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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

They neutered HOPE unfortunately. Used to be you needed a 3.0 high school GPA to qualify, now you need a 3.7 (not counting the GPA boosts you get from Honors and AP), and they don't cover books or fees anymore, and they upped the in college GPA requirements.

It was really unfortunate to see such a blatant money grab.

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> now you need a 3.7 (not counting the GPA boosts you get from Honors and AP)

Does this mean that you're actually better off taking unweighted non-honors/AP classes and getting a better grade, rather than taking honors/AP classes and getting a less good grade?

Yeah, that's one unfortunate side effect.

I recall AP classes being weighted 1 point higher, so I often had a GPA above 4, e.g. 4.2. So wouldn't it not make a difference? Get a B in an AP class and it counts as an A anyways

Not under HOPE calculation of GPA which is different than your school's. The point is that they don't weight AP and honors any higher like you're saying. They removed that in order to cut the HOPE budget.

The HOPE GPA does add 0.5 for all AP/IB classes. It doesn't apply to all honors classes, which is unfortunate, but they do recognize that some classes are harder.

It's been split up into two tiers. The HOPE scholarship has a 3.0 requirement, and pays approximately 80% for public colleges. The 3.7 requirement is for the Zell-Miller scholarship, which pays 100% for public colleges. It's obviously not as much as before, but I'd hardly call paying 80% of tuition neutering.

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