Comparing two people from one school and assuming equal rigor, is there any difference between one person who has A’s and 5-8 A+’s on their transcript compared to another person who has A’s but 5-8 A-?
My school does 4.0 for A+/A/A- and gives 5.0 for all 3 if its weighted. The plus or minus though, does go on transcript.
I am asking this because I am seeing this with two of my friends. The first one puts in a lot of effort, so they get A’s and A+’s if the teacher is not the hardest or they work really hard.
The second one is intelligent but lazy. They put in barely enough work to get the highest grade point possible, so they are often really close to a B+.
I guess this doesn’t matter for UCs because they remove +/- when they ask you to enter? (they review transcripts though)
And I’m guessing this will matter for top colleges since consistent A- performance is worse than A?
I am assuming that you are describing students in high school.
Quite a few of the classes that you will take in the future will depend upon what you are learning now. An A+ in precalculus will for example make calculus easier when you get to it. In theory an A+ in French could make next year’s French class easier, but this is something that I never experienced personally. I guess that between calculus and French I have seen this from both sides.
If this were to happen in university, there is another issue: The student who is very intelligent and puts in the effort and gets a lot of A+ grades might be given the opportunity to participate in research, internships, or to be a TA. These opportunities will go on the resume and can help quite a bit with either graduate school admissions or for job applications.
Also, the study skills that you learn when putting in the effort to get an A+ can be helpful when you get to tougher classes.
I have however seen cases where the lazy high school student became a hard working university student.
That assumes that the grade reflects the knowledge of the student. With so big part of the grade depending on homework, that’s not necessarily true. One of my son’s friends was getting consistently 100% on tests, but didn’t care about homework at all. The grade definitely didn’t reflect his knowledge.
On the GPA front, it’s interesting that your school scores all A-range grades the same way, but that won’t matter for most colleges as they’ll recalculate your GPA using their own scale. Here’s the standard unweighted scale:
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
F
4.0
4.0
3.7
3.3
3.0
2.7
2.3
2.0
1.7
1.3
1.0
0.0
So the GPA your school provides is often meaningless in the context of college – unless it’s the standard unweighted GPA, but even then some colleges use different scales.