GPA

Ranking and GPA

What do I need to know?

The Academic Program of Studies for Secondary School Grades 6-12 for Meridian explains class rank as well as unweighted and weighted GPA.  For the full guide, please refer back to the Meridian website. Here is a helpful excerpt from the guide:


Class Rank

Texas state law dictates that the top 10% of graduating seniors from each high school are guaranteed admission to any public state university (with the exception of UT Austin, which has the latitude to set their percentage of automatic admissions at a level expected to fill no more than 75% of their entering class each fall). Therefore, the top 10% of the graduating class will be identified for communication to Texas public universities. However, Meridian does not rank the remaining 90% of students, and is considered a non-ranking school. This will ensure that college admissions officers judge Meridian students by the quality of the academic program they have pursued.


Valedictorian, salutatorian, and top 10% will be determined by a Weighted GPA. In case of a tie, the student with the highest Weighted GPA in all IB DP courses taken shall be valedictorian. To be eligible for valedictorian or salutatorian, a student must at a minimum be enrolled at Meridian for the entirety of the junior and senior year.


Grade Point Average (GPA)

Two GPA calculations will be used at Meridian. 


College 4.0 Unweighted GPA

The College 4.0 Unweighted GPA assigns a “grade point” for each 0.5 credit semester grade for a high school

credit course, and is the mean (average) of all 0.5 credit semester grade points of high school credit courses. Note that, in the past, College 4.0 Unweighted GPA included high school credit courses taken in Middle School (such as French, Spanish, and Algebra 1). Starting with the class of 2023, no courses taken in

Middle School will count toward high school GPA.


The College 4.0 Unweighted GPA grade points are based on a 4.0 scale as follows:

90-100 = A = 4.0

80-89 = B = 3.0

70-79 = C = 2.0

0-69 = F = 0.0


Weighted GPA

The Weighted GPA does not appear on the transcript and is only used to calculate academic honors such as top 10%, salutatorian, and valedictorian. Students may take differing numbers of high school credits in middle school (particularly if they were not Meridian students in middle school) or differing numbers of courses in high school (for instance, one student may have a study hall, and another may take an extra elective course). In order to provide a consistent comparison between students, only the seven high school credit courses that Meridian students are required to take in grades 9 through 12 will be used in the calculation of the Weighted GPA. Courses that are typically taken as an 8th elective course, and therefore do not count in the Weighted GPA, include Computer Science, Design, Journalism, Physics (elective, not IBDP), and Personal Financial Literacy. If a student chooses to “double up” in foreign language and take both French and Spanish, one of these two will be designated as an 8th course elective and does not count towards Weighted GPA.


Additionally, the following do not count in Weighted GPA, even if taken in grades 9 through 12: summer school courses, correspondence or distance learning courses, credit by examination, credit for acceleration, courses from home school, private or non-accredited schools, dual enrollment courses such as at Austin Community College.


Like the College 4.0 Unweighted GPA, the Weighted GPA assigns a “grade point” for each 0.5 credit semester grade for a high school credit course, and is the mean (average) of all 0.5 credit semester grade points of high school courses. As stated above, only the seven high school credit courses that Meridian students are required to take in grades 9 through 12 count in the Weighted GPA. Weighted GPA for courses other than IB Diploma Program courses (for example, all Meridian courses taken in the 9th and 10th grade years) is calculated on a 5 point scale with 100 representing 5.0, and each point below 100 descending in 0.1 increments. Due to their higher difficulty, IB Diploma Program courses are calculated on a 6 point scale with 100 representing 6.0. Failing grades in all courses are calculated with a 0.0 grade point (see the Weighted GPA Table on the next page).