This is Raul again with lesson number 12. All about grades and GPS. We know that high school grades are the number one and number two factors in college admissions. In this lesson, let us understand a little bit more about grades, how they're measured, how the report and and why they're so important. You should be very familiar with this chart. You get a 93 plus on a test or a project and you're set to have scored an A grade.

During the entire school year. Your teacher considers your performance and category activities. More important activities like tests, projects and exams and capital Gonna be activities like quizzes and homework. She will rank category a performance more heavily than Category B performance, and will calculate your grade point average GPA for the year using the same scale. The difference is that the GPA measures your performance on an entire school year. This is why the GPA is so important to colleges.

It measures how you did over the entire school year, a marathon versus a sprint. Now let's talk a little bit about strength of curriculum. The number three item on our list. Not all high school courses for the same topic in the same grade have the same degree of difficulty. For example, a high school may offer ninth grade students to history courses US history and Advanced US history, the honors level. You'll often heard good teachers say that a B in an advanced level course may be better than an A in an on level course.

This is because colleges value a student's spirit in taking on an above level challenge performance and it matters less than the effort put in to understand and interpret difficult concepts about the students grade level. The strength of curriculum represents the degree of difficulty associated with the topic. A student who does well in difficult courses will likely do better in college. Okay, but how is the curriculum measured? This is where we introduced the idea of the weighted average GPA when high schools award grades based on data of difficulty, they're set to use the weighted average GPA approach. In effect, students earn a bonus for attempting more difficult courses on a pre determined scale.

Here, the school is awarding GPAs on a four to six scale. Let's go back to our ninth grade student example. If our student consistently scores between 98 and 100 in US history, she will be awarded an A in the subject and will earn a four GPA. Instead, if she were to take on an above level AP course in US history and take the AP exam, she will earn the same 4.0 GPA even if she only scores a 77 to 79 all year or were she to score a 98 in April. US history all year, she will earn a 6.0 GPA. This is a 50% bonus or a 4.0 level course.

Here's a chart of a school district that allocates grades, depending on weights. Tier One is a traditional course. No weighted GPA options here to pre AP, pre IB, dual credit and certain approved career and technical education courses and tier three courses that culminate in a national or international exam. For example, AP or IB. How our weighted average GPA is reported. Your cumulative weighted average GPA accumulates your entire high school record into a single number is obtained by adding all of your weighted averages and dividing by the number of courses.

Say we are looking at a student from a public school in Washington State, you need 24 courses to graduate each with one credit. The course name indicates whether it is on level honors or AP. In this example, the scale is for 4.5 and five traditional courses like arts and health and fitness score on a 4.0 scale. If a student takes dual credit or honors courses, these could rate a 4.5 scale. Assume that the student scores as in the last column. These GPAs are weighted with the difficulty bonus.

Adding up all of the students GPAs gives you 86 and divided that by 20. For the number of courses taken gives you a cumulative GPA of 3.583. This is how your entire high school record is reported into a single number. Because all US high schools follow this method, colleges can technically compare the performance of a student in Washington state with another from a different state like Alabama or Mississippi. Clearly, the higher your cumulative weighted average GPA is the higher is your chance of getting into elite schools. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Thank you.