The Weighted GPA: Useful or Inflationary?

[cantab]

That's odd, my school district doesn't cap the weight of the GPA. You get 0.08 added onto your GPA for every AP, IB, and dual-enrollment. For honors, you get 0.04 added on. I have like a 5.9, which is good but not that stellar. The highest are in the 7.0's, with some people actually getting 8.0's. FYI, my unweighted is 3.9

That's broken. Not least because you could take 100 weighted classes and get an 8.0 WGPA despite flunking everything.

I do not envy American university admissions tutors. The English ones complain enough about the flaws in our system.

Something of a tangent: How many US universities set their own entrance exams?

 

[andrea]

That's broken. Not least because you could take 100 weighted classes and get an 8.0 WGPA despite flunking everything.

I do not envy American university admissions tutors. The English ones complain enough about the flaws in our system.

Something of a tangent: How many US universities set their own entrance exams?

Uhm, most colleges/universities require SAT or ACT scores. They're standardized tests that you have to take at some testing center throughout your junior or senior year. That's basically the only thing that you can compare all students on, since basically everyone has to take it to even be admitted into college in the first place.

 

[Polis4rule]

That's broken. Not least because you could take 100 weighted classes and get an 8.0 WGPA despite flunking everything.

I do not envy American university admissions tutors. The English ones complain enough about the flaws in our system.

Something of a tangent: How many US universities set their own entrance exams?

Not really, you need to obtain straight A's in all of your classes to get that. And pretty much the only people who get 8.0's are nerdy IB kids who take pretty much take like 10 extra AP classes (read: online) in order to obtain that. I think the county awards you 0.08 per semester if you get straight A's. Oh, and my county goes on semester grading scale.

And to answer your earlier question, GPA is pretty much just an overall factor of how well you did in school. If you get a D in French, your transcripts will show that you got a D in French. And colleges look at transcripts, and will rescind acceptances and scholarships.

And US universities don't need entrance exams; SAT's and ACT's essentially do that for us. At any rate, it's up to the individual college to decide whether or not to accept someone. If the admission people feel that a particular person should be accepted, then its the college's decision. That person will either pass or flunk out in college.

Besides the fact, it's part of the American culture that everyone has a chance to improve his or her life. Setting an exam that might automatically bar you from a certain college goes against our culture. If you aren't qualified, chances are that you know it, or the college will not accept you.

 

[cantab]

Ah right, so you do have some external exams. (The SATs and ACTs). For some reason I though they were taken at a younger age. (Probably because Britain has tests also called SATs, which are taken in 'year 9', with another 4 years to go before university entrance).

 

[Anachronism]

I think that the way grades are done is unfair and promotes people to be mediocre.

I take all of the hardest classes available at my school, and my school doesn't do weighted GPA, so even if I am in 7 IB Classes and someone else is taking all electives and low-level courses, we are still expected to both get A's and our As will count for the same GPA. Now in some ways I guess it can be argued that getting an A _should_ be expected, but to "punish" someone who is trying to challenge themselves is not really fair.

Even if you are in a difficult class, curves, idiculous amounts of extra credit or small simple assignments can artificially raise grades, so that is another way they don't matter at all.

tl;dr: grades are dumb and don't reflect the difficulty of your classes.

For this reason weighted is better than not weighted I guess for some things (if everyone did it and colleges could use it) but basically all grading sucks for what it is used for.

 

[Megan_Fox]

My school only sends the Weighted GPA but i was told that Colleges would just do the math and find the unweighted GPA

 

[bearsfan092]

My school only sends the Weighted GPA but i was told that Colleges would just do the math and find the unweighted GPA

You better believe they will. Otherwise, I'd be inclined to think that all schools would elect to send only the weighted grade.

 

[lati0s]

Weighted GPAs are very useful for comparing students within a school for class rank and such, but because different schools do them differently, they are not as useful for comparing students from different schools, for colleges and such, that is why most college just look at your unweighted GPA.

My school has a system where college credit classes, AP and IB, are worth a 6.0, advanced classes are worth a 5.0, and general classes are worth a 4.0

 

[Xia]

I think weighted GPAs are useful ways to reward students who take the initiative and choose to take harder classes. The biggest problem I've found with weighted GPAs is they don't weigh Post-Secondary coursework, but will (in most cases) weigh AP and dual-credit courses. If people knew they could get a GPA boost by going to college early 9and not get screwed by the "shock" of college work), I'm sure a lot more people would choose PSEO over traditional high school.

 

[Anachronism]

My school has a system where college credit classes, AP and IB, are worth a 6.0

damnit, and my school treats them as 4.0 still. Its this lack of a standard that is the problem.

 

[mtr]

From my experience, I would argue that weighted GPAs are inimical to both students and colleges seeking to evaluate them. I've seen that the desire to gain a high weighted GPA often leads to drastic measures to game the system. These include things like refusing to take things like Band because they are not weighted, and therefore will dilute a high-achievers WGPA. Also, students tend to systematically identify "cheese" AP classes such as Psychology, Government, Statistics, Economics, etc, and take them even if they don't care about learning the subject matter.

