Most homeschool parents award students a GPA based on the same scale that they remember from high school. The thing is, however, that this is not your GPA. It’s not yours either. GPA rules have changed and schools are now awarding students GPA’s that approach 5.0 and 6.0. For a homeschooling parent with a child nearing college, this can cause alarm and even make the homeschooler decide to also award weighted GPA’s.
Weighted GPA’s are awarded by many schools to prevent students from taking classes that ensure easy A’s and to coerce them to take courses that are more challenging. In a weighted GPA system, a student taking an honors or AP class could earn up to a 4.5 to a 5.0 GPA for getting an A. Some schools may even award as much as a 6.0, though this is rarer. Another way to weight a grade for more difficult classes is add .33 or one third of a letter grade score to the grade the student receives.
Weighted GPA’s are favored by high school students who in the past found themselves ranked below students who took basic math and science, while they took stressful honors level calculus and physics. Beyond that, however, they appear to be useless.
According to Greatcollegeadvice.com, schools report both the weighted and non weighted score to colleges as well as the class rank which is determined by the weighted GPA. Colleges don’t use weighted GPA’s to measure one student against another, in fact they often examine a high school transcripts, stripping away elective courses and looking specifically at core curriculum classes to determine if students are worthy of admission.
If you wish to assign your homeschooled student with a weighted GPA you could have them take AP Classes at local community colleges and then calculate the GPA for those classes based on a weighted score. Still it is hard to award a class rank of 1, so it is really not necessary.
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