When it comes to college admissions, it’s easy for students to get obsessed with boosting their GPA. The focus on GPA makes perfect sense—after all, grades are ingrained into our educational system as a metric of success and are generally considered to be the most important aspect of a student’s college application.
But, high school GPAs may not be as important as students think. Even though colleges will certainly consider a student’s grades and course rigor, they may not consider the GPA printed on a student’s high school transcript.
Take the University of Georgia, for example. On its blog, it tells applicants to “look at the GPA(s) on your transcript, and then completely ignore it. Scratch it out, mark it out with a Sharpie, rip that section off the transcript—whatever you need to do to get it out of your mind.”
But, if grades are so important, why would UGA give this advice?
The reason is that UGA, like many other colleges, recalculates GPAs in an effort to level the playing field and enable admissions officers to compare applicants more fairly. After all, with over 26,000 high schools in the U.S., grading scales, course offerings and the availability of weighted credit vary widely. While recalculated GPAs cannot correct for all of the nuances across different high schools and grading scales, they help admissions officers compare apples-to-apples.
Recalculated GPAs rarely align exactly with what students are accustomed to seeing on their report cards. UGA’s formula, for example, is based strictly on core academic courses. Here’s how it works: UGA assigns a point value to each grade (an A is worth 4 points, a B is 3 points, and so on). Then, it adds a 1.0 weight for every AP or IB grade a student earns. So, the UGA recalculated GPA does not consider the point differential between an A and an A-, and it does not factor in grades in courses it considers to be non-academic.
The University of Florida takes a somewhat similar approach. UF uses a 4.0 scale and assigns 4 points for every A along with an extra 0.5 points for honors, pre-AICE, pre-AP, and pre-IB classes. Therefore, at UF, an A in an Honors class is worth 4.5 points on a 4.0 scale. If a student takes AP, IB, AICE, or dual-enrollment college courses, those classes are awarded an additional 1.0 weight, which means an A in those courses are worth 5.0 on a 4.0 scale.
The University of Michigan, on the other hand, doesn’t use a weighted GPA scale. It converts all applicants’ GPAs to an unweighted 4.0 scale based on grades from 9th to 11th grade, ignoring pluses or minuses awarded by a high school. So, for purposes of Michigan admissions, an A, A+, or A- all count as 4 points in the GPA calculation.
So, before you load your high school schedule with classes such as “Honors Physical Education” or “Honors Life Skills” (yes, these courses really exist at some high schools), understand that some colleges on your list may not consider the impact of these courses on your GPA (or even consider them at all).
Even if a high school GPA doesn’t “count” at a particular college, grades and course rigor are always going to be critical in a student’s admissions success. Colleges want to see that students challenged themselves with a rigorous course load and did well in core academic subjects (English, math, science, social studies, and world language).
So, while high school GPA might not be the be-all and end-all, students’ grades—and the effort they put into them—definitely matter. By choosing courses wisely and focusing on academic performance, students will set themselves up for success, regardless of whether a college takes their high school GPA at face value.