 

[MrIndigo]

From my experience, I would argue that weighted GPAs are inimical to both students and colleges seeking to evaluate them. I've seen that the desire to gain a high weighted GPA often leads to drastic measures to game the system. These include things like refusing to take things like Band because they are not weighted, and therefore will dilute a high-achievers WGPA. Also, students tend to systematically identify "cheese" AP classes such as Psychology, Government, Statistics, Economics, etc, and take them even if they don't care about learning the subject matter.

This is a common occurrence, even in standardised testing, but there's two sides to it.

A really high achiever here will take one of the following sets of subects:

- English (Advanced, or Extention levels), Extention 2 Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, [Other]; the other won't be counted, but the rest are generally the most difficult courses and hence for good students, will give the best returns on their time investments.

- Extention 2 English, L.O.T.E x 3; these are typically people who have both good linguistic skills but also speak one of the Languages Other Than English at home. French/Spanish/Italian is a common triplet.

So certain courses become really popular, even among people who are going on to completely unrelated degrees, because they score well (if you're good).

However, the flipside is that a number of people will do courses that are too difficult for them, because they think their marks will "scale up". Out here, we don't scale linearly, we scale against gaussians (bell curves). You only get scaled up if your position on the raw mark distribution is higher than the crossing point of the raw mark distribution and the normalised distribution. If you are in the overlap region, your marks won't change much from raw, and if you're in the tail end you will actually be marked WORSE than your raw mark.

Getting above average in the lower course CAN (and often is) better for your grades than getting poor scores in the harder course, which is why it's so important to pick courses appropriate to your aptitude level, but very few students understand that.

 

[mtr]

Words

Err, you confuse me kind of. Are you referring to a high school or college environment? I'm from the US, and I was just referring to my high school experience. Over here, it so happens that certain AP (rough equivalent of A-Level or whatever) subjects are easier than others because they only go half the speed of a college class on the same subject, and this fact is acknowledged by our College Board (organization regulating standardized testing and whatnot). Such classes include AP Psychology and AP Statistics. The problem is that such courses are given equal weighting compared to rigorous AP courses such as AP Chemistry and AP Calculus BC. This weighted GPA system drives students to stock up on easy AP classes to pump up their weighted GPA and rank, which I feel is a practice inimical to all parties involved for a multitude of reasons.

EDIT: Well, that would makes more sense. Over here in high school, classes are graded linearly, though in college we have a bell curve.

 

[bearsfan092]

Err, you confuse me kind of. Are you referring to a high school or college environment? I'm from the US, and I was just referring to my high school experience. Over here, it so happens that certain AP (rough equivalent of A-Level or whatever) subjects are easier than others because they only go half the speed of a college class on the same subject, and this fact is acknowledged by our College Board (organization regulating standardized testing and whatnot). Such classes include AP Psychology and AP Statistics. The problem is that such courses are given equal weighting compared to rigorous AP courses such as AP Chemistry and AP Calculus BC. This weighted GPA system drives students to stock up on easy AP classes to pump up their weighted GPA and rank, which I feel is a practice inimical to all parties involved for a multitude of reasons.

EDIT: Well, that would makes more sense. Over here in high school, classes are graded linearly, though in college we have a bell curve.

I also hate the cakewalk mentality that AP classes seem to be promoting these days. Some of them are genuinely difficult, such as AP Calc BC and AP US History as taught my my old teacher. However, I am taking AP Gov't and Politics (extremely easy) and next semester AP Macroeconomics (actually interested in this), and those are most certainly not as difficult as the first two AP classes mentioned. I feel that the GPA is sometimes more of a contest on who can select the courses with the best work-reward ratio.

 

[andrea]

I also hate the cakewalk mentality that AP classes seem to be promoting these days. Some of them are genuinely difficult, such as AP Calc BC and AP US History as taught my my old teacher. However, I am taking AP Gov't and Politics (extremely easy) and next semester AP Macroeconomics (actually interested in this), and those are most certainly not as difficult as the first two AP classes mentioned. I feel that the GPA is sometimes more of a contest on who can select the courses with the best work-reward ratio.

Eh, I can't necessarily agree with that- my high school only offered 5 AP classes, and they were all really difficult (I suppose since there were just a couple, all had to maintain the same sense of difficulty).

I guess that when you get into different schools, they have different standards for an AP class... You really had to work hard to get a good grade in these classes.

 

[bearsfan092]

Eh, I can't necessarily agree with that- my high school only offered 5 AP classes, and they were all really difficult (I suppose since there were just a couple, all had to maintain the same sense of difficulty).

I guess that when you get into different schools, they have different standards for an AP class... You really had to work hard to get a good grade in these classes.

Ah, well my school offers quite a few AP classes, not all of them difficult. I also remember a conversation with my friend who now lives in Arkansas. While AP US is fairly difficult at my school, at his school, it's extremely easy. I have a feeling he won't do as well on the AP exam, but my point has been made.

