As a part of the admissions review at UGA, our team recalculates a GPA for all freshman applicants using core course grades and any additional AP/IB non-core grades. We do this in large part because every school or school district is able to determine their own grading policy and how they calculate a GPA, and as such there is no consistent method for comparing HS GPA’s when they are vastly different (so using a GPA on a 4.00 scale vs one that is on a 6.00 scale). A 4.00 looks very strong within the scope of one of these grading scales, and less than strong in the other one. As such, UGA is focused on consistency in our review, and in looking at students within the same academic scope. This also applies to the documents we receive, as we need consistency in the transcripts from each school. In order to accurately and clearly calculate a standard UGA GPA, we need every transcript from an individual high school to be the same.
When two different students from the same high school have different transcripts, it makes it very hard to calculate a GPA, especially since we have built in the grading scale and weighting system for each high school we see. For Fulton County students though, the official transcripts we receive from the high school can come to us with either “weighted” or “unweighted/weighted” grades depending on the method the student selects, thus causing our office to have a challenge. An individual course grade could show up as an 85 on one transcript and a 92 on another, depending on the type of transcript sent to us. Again, the one key for us it that the transcripts that are sent from a school be consistent for all students, as we need to set up our system based on each school’s policies. Over 95% of UGA applicants have transcripts that show unweighted grades, so this allows us to review Fulton students in the same method as almost all other applicants. As such, we will be adding a required checklist item for a unofficial transcript that shows both the unweighted and weighted grades for all applicants who attend a Fulton County public school, and allow the students to upload this document through their admissions status portal. We will still require an official transcript from the school along with a Secondary School Report from the counseling office, but this is an added document to make sure we are able to review Fulton County students in the most accurate way possible.
We have tried our best to make this process easy for Fulton County School applicants by allowing them to upload the document themselves on their status page and show that the document has been received by our office and placed directly into their file through the upload. A student’s status page will generally be available in 2 or so business days after the student submits their application. We hope that this new process will allow for a more accurate understanding of these student’s grades, and will let our office to be more efficient in our process.
Thanks for the help with this, and Go Dawgs!