Which gpa will colleges care about more my weighted gpa 3.9 or my 3.5 unweighted gpa?

It depends on the school, most colleges reweight everyone's GPA to be equal. That being said, it might be helpful to look at your UW GPA as an indicator of success in your classes and your weighted GPA as an indicator of course rigor. Colleges care a lot about course rigor in general, so a few B's (which is what I'm assuming put you at a 3.5 UW) won't kill your chances if you took the most rigorous courseload your school offers. If you consider unweighted GPA (as many schools do) it may be easier to compare yourself to benchmark GPAs, but the DIFFERENCE between your weighted and unweighted GPA shows that you took advantage of challenging courses.

TL;DR: Both matter, no matter which one your schools look at, because they reflect what kind of classes you took and how you did in them, not because there's anything special about the number/scale/calculation

Hope that helps!

Colleges mostly care about your unweighted 3.5 GPA. Youre 3.9 supports your statement that you took weighted honors or AP classes but it doesn't give the whole picture on how well you did in your AP classes. Therefore colleges will tally up how many weight classes you took as well as course rigor and try to understand how your grades reflect your academic strengths and weaknesses. For example if you are better at humanities or better at STEM, you should take the opposite subject as SAT SUBJECT Tests to prop up your grades. If you got a B in AP Lit but can show you got a 750 on SAT Reading and Writing or 750 on SAT II subject test that will make up the deficit for a lower mark.

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