The Weighted GPA: Useful or Inflationary?

[bearsfan092]

Okay, the topic at hand is, you guessed it, the weighted GPA. I'll try to be as coherent as possible, but my own thoughts are a little disorganized on the subject.

For those unfamiliar with the weighted GPA system, here's how it works at my school and at many other places:
1. Usually, grading is based off a 1 to 4 scale. 4 is an A, 3 is a B, etc.
2. In a weighted class, a 5 is an A, 4 is a B, etc.

I have just received my report card last Friday and saw my GPA, which was at a 4.66 for the semester. For those not aware, take your total points from your grades and divide by the credits (in my case, 28/6).

Naturally, I was pretty happy, at least until I went on facebook. With report cards just coming in the mail for the majority of students, there was a lot of GPA sharing going around. I've kept a small list of people's GPA's I've gotten over facebook as a sort of mini study. I then arranged them from high to low. There's some slight data problems because some people told me one decimal while others told me two.

4.66
4.66
4.66
4.5
4.5
4.5
4.33
4
4
4
3.8
3.8
3.8
3.8
3.8
3.8
3.4
3.1 (Not entirely sure on validity)
2.83
2.8
2.1
2.1

And a sloppily made Excel graph for your convenience

A few quick flaws in the data:
1. Way too small a sample size
2. No way of verifying data
3. Not a random sample. Based off of my friends, many of whom are from my classes and are most likely better students because of those classes.
4. This is a suburban upper middle class high school, and C's sometimes don't reflect the "average". I find that an unweighted B fulfills that role.

I'm going to assume from a very amateur statistics viewpoint that this should look something like a standard bell curve. It has a resemblance to one, but it seems to be tilted towards the upper half. What draws more attention is the fact that there are so many 4+ GPA's.

Well sonny, back in my day, the best students got 4's, and everyone else didn't. Well, now it looks as if anyone can get a 4 with a few weighted classes and much less elbow grease than it used to take. The result is undeniably grade inflation, where everyone is smart and no one is smart.

As a junior in high school, I've had to pay attention to the college application process. Colleges for the most part seem to have realized that the weighted scale has unnecessarily inflated grades. As a result, many colleges look at the unweighted grade.

A 4.85 (assuming that Physical Education counts on a 4.0 scale) is the new 4.0. The system tried to create a way to get the better academic students recognized and instead just assigned them a new number.

So, on the basis of needless inflation of grades, I say that the weighted grade system should be done away with. I see no point in assigning a higher number to the GPA system that often does not get used and potentially allows less work to be done in an honors class than a regular class for the same GPA.

Your thoughts? Need clarification on any points? I'd love to hear what you think.

 

[Blackhawk11]

My school doesn't do weighted GPA at all. Last term I had 2 ap classes and all A's, yet still only a 4.0. I think that weighted GPA would be good for comparing students at the same school for class rank purposes, that way you can't get into the top 20 with just easy classes. However, that should be where it stops being used. Colleges should only look at unweighted GPA and your transcript, because somes schools, like mine, don't give weighted GPA, which will create discrepancies between students from different schools.

Overall, my opinion is this: weighted for bragging rights, unweighted for everything else.

 

[Eraddd]

No weighted GPA in our school because we don't have rankings or valedictorians and all that jazz.

Personally, I'd stick with unweighted as long as the college dudes LOOK at the courses I'm taking. If average Joe is taking Chemistry 11, compared to me taking Honours Chemistry 12 and he gets a 95 and i have a 89, I sure as hell want mine to be looked better than his.

 

[MrIndigo]

The idea behind a weighted GPA is to offset the lower marks from a more difficult subject, so that you aren't penalised for taking on advanced courses. Unless you have a standardised testing system and curriculum, there's no real mechanism of weighting across different schools that will work; and for universities considering applicants from various schools, that's a problem.

However, once you leave high school, your GPA doesn't have that much significance anymore. For instance, my final high school results are conglomerated into a percentile score; I got 96.6 if I remember correctly, which is equivalent to being ranked in the top 3.4% of the state. Since coming to university, my UAI of 96.6 has meant nothing, and no employer after I leave will care about it.

If GPAs are compared on a year-to-year basis (i.e. people from 2007 compete with people from 2008 in terms of applications etc.), then the GPAs need to be scaled against the mean from the previous year (which eliminates problems of having one year being harder than the previous, but also eliminates evidence of one year being smarter than another). So that's the tradeoff you make.

 

[CardsOfTheHeart]

When I went to high school, our weights were like this:

A - 5
B - 3.75
C - 2.5
D - 1.25
F - 0

...and I never understood the point of it. As a college admissions officer, I wouldn't ever look at weighted GPA because

A. The unweighted GPA is standard and comparable.
B. Weights are not uniform across all schools, thus they are not comparable.
C. Not all classes can be weighted. (I'm assuming that P.E. is never weighted.)

