If you have a 4.0 GPA but took all the least challenging classes in high school, colleges will be less impressed since you didn’t push yourself academically. This means you should continue working on taking difficult classes and getting high grades in them in order to be as impressive as possible. It may be harder to stand out from your classmates with your GPA because more students will have GPAs that are at the same level when class difficulty is not a factor in the calculation. If class rank is based purely on unweighted GPA, your class rank may not reflect the effort you expended. Students with a lot of AP classes can have lower unweighted GPAs than students who took less difficult classes despite being more academically driven.

And they don’t want to unfairly promote someone who went to a school that offered 20 AP courses. If you took all AP/IB curricula and achieved a 4.0, you would be seen as far stronger than a candidate who took less challenging or fewer courses and achieved the same 4.0, even though the GPAs were the same. CEO at ScholarshipOwl David Tabachnikov is the CEO of ScholarshipOwl. best baseball hitting nets Formerly at Waze and Google, David is an experienced CTO/R&D manager with over 10 years of experience of leading tech teams. David fervently believes that students should have greater access to education, and is passionate about using technology to help them achieve that goal. Simplify and focus your application process with the one-stop platform for vetted scholarships.

This is because weighted and unweighted are generally measured on different GPA scales. As its name suggests, Grade Point Average is a measure of your average academic performance across all of your courses. Typically, but not always, it is on a scale from 1.0 to 4.0 with a higher Grade Point Average indicating better performance on a typical A-F grading scale found in the United States. There is no better place to start in a discussion of Weighted vs Unweighted GPA than the definition of what exactly GPA is. Naturally, you can’t learn the difference between weighted and unweighted GPA without knowing what GPA is.

Each high school creates its own grading scale, and these vary widely from school to school. One put weight into the grades, similar to the point values mentioned in the previous paragraph. In addition, that school’s grading scale was based on 100 points. There, an A+ in a standard course, an honors course, or an AP/IB course would have a value of 100 points. To get a GPA, all of the point value scores a student receives for courses during a specific period are added together.

Many educators argue that ranking fosters cutthroat competition among students, when in fact precise enumeration does not mean as much to colleges as overall academic performance. For this reason, many high schools now report decile instead of rank, while some provide no comparative measure between students at all. Rankings that use weighted GPAs reflect students’ efforts in challenging courses, while those using unweighted GPAs do not. For example, the unweighted GPA is the easier to work with because its letter grade to number conversions are very straightforward. It’s also the scale used during college, so your unweighted GPA might give college admissions officers a better idea of how you’ll do at their school.

Basically, you get an extra 1.0 added to your GPA just for taking an honors or AP® class. Only honors or AP® classes are reported on the weighted scale. If you are not taking all upper-level courses then only a few of your classes will be graded out of 5.0 – the rest will be on the “normal” 4.0 unweighted scale. As we mentioned, the weighted GPA was created to take into account the difficulty of a student’s classes when calculating his or her GPA. Basically, this means that someone with a B in AP® Spanish would not have a lower GPA than someone with an A in academic Spanish, because technically the AP® student is doing more work.

He doesn’t use tough speech so it’s really easy to understand him and he is also very friendly and open-minded. My daughter has been received a lot of useful information and increased her score. Attending class alone can help, but participating in class while attending consistently will help you even more.