Do colleges look at weighted or unweighted GPA?

RReaders at Stanford and other highly selective colleges do not take the GPA box at face value, and most families spend more time on that box than any reader does. The self-reported figure, weighted to 4.4 or 4.6 by honors and AP bumps, looks like a verdict. In the office we learned from, it mostly went unread, and readers went straight to the transcript to judge the record for themselves.

That habit explains a common and expensive mistake. A student with a weighted 4.38 believes a strong public flagship is a safety, applies to it last, and is surprised by the result. The weighted number made a few Bs disappear. The reader saw them immediately, and the student had never run the arithmetic the reader did.