RaiseMe - College scholarships

Hey there, thank you so much and welcome to RaiseMe! We're adding new partner colleges all the time, so be sure to Follow all the colleges you're interested in, even if they don't yet offer scholarships on RaiseMe. That way, you'll be notified if they join RaiseMe later on. As for your question around GPA, RaiseMe calculates your GPA using unweighted grades in core classes (so that means the maximum is a 4.0). Don't worry, though - colleges can see advanced courses on RaiseMe and often award more micro-scholarships for them. When you're entering your classes, be sure to note whether they're AP/IB, honors, or advanced courses - you may be eligible for more micro-scholarships on top of what you get for good grades! We're so glad you're using RaiseMe, and if you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at support@raise.me.

Please reach out to support@raise.me for a more personal response. Thank you for the review! Let's see if we can address everything you covered. 🙂 (1) The Micro-Scholarship dollars you see on RaiseMe are not just an estimate of the money you will receive when you enter college, the scholarships you see on a given college represent the actual minimum amount of grant aid you will receive if you are accepted and attend that college. (2) We hear you! We're working hard and constantly adding new colleges that offer Micro-Scholarships to RaiseMe, as of this moment we have just over 300 college partners (we had about 200 last year). Over 100 of those partners are state colleges. Public colleges are sometimes slower to join because they have more complex processes than private colleges (e.g. an entire state college system with 10 campuses may all need to move to the new system, which takes a lot of time). If there is a college you especially would like for us to add, please email support@raise.me with its name; it also wouldn't hurt to email that college's admissions office directly and request that they join RaiseMe, as there's a good chance they've heard of RaiseMe at this point. (3) For unleveled courses, you can change the subject to "non-core" this will ensure that the course counts for credit but not for GPA. (4) Colleges on RaiseMe require that we specifically only work with unweighted GPAs. While many colleges may collect unweighted and weighted GPAs during their application process, most will ultimately just use your unweighted GPA and then may decide later to add their own weighting afterwards. If we were able to use weighted GPAs, we would need to set much higher minimum GPA thresholds than we currently have (Northeastern, for example, might require a weighted GPA of 4.2 or higher). Unfortunately, this is impossible primarily because there are many systems for weighing GPAs across the country. In some districts, an AP course is +1.0; in others, it's +0.5; in others, an honors course is +0.5. Though we use unweighted GPAs, colleges on RaiseMe do love AP and honors courses, and are more likely to admit you if you have them – you can even earn extra Micro-Scholarships on RaiseMe if you have AP or honors courses. Once again, thank you for your review and please reach out to support@raise.me if you have any further questions or feedback. We'd like to do whatever we can to get you from a 4-star review to a 5-star review!

Please reach out to support@raise.me for a more personal response. Thank you for your review. Hopefully we can help with this a little bit. First the easy one: for students on your credit system, we recommend you count 5 credit courses as "Full Credit" and 2.5 credit courses as "1/2 Credit" on RaiseMe. Our system and colleges will calculate everything the same way as your school if you do this. As for the GPA question, it sounds like you've done your reading so we don't have too much we can add here. Please note that high schools weight GPAs differently, so colleges just translate your grades into their own system and calculate GPA on their end. At RaiseMe, we're using a system that is closest to the true system most colleges actually use. Please note that because we use unweighted GPAs, we are able to offer Micro-Scholarships at lower GPAs. If we were to use weighted GPAs, all of our GPA cutoffs would need to be higher. For example, one of our most prestigious universities requires an unweighted RaiseMe GPA of 3.7 to earn; if this college accepted weighted GPAs on RaiseMe, it might require a weighted GPA of 4.7 (depending on the weighting system... some systems go to 5.0, some don't allow anything over 4.0 even when they weight scores) to earn in order to award the same amount of Micro-Scholarships to the same set of students.

Please reach out to support@raise.me for a more personal response. Thank you for the 4-star review. Hopefully we can get you to 5-stars! We understand that it can be frustrating to have a GPA from your school that doesn't match your GPA on RaiseMe. You can find a full explanation for why we use this specific unweighted GPA formula on our help center at https://help.raise.me – ultimately, we are required by the colleges we partner with to use this specific unweighted GPA formula. If we were able to use weighted GPAs, the minimum GPA to earn scholarships would need to increase accordingly (for example, a college with a 3.0 minimum unweighted GPA would possibly require a 3.9 minimum weighted GPA to earn). When students apply to college, many colleges unweight your GPA and consider AP/IB/honors courses for admissions and scholarships but not for GPA weight; our system reflects this reality. Hope this helps! And good luck in your scholarship hunt.

Please reach out to support@raise.me for a more personal response. Hello there! Thank you for your review! 🙏 Weighted GPAs is certainly something we are exploring. While some colleges do allow students to provide a weighted GPA along with their unweighted GPA when applying to colleges, weighted GPAs are often not used in admissions decisions. All colleges will typically perform their own internal weighting on unweighted GPAs by using AP/IB, Honors, and other special course counts in their weights. School districts weight GPAs in different ways, some provide a full letter grade bump for every AP course taken, others provide a half-letter grade bump, others increase percentage points by 10%, and still others will increase GPAs but never above a 4.0. Because of this, we only display and use unweighted GPAs. Please keep this in mind: colleges do look at the counts of advanced courses you input on RaiseMe, and they do award Micro-Scholarships for advanced courses. If a college's minimum GPA on RaiseMe is a 3.5, that means their unweighted GPA minimum is 3.5 — meanwhile their "weighted GPA minimum", if they had one not published on RaiseMe, could very well be 4.5. If you need more assistance, please reach out to support@raise.me for help. We'd like to do everything we can to bring you from a 4-star review to a 5-star review. Keep up the hard work, we're excited to see how far you go!