Counting GPA for an international student

Applying to College
1

<p>Hey guys,
so as you may know from some of my previous posts, I'm an international student currently applying to a couple of U.S. schools. The thing is that in our system, we don't use such a thing as the GPA in the States; our grades go from 1 to 5 with the former being the best. Then, if it's needed for some reason, we just take the mean of all of the grades on our reports to show how "good" we are compared to the rest of the class. </p>

<p>Our school - an international one offering the IB Diploma - is quite demanding in terms of academics. Internally, we get reports in percentage points, but for the sake of our national system, the percentage grades have to be converted to the 1-5 scale. So for example 85-100% is a 1 on the final report. </p>

<p>The problem is that - as I said - counting GPA is not usual in here. However, our school does it using apparently quite a strange formula. They take our percent grades and don't include the different difficulty of the IB subjects - it's not weighted, the SL and HL courses have the same impact on the final GPA score. Eventually, even the best ones in class (a guy who got straight A's, meaning all 1's) ends up with a GPA around 3.0 at best. </p>

<p>My question is - is it really necessary to include the GPA even if it is quite artificial? Wouldn't it be better to just provide the transcripts and let the college do the counting? I'm not absolutely sure how it works, but under the current system - compared to the other guys who don't do the IB, but just our national high school exams, which are VERY simple - get a substantially higher GPA just because they don't use percent grades. So with their system, if they get straight A's as we do, their unweighted GPA is 4.0... </p>

<p>Any advice?
thx</p>

2

<p>If no one in the administration at your school has ever helped a student through the application process for colleges and universities in the US, follow the links here to find the closest advising center for EducationUSA. The counselors there do have that type of experience and should be able to advise you on what to do about converting your grades to a 4.0 system.</p>

<p><a href=“https://www.educationusa.info/centers.php[/url]”>https://www.educationusa.info/centers.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;