Confused By GPAs Above 4.0

I do not fully understand how some people manage to have a 4.0 GPA or higher. I am working on the assumption that earning a 4.0 GPA means getting a 100% on every single assignment in every single one of your classes. I am also assuming a GPA above 4.0 means doing all that, but also getting extra credit.

I feel like I must be missing something. I started my first semester a month ago. I am taking five different classes and I have five different teachers. Only one of those teachers has mentioned the possibility of extra credit for one, single assignment for the entire semester. The other classes do not appear to have the possibility of extra credit, or at least it has not been mentioned by the teachers and there is no mention of extra credit in the syllabus.

Do I simply have bad luck this semester? Do other classes usually have more extra credit available to be earned? Or perhaps I am being impatient and the teachers will have extra credit available later in the semester?

I am also not sure of my own GPA at the moment. I have seen some information that says just simply having an A in all of your classes means you have a 4.0 GPA, in other places I have seen it could be as low as 3.8.
I have an A in all of my classes, but one of them is fairly low at 92%. My average for all classes combined is 96.5%. I am assuming this might be 3.9?

Relax…the first thing to know is that you will be evaluated in the context of your school. Second, a GPA over 4.0 is not about extra credit in the sense of extra homework or projects.

Many, but definitely not all, schools add a set amount to grades in honors / advanced / AP classes. So, in one of the schools that I know, you automatically get 0.5 added to your mark for an AP class. If you got an A in the class (4.0), you get a 4.5. It was (theoretically possibly to get a 4.85 GPA in that school (due to limits on how many APs students were allowed to take).

If a school ‘weights’ advanced classes, students will have two GPAs: weighted (W) and unweighted (UW).It gets really really arcane as to how the systems work, but again: it will matter relative to your school only. And the one that most colleges care most about is UW.

Yes, using conventional scales you currently have a 4.0.

But…please don’t get this anxious this early. Read this, and believe it:

https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/applying_sideways/

It’s old, but MIT Chris is still at MIT & still posting, and still stands over this post. Take it to heart.

Some high schools don’t have weighted grades.

There are many, many ways to calculate a GPA, so all numbers need to be put in context , which we don’t have most of the time.

A 4.0 typically doesn’t mean 100% in all classes, it means an A in all classes. Most high schools give A’s for either 90-100% or 92-100% average grade for the grading period.

Most, but not all, schools have this as the maximum unweighted grade, so 4.0 is the highest possible. Some schools have an A+ for 97%+ or so, and score it as a 4.3. Similarly, 90-92 may be an A- and a 3.7 or 3.67.

A weighted GPA awards extra points of honors, AP, etc., courses, so you can receive a 5.0 with an A in an AP class.

There are many permutations. I graduated from grad school with an 8.15, my daughter’s valedictorian had a 5.82, both based on abnormal grading and weighting schemes.

Extra credit doesn’t factor into a GPA, other than how it may raise the grade in a class.

You’re talking about college, right? I wasn’t aware of a gpa over 4.0 in college either. That’s a head scratcher to me.

As others have said, there are many, many different ways to calculate GPAs. High schools vary a lot in this regard. Universities do not vary quite as much, but I have still seen some variations.

Some schools consider any A to be worth a 4.0, and this is as high as you can get. Some others consider an A+ to be a 4.0, with an A as a 3.7. Many highschools give higher maximum GPA for honors or AP classes. For example, at some high schools an A+ in an AP class might be worth either a 4.5 or a 5.0.

I am familiar with a university where an A+ is worth a 4.3, and an A is worth 4.0. Some students do have a GPA well above 4.0. Also, students do not need 100 on tests to get an A. I have seen cases where an 85 was an A+ (in the two cases that immediately come to mind, this was for a test or exam where the class average was less than 50). I had one professor in university who gave the top 1/3 of the class an A regardless of what their scores had been on actually tests and homework. It was a brutally tough class so many students were getting less than 50% on many of the tests.

When you apply to university, they will look at your actual grades. They will also get information regarding your high school, so they will know how to interpret your grades.

What this means is that it is very difficult to know what it means when someone tells you their GPA, or when you see what the average GPA was for admission to some university. Other than this, it does not matter. Universities and colleges look at your actual grades.

Thank you for everyone who has responded! The replies have been quite helpful. To clear up the confusion, I have recently started college, not high school. I am aware that I should probably already know how GPAs work because they have GPAs in high school, but I actually dropped out in the beginning of 9th grade, so I did not get much of a chance to learn how they worked back then.

collegemom3717 is probably right in that I should relax a bit over this issue.

GPA depends not only on how your school assigns numbers to letter grades, but also how each professor assigns those grades in the first place. At my school, we had just A = 4/B = 3/C = 2, and then “NR”, meaning the grade didn’t appear on your transcript and you had to retake the class; basically a fail which didn’t change your GPA. But in most cases, grades were also curved or scaled somehow; I definitely earned about an 84 in Orgo 2 but my letter grade was an A and it counted as a 4. From all this you should see that GPA is far from a universal measure as all schools are different and all professors are different too.