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I am an international student from Bulgaria and there are no such things as a weighted/unweighted GPA. We do have GPA's here but I don't really know what a weighted/unweighted GPA means exactly. I have to check one on the School Report on the Common APplication but I do not know which one to choose. Can anyone tell me what exactly weighted and unweighted mean regarding the GPA?

By Drusba (Drusba) on Monday, December 01, 2003 - 09:01 am: Edit

Unweighted GPA is the average on a 4 point scale of your grades where an A in a class =4, B=3, C=2, D=1. Thus, during a semester if you have 5 classes and get two A's and three B's, your GPA for that semester is 2 X 4 plus 3 X 3 divided by 5 or 3.4. For overall GPA you add up and average grades for all semesters.

Weighted GPA results from high schools giving honors and AP classes extra credit on that 4 point scale. For example, an A in an honors course may equal 5 instead of 4, a B 4 instead of 3. Schools have many variations of weighting, e.g., some add only .5 per course, some use special multipliers, some give extra credit for AP but not honors. Net result is that your weighted GPA will be higher than unweighted and by how much higher depends on the system used. In relation to US high schools, colleges are generally aware of the system used by each school and often determine the GPA they will rely on by redoing the GPA using their own or no method of weighting.

By Vtsonev (Vtsonev) on Monday, December 01, 2003 - 09:05 am: Edit

Thank you. I think I will check "unweighted" after all.