 

[andrea]

Ah, well my school offers quite a few AP classes, not all of them difficult. I also remember a conversation with my friend who now lives in Arkansas. While AP US is fairly difficult at my school, at his school, it's extremely easy. I have a feeling he won't do as well on the AP exam, but my point has been made.

I think the only way you could judge the difficulty of AP classes would be to see how well you do on the exam- if the class was relatively simple and the exam was hard, well... Then you've got an easy class to boost your GPA.

If your class was easy and you still did well on the exam, then maybe that is all the harder that class should be.

That was kinda the story behind my AP English class last year- it used to be difficult until our half-retarded teacher got laptops for the entire classroom. We really did nothing in class except for play with the new laptops so she could learn how to use them effectively for her other classes. Still, we learned the basic concepts needed to pass the AP exam. I walked away with a 4 after learning relatively nothing all year. It was an easy way to boost the GPA.

 

[Anachronism]

Not that it matters since my school doesn't do weighted, but my IB Psychology class is probably the easiest class I have ever taken. All we do is watch movies and then talk about their psychological aspects! If any advanced course can be considered "cheese," it is this one. My school offers probably about 20 different IB courses, and all of them are pretty easy really. In IB Spanish, we pretty much just talk about Spanish popular culture, Spanish literature, etc., and then take multiple verb and vocabulary quizzes which determine our grade. In general, IB classes here are easy, although there are some which require extensive homework and the projects are generally rather difficult, they are on the whole quite manageable. Maybe this is why my school doesn't weight. It is harder material in these courses, but the work necessary to maintain an A is minimal in my opinion. I haven't taken any standard level courses in my high school career so I can't exactly say if those are any more rigorous...

 

[ivar]

There should be a more standardized metric for evaluating grades. GPA doesn't do a great job taing into account grade difficulty, so grades should be done according to percentile score, taking into account the difficulty of the course, somehow. But maybe that's too idealistic; I don't know the logistics of how to go about doing that.

 

[bearsfan092]

There should be a more standardized metric for evaluating grades. GPA doesn't do a great job taing into account grade difficulty, so grades should be done according to percentile score, taking into account the difficulty of the course, somehow. But maybe that's too idealistic; I don't know the logistics of how to go about doing that.

Yeah, I have no idea how to implement it. It would also go against one of my instincts that a simple number can convey the potential of a student. I know we are more or less forced to adopt that sort of system, but that doesn't mean I can't bitch about it.

 

[ShadowBroker44]

I believe that it is useful, honors and AP classes are harder, so you should be rewarded for taking the harder class

 

[Game Freak201]

From where I am from (Florida), colleges and universities would receive a student's transcript from high school and use their own formula - honors is weighted at .5 and AP/IB/Dual Enrollment is weighted 1.0 - to create their own weighted GPA. The advantage of this is that somewhat standardizes the GPAs while still rewarding the people who take honors and AP/IB/Dual Enrollment classes; though, this still doesn't solve the problem that some classes of equal weight are easier in one school and harder in another.

I think that weighted GPAs are necessary for class ranking and comparing how well different students did in school as long as the formula used to determine them is the same when doing the comparison.

 

[Eraddd]

Not that it matters since my school doesn't do weighted, but my IB Psychology class is probably the easiest class I have ever taken. All we do is watch movies and then talk about their psychological aspects! If any advanced course can be considered "cheese," it is this one. My school offers probably about 20 different IB courses, and all of them are pretty easy really. In IB Spanish, we pretty much just talk about Spanish popular culture, Spanish literature, etc., and then take multiple verb and vocabulary quizzes which determine our grade. In general, IB classes here are easy, although there are some which require extensive homework and the projects are generally rather difficult, they are on the whole quite manageable. Maybe this is why my school doesn't weight. It is harder material in these courses, but the work necessary to maintain an A is minimal in my opinion. I haven't taken any standard level courses in my high school career so I can't exactly say if those are any more rigorous...

Errr you got it lucky. IB courses are raping my ass. Math SL is raping my ass right now (I was at a 93, then applications of diff calculus dropped me with a 68% LOL). Physics is hell, with freaking analog and digital. Chem is fine though but it's SL. English with King Lear and orals coming up = sigh...

 

[MrIndigo]

What about analog and digital? Also, King Lear is pretty good, but oral assignments are AWFUL. I hate them more than anything.

 

[Eraddd]

What about analog and digital? Also, King Lear is pretty good, but oral assignments are AWFUL. I hate them more than anything.

It was pretty difficult to understand it (for some reason, don't ask me) and once I thought I had it (as in I could do all the homework questions and test questions without a problem), I got owned on the test. Thank God the next topic is one of my strengths (nuclear physics and quantum mechanics).

King Lear = good book
10 minute Oral on a passage = pretty awful especially when your teacher doesn't give you enough practice and feedback. I remember just being broken mentally and emotionally because of my last year's oral (english teacher told me that I did well afterwards, because I cut the whole day after that because i was pretty ticked off.)