

3.8? 5.2? How Can Admissions Officers Compare GPAs Across High Schools?
High school students are often painfully and intimately familiar with the methods their high schools use to calculate GPA. At times, attempts to manipulate GPA can have more influence on a student’s course load than the classes he is actually interested in! Consider hypothetical students from three different high schools: Alex has mostly As and Bs in a mix of honors and AP courses. His high school gives extra weight to these core subjects, and his transcript shows a GPA of