I know this is a total rookie question but I’m just starting this process. My high school grades are out of 100. I have a 91 unweighted. Different websites say varying stats of what that is on a 4.0 scale. Can someone tell me what is the generally accepted 4.0 scale? Thank you!
here ya go:
As a high school student with a similar grading scale myself, I have also done research and tried to get a better idea of what the 4.0 scale actually is.
In a nutshell, you basically take each lettered grade(or numerical grade which would be most likely in your case) and you would convert it to a 4.0 scale using the link @Sweetgum provided.
Find the average of all of the courses and that’s your unweighted gpa.
While this unweighted GPA gives you a good idea of how you stand in regards to other colleges, don’t take the number to heart. The 4.0 scale can be quite misleading when the number is a conversion to the 100 point scale.
Here’s an example. Imagine that Student A’s school uses a 4.0 scale, and that he/she averaged a 94 on every course in school that they took. Technically, their unweighted gpa would be a 4.0 on the grading scale their school uses, but would be a 94 on the 100 point scale.
Let’s take Student B, whose school calculates GPA based on the 100 point scale. Imagine if they got 2 A-'s and 1 B in their whole high school career, yet had an unweighted GPA of a 97. Even though their UW GPA is quite high, the conversion to a 4.0 gpa would probably be a high 3.8 to a low 3.9. If someone compared Student A and Student B’s GPA based on the 4.0 scale, they would think Student A performed better in high school, when in reality Student B did better overall.
Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of what the 4.0 scale is. My advice to you would be to report your unweighted GPA as it is , in the 100 point scale rather than the 4.0 scale. On the other hand, the conversion does give you a much better idea of how you stand against certain colleges/universities.
Most colleges that recalculate GPAs will only include core courses in the uwGPA calc, so that’s a good place for OP to start. Include English, SS, Science, Math, Language…ideally 4 years of each. No gym, no electives. Sometimes engineering classes can be considered core.
You really need to think of it in terms of your school, what does a 91 mean? Does that put you in the top 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%. How was your class rigor compared to the others in your class?