"A" in Robotics = Lower GPA?

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

The good news? Since I got to college I have a strong feeling that unweighted GPA is used more often than weighted. My reasoning is that talking to my friends from all over the northeast, all of our schools used different systems to weight their advanced classes in regards to GPA, making weighted GPA a bad statistic to quantify and compare. My hope is that colleges know this and use unweighted GPA.

This is what I've heard oft-repeated - colleges will recalculate your GPA using their own system, to even out differences between the GPA calculations from different schools.

Perhaps this is not always true, and students who take more non-weighted courses really are at a disadvantage. Anecdotally, I know that four years of Jazz Band lowered my weighted GPA (compared to an alternate reality in which I'd taken more Honors/AP classes instead), but I never thought that this somehow put me at a disadvantage in the context of college admissions compared to other students. Perhaps I was just naive.