If there was uniformity in the weights, then I guess it could be of SOME use, but even then you'd still have to look into the transcript for the full story. It doesn't even matter to me WHAT weights everyone uses; I'd still need to see the transcript to know exactly what's going on.

The idea behind a weighted GPA is to offset the lower marks from a more difficult subject, so that you aren't penalised for taking on advanced courses.

Do you happen to know of any universities that actually CARE about that? It boggles my mind why any of them would.

 

[bearsfan092]

Well, I've been to a few informational meetings regarding the applications process and have been told several times that colleges do not look at GPA but rather your transcript, which is what many of you are suggesting. This just makes the case for the abolition of the weighted GPA stronger in my opinion.

I guess a deeper related problem lies in the fact that our school system tries to simplify grading by assigning a number to it that may or may not be representative of your academic performance.

 

[cantab]

As someone British, the American idea of GPA, period, seems flawed. You can't just reduce the whole of someone's academic performance into a single number. In the UK, you get separate grades for every subject. So if you get a D in French, you get a D in French - it doesn't affect your other grades, and further/higher education are free to make of it what they will. (If you're going on to study physics, who cares about your French mark?)

 

[Lockeness]

Weighted grades give a reward to those who take advanced classes. Otherwise why take them if there is no reward for your "risk". So weighted grades are capitalist in their design. As someone who takes a lot of advanced classes there is a sort of reward for going above and beyond. My complaint is that with weigted classes in my system there are a lot of 4.0s that are not deserved so to speak. However this can proabaly be remedied by harder classes in general or a totaly redone educational system which is another discussion for later.

 

[Surgo]

Well, I've been to a few informational meetings regarding the applications process and have been told several times that colleges do not look at GPA but rather your transcript, which is what many of you are suggesting. This just makes the case for the abolition of the weighted GPA stronger in my opinion.

I guess a deeper related problem lies in the fact that our school system tries to simplify grading by assigning a number to it that may or may not be representative of your academic performance.

Yeah that's nonsense, at least at the higher end schools. Getting a C in a math class is enough to reject you from some places (that's personal experience there), or at least it was when I applied to college.

 

[cim]

GPAs in general: Useful or Inflammatory?

I mean, seriously...

 

[CardsOfTheHeart]

There is one thing I just remembered that makes weights useful: scholarships. Schools do give out some scholarships according to your class rank. When I went to high school, iirc, one college offered scholarships like this:

Top 15% of class: half-tuition paid
Top 10% of class: full tuition paid
Top 5% of class: tuition, books, etc.; everything paid

(The percentages are probably wrong, but this was over five years ago; I don't remember that much.)

In that case, the weights help those who take the advanced courses and put in the effort stand out over those that don't take the risk. It's supposed to promote hard work with the hopes that it will be reflected in the grades. That's the theory, anyway...

 

[Fishy]

I think weighted GPAs are silly, and any college admissions person who considers them is just dumb. Sure, in my senior year I managed like a 4.3 or something and thought that I was awesome, but then realized it was stupid to consider myself "super smart" in comparison to other people in non-honors classes, since you're not even on the same field of comparison.

Colleges don't even have weighted GPAs (to my knowledge?) and since every teacher ever tells you that high school is preparing you for the terror that is college, I think it's silly to have weighted grades at all. If anything, it's causing students to overestimate themselves that since they can ace honors classes while doing little work (hello AP English), they can skate through college classes, which have a much larger workload and unweighted grades.

edit: yeah Coth, I think class rank is probably the only viable reason for weighted grades, as it shows that you're taking "harder" classes and still doing exceedingly well, which can be comparable to everyone else since they are either choosing to take the harder classes and do well, or just stick to the mandatory whatever and still do well, or not!

 

[MrIndigo]

When I went to high school, our weights were like this:

A - 5
B - 3.75
C - 2.5
D - 1.25
F - 0

...and I never understood the point of it. As a college admissions officer, I wouldn't ever look at weighted GPA because

A. The unweighted GPA is standard and comparable.
B. Weights are not uniform across all schools, thus they are not comparable.
C. Not all classes can be weighted. (I'm assuming that P.E. is never weighted.)

If there was uniformity in the weights, then I guess it could be of SOME use, but even then you'd still have to look into the transcript for the full story. It doesn't even matter to me WHAT weights everyone uses; I'd still need to see the transcript to know exactly what's going on.

Do you happen to know of any universities that actually CARE about that? It boggles my mind why any of them would.

All classes can be weighted based on average performances, but it needs to be done properly, not just within each school.

In my state, your university receives NOTHING about your subjects and marks. All they get is your UAI percentile rank.

EDIT: @Fishy, our college courses can be weighted. Generally they're just scaled to a standard grade allocation curve, but MATH1902 is the advanced version of MATH1002, and the 1902 scores are scaled against 1002 scores.

EDIT: Also, linear weighting is retarded. True weighting is done using bell curve fitting, so that someone who does poorly in an advanced class is worse off than someone who does average in the normal class.

