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.