What is a Weighted GPA?

A student’s GPA is actually a complicated little number. He or she often has a single number that they consider to be their GPA, but in reality there are significant variations to that number depending on who is looking at it and in what context. The most common variation to a GPA revolves around the concept of weight.

In short, a weighted GPA is a way to look at student’s overall academic performance through the lens of the rigor of their course selection or schedule. It’s a quick way of comparing students against each other with the inclusion of how they’ve challenged themselves. Remember, a GPA in and of itself is sort of like a credit score for students. Just as a credit score is one-stop-shop way of describing the many factors that evaluate a person’s credit, the GPA quickly says how a student performs in the classroom. However, what happens in one classroom can very greatly from another. For example, you can’t really compare a person who successfully pays off a $50 credit card charge at the end of each month with a person who is successfully making a $2000 mortgage each month. Both are being financially responsible, but the weight of the accomplishment of the person making the mortgage payment is much more significant. In the same way, a student who takes the most basic science curriculum a school offers is not really on par with a student who takes a series of rigorous  AP classes within the science department. The unweighted GPA doesn’t tell us that. If both students make all A’s in their classes, they have the same unweighted GPA. However, if we can assume the AP classes are harder than the regular ones the weighted GPA tells us, “Ah, this student has challenged themselves and performed well in tough classes.”

Here is how weighting works. GPA calculation can vary sometimes from school to school, but the most common practice is to assign a 4 to letter grades of A, a 3 to letter grades of B, a 2 to letter grades of C, and so on. However, weighted courses receive a boost or a bonus. So a weighted A might equal a 5, A B might equal a 4, etc.Sometimes there are different tiers of weighting so maybe a honors class gets a half point and an AP or dual enrollment course gets a full point. Either way, when we compare students by their weighted GPA we are offered more differentiation between them as we have insight into the types of of classes they took.

Weighting is only one form of a GPA. Colleges, one of the most important end users of this number, usually recalculate a GPA with their own standards and their approach to weighting can be different from one another. Discussing that is beyond the scope of what I want to convey here. Nevertheless, it’s important to understand what a weighted GPA is and to have at least a general idea of how they are calculated. It’s an important little number that goes along towards deciding a student’s fate.

FAFSA and the Modern Family

One of the financial aid questions I get more than any other revolves around students from nontraditional families. Nontraditional families come in many different forms. Most commonly, that term means that a child’s biological mother and father are not married and/or do not live in the same household. When that happens it results in various financial circumstances and arrangements. In that case, trying to figure out how to file the FAFSA can be maddening.

The most foundational of rules a nontraditional family should use when completing the FAFSA is that the family should use the financial information from the parent the student spends the most time with. So if a student lives with mom during the week and stays with dad maybe every other weekend, the student will file their FAFSA with mom, without regard to either parent’s income.

What to do when mom or dad are remarried though? Well, the step parent’s income is also going to be factored into the FAFSA. Regardless of how long the biological parent and stepparent have been married, regardless of whether or not the stepparent has legally adopted the child, if the student spends most of the time in the home of the parent who is married to a stepparent the parent and stepparent’s income should be put on the FAFSA. Actually, FAFSA changed their 2014 to include unmarried couples. So, for example, if mom lives with her boyfriend who she is not even married to, FAFSA expects the boyfriend’s income to be reported. All of these rules now apply to same sex relationships too, by the way.

So what if the students doesn’t live with mom or dad? Maybe they live with a grandparent, or uncle, or even a friend. The first thing you have to do here is to look more closely at the student’s situation. Has the student been declared homeless by their school? Are both parents deceased? Is the student a foster child? Have they been fully emancipated? If any of those are the case, the child is considered independent and should file their own FAFSA using their own income. My experience, however, is that these situations are less common. What is a more likely scenario is that living with someone like a grandparent, who is not a parent, is just a better situation for the child. In that case, a parent or both parents are still around and the parent’s income should be used on the FAFSA, even if they don’t see the student a whole lot or provide any support. If the parents are truly deadbeats, the student hasn’t seen them in years, or they flat out refuse to complete the FAFSA--that’s when a student needs to start considering whether or not they should be declared homeless. They can discuss that with their high school officials.

The definition of a family can be complicated. There are endless possibilities and each can create a different set of circumstance when it comes to FAFSA. When in doubt, a student’s best recourse is to discuss their situation with a financial aid officer at the schools they are interested in. That’s what those people are there for and they are financial aid experts. At the end of the day, as a high school counselor, the best advice I can give when questions like any of the above come up is to pick up the phone and call the college.