Weighted Grades Explained
Many high schools give honors-level courses a small academic boost. This is more commonly known as “weighting,” aka placing more importance on honors courses over non-honors courses. The process of weighting grades probably started off as an innocent attempt to make the grading process a bit more fair. After all, honors-level courses are harder, so those grades should be rebalanced to make them comparable to non-honors courses. But this inadvertently triggered an academic arms race that has left high school graduates more stressed and confused than ever before. This guide is to help you understand and resist the pitfalls of weighted grades so that you can pick courses that will enable you to be more effective and healthy.
Why weighted grades don’t matter to colleges
First, colleges will reweigh your grades based on their own criteria because grading and weighting are not standardized, so each school does it differently. Although it is true that colleges consider the rigor of your courses as they review your application, the “weight” they attribute to an honors course is not as neat and tidy as simply adding 0.5 to your grade point for that course. This is because every college will re-calculate your GPA based on a wide range of factors, including what they know about your school and what they know about your teachers. Most universities have so much data on high schools and their staff based on past applicants that they can evaluate just how strong your B+ in Mr. Smith’s Precalc class is compared to all the other applicants. So, since colleges will re-weight your GPA anyway, it’s pretty useless for you to overthink your GPA.
Secondly, colleges don’t just take your weighted grades directly because weighting grades is ultimately an academic subsidy, and basic economics taught us that subsidies are meant to incentivize more of said behavior. In other words, colleges do not want to encourage you to take more honors and AP courses than you need, and doing so can actually hurt your admissions chances. We’ve already established that college admissions will reweigh your GPA, but we haven’t yet addressed what so many AP classes will do to your personal profile.
Every applicant should consider what each part of their profile communicates to the college admissions team. The clubs you do, the conferences you attend, the competitions you join, and the classes you take all say something about who you are and what you care about. For most students, the assumption is that more is better. As Stalin famously said, “Quantity is a quality all its own.” But just as blindly throwing more resources at an issue is a wasteful and inefficient way to solve a problem, taking every available AP course is a wasteful and inefficient way to strengthen your profile. It’s true that a big pile of AP courses might signal to colleges that you can handle a lot of pressure (and endure a lot of pain), but it gives little insight into who you are or what you care about (which is what college admissions offices are actually trying to evaluate).
Why weighted grades shouldn’t matter to you.
You are more important than your college outcomes. It’s easy to lose sight of that, but it’s important to remember. The academic arms race created by weighted grades is very stressful and extremely unhealthy. Through a combination of peer pressure and self-pressure, more and more students are taking honors and AP versions of courses even when they care little about the subject. Fortunately, there’s been a recent shift in the tenor and tone at the very top high schools in the United States. Many prestigious schools like Philipps Exeter (which ironically helped pioneer and develop the Advanced Placement Program) have fully stopped offering AP courses.
Instead, we advocate for challenging yourself with the most advanced classes available in certain areas while being okay with average in others. For example, if you’re a coder and want to develop a computer science profile, you should take the hardest computer science, science, and math courses. But do you need to take AP World History? No. Can you take it if you love history? Absolutely yes. Herein lies the key: take courses because of curiosity, not because of looking good. Courses inspired by your curiosity are more inspiring and fun, which is a big win for wellness and mental health. Additionally, these courses will say much more to colleges than the noise generated from any random and unrelated AP-level courses.