1. BYU does NOT accept weighted GPAs from high schools. They only look at the raw grades. Anything your kid's school tries to add on to a GPA because the school deems a course more rigorous gets stripped away by BYU when they review the student's transcript. In that sense, taking a harder class and getting a lower grade will not help - and could hurt. (But BYU does look at how many AP/IB courses the student completed.)

2. BYU then has its own school-by-school formulas for weighting the raw course GPAs based on the history of students from that school performing at BYU (or BYU's assumptions about the school's difficulty). For my daughter's school, BYU told me any grade 90 or above in a course gets counted as 4.0 by BYU. But, for a different school they might count a 90 as a 3.7 or something.

3. It was very difficult to get this explanation and I had to keep bucking it up the adminstrative ladder until I found someone willing to give me even semi-straight answers. The first people I talked to seemed VERY reluctant to explain how BYU actually calculates/evaluates high school GPAs. Part of that reluctance, I'm sure, is from not wanting to give advantages to parents and students who are trying to game the system.

4. The above is the explanation I finally recieved, but because it was so difficult to get anyone to give clear answers, I'm not sure how much I actually trust it. My kids are not going to depend on a 90 in a course being good enough to maintain a 4.0 in BYU's view - even though that is what I was told. They are making sure everything stays 99s and 98s, just in case.