. They are first going to evaluate your transcript of grades and course rigor against your peer classmates that are applying to the same schools as you. So if there are 30 people applying to Notre Dame or UVA or USC, the admissions office is trying to figure out where you fit in relationship to the other applicants from your school. So if you are the strongest top 2% rank in your high school you probably have much less to worry about than someone ranked in the 2nd quintile liks 20%-40% of your class.

So the right way to find out how strong an applicant you are is to gain access to Naviance or something similar from your HS counselor's office and see where you compare to other students who were admitted, waitlisted, or rejected from the schools on your college list.

I went to a top Private boarding school where nothing was weighted and everyone was graded on a 100 pt scale. If you got a 90+ GPA you graduated with honors, above 93+ high honors. And only 2 students out of 208 had a 95 so the grading was severely compacted and deflated. The admit rate for this school was about 12% so in the HS admit pool there were many bright kids. 1% had a 95, 10%-93-94%, 25% 91-93%, 25% 89-91, 15% 87-89, 10% less than 87.

I'm sharing this so you don't worry about what other people are reporting as their GPA and weighted GPA. What other people outside of your school have doesn't matter. So you can't even compare a kid who went to Exeter to an Andover student because the scales are completely different. Exeter is on an 11.0 scale, Andover a 6.0 scale, Deerfield 100 pt scale, Hotchkiss 12.0 Scale, and Choate 4.3 Scale.

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-1
a year ago

Hello! Colleges recalculate your grades to fit their grading scale, and mostly look at unweighted GPA from a scale of 0.0 to 4.0. I'm not entirely sure how they'd factor in honors vs honors-accelerated for weighted GPA's, since I'm not familiar with how colleges consider private school grading systems. Honors, even though its the lowest level at your school, shows course rigor and honors accelerated being higher than that would show you're taking more rigorous classes. I generally wouldn't worry about your weighted GPA too much.

-1
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