 

[Fishy]

Ah, I see. What I was really just thinking is that (at least at my school) no grade for a class can receive more points than a 4.0. If that's what you're saying yours does for the math courses at least, then I've just misunderstood again.

 

[MrIndigo]

Ah, I see. What I was really just thinking is that (at least at my school) no grade for a class can receive more points than a 4.0. If that's what you're saying yours does for the math courses at least, then I've just misunderstood again.

Well, in uni here you're assigned a mark out of 100, with grades Pass=50, Credit=65, Distinction=75, HighDistinction=85.

Most courses have a standard number of each grade they can allocate; so they raw mark everything, and then the top X people above 85 get moderated so that their lower cutoff is 85; everyone who was above 85 but lower than those get shifted to 84, and the process repeats for Ds, Cs.

You can't get scaled from a pass to a fail, but the other grades are mutable.

The way it works with maths is that the number of top grades are limited harder in the nonadvanced course, so it is harder to get top grades if you do the normal course. i.e. the marks are scaled compared to each other.

 

[bearsfan092]

I think it's silly to have weighted grades at all. If anything, it's causing students to overestimate themselves

Actually, it was the realization that I overestimated myself that made me post this thread in the first place!

@Lockeness. The weighted GPA may have been a reward in its infancy, but it is no longer a reward because colleges no longer consider it. All it's done is created a higher number for the top students while inflating the numbers of everyone directly below.

 

[cantab]

Well, in uni here you're assigned a mark out of 100, with grades Pass=50, Credit=65, Distinction=75, HighDistinction=85.

Most courses have a standard number of each grade they can allocate; so they raw mark everything, and then the top X people above 85 get moderated so that their lower cutoff is 85; everyone who was above 85 but lower than those get shifted to 84, and the process repeats for Ds, Cs./QUOTE]
This is an approach that is generally rejected in the UK, on the grounds that it's unfair to punish people just because their year happened to be better than average. Then again, 'objective' marking is clearly leading to inflation.
At Cambridge there were some courses run for very few students indeed. Minerals Science has regularly run with less than half a dozen students, and there have even been years where NO students took it. When you get to such low numbers, you can't normalise by percentile.

 

[CaptKirby]

I think it is really goofy. As much as I enjoyed not studying in my AP classes at all and still getting essentially a GPA boost, I was able to not study my entire senior year by taking all AP classes since I knew I was good for at least a 4.3-4.5 no matter how much I ignored school. I would have had to actually care if it were an unweighted scale!

 

[Fabbles]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I go to a Private high school that is extremely good at the top - basically our AP scores are pretty ridiculous because of how hard the actual classes are. Year in and year out we receive all 5s on AP Chemistry - not because everyone there is insanely smart, but because of the work they must put in, roughly 4 hours a night.

Now, the same can not be said for the non Honors or even Honors programs. Honestly, a person could not even show up to those classes and get an A. For example, my honors Spanish class played Bingo almost every day, while AP Spanish is one of the hardest courses (and exams) at the school.

What this all means is that come report card time, nearly all of the kids who get straight As come from the people who take non honors and honors classes, while most AP students get a few Bs.

It just seems outrageous to me that both should be weighted equally. The actual numbers are not important - what is important is determining class rank. If class rank went by unweighted at my school, it would be a complete joke and there would be no incentive for taking challenging classes.

Obviously, this is all coming from someone who goes to a school where a D in AP Calc is much harder than an A in Trigonometry - non Honors and Honors take Trig senior year, AP takes AP Calc BC.

 

[andrea]

My high school had a weighted GPA system, and it worked very well. All classes were on a 4.0 scale except for the 5 AP classes that you could take in your junior and senior years. So, there weren't ridiculously high or anything compared to schools with just a 4.0 scale.

Either way, I think its kind of retarded for colleges to look at GPAs in the first place since they are different between all the 1000s of high schools there are in the country. Then again, didn't someone already comment that colleges don't care what the GPAs are?

Anyways.... I think that weighted GPAs CAN BE good to have in high schools to help calculate who the best student is among the graduating class, IF they are used in an intelligent way (e.g. not weighting stupid classes like gym etc). They can help to set apart students who have really put a lot of work into their classes instead of gliding through high school in general classes.

 

[toshimelonhead]

I want class rank and any type of GPA thrown out entirely.

That way I can play shoddy for hours on end while still overloading on AP classes.

 

[cantab]

Either way, I think its kind of retarded for colleges to look at GPAs in the first place since they are different between all the 1000s of high schools there are in the country. Then again, didn't someone already comment that colleges don't care what the GPAs are?

A serious question: Why doesn't the USA have external exam boards like the UK does?

 

[Polis4rule]

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

 

[andrea]

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

I gotta say that that is definitely one of the most ridiculous sounding systems I've heard, lol.

 

[bearsfan092]

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

Dear christ, that's a complete nightmare to compare to other school systems. If I were some college evaluating your application, I'd have to do some serious digging just to figure out what exactly those numbers are supposed to be telling me.