Do colleges round up gpa's

My son just ended his junior year with a 88.98 cumulative unweighted GPA. Will he be penalized for the hundredths of a point?

He won’t be penalized. Colleges will use the GPA provided on the HS transcript. If that is to the second decimal, that is what it is.

The GPA is what it is. Self report it to colleges as it appears on the transcript. If your school doesn’t round up, your child shouldn’t round up either.

Honestly I don’t see the difference between an 88 or an 89. Either would have been Bs at my D’s HS.

Most colleges look at the transcript and use their own scale anyway.

“Penalized” in what way? It will be viewed for the score that it is.

Theoretically, if someone had to rank by number GPA, he’d be behind an 89.00 and ahead of an 88.96. Because that’s what it is.

The reality is that the vast majority of schools grade by A, B, C - maybe with + and -. These are converted to a 4 point scale. If your school does not provide letter grades, schools will likely convert every course grade on the transcript to a letter (89.50+ = A or maybe 92+=A, 89.5-92 = A-) to standardize it.

@RichInPitt Actually, I don’t know of any school that would give an A for an 89.5. At my kids school, an A- is 90-93,an begins at 94, and an A+ is 98+.

However, they do not transform the GPA into letter grades - they transform all of the 100 based grades into a 4.0 based, and then recalculate the GPA. The GPA could be anywhere from B+ to A.

Imagine a person with three grades: 97, 85, and 85. The average is 89. It would be B, B, and A, GPA of 3.33.

Now imagine a 92, 93, and 82. The average is still 89, but now we have two As and a B, with an average of 3.67

These are two very different GPAs.

So a GPA of 89 could be anything from as high as 3.9 to as low as 3.1, in the most extreme cases. If most of the grades that are 90+ (As) are in the 90-93 range, and most of the 80-89 grades (Bs) are 80-83, the 4 point GPA can be pretty high. However, if the 80-89 grades are closer to 89, and the 90+ grades are closer to 100, the 4 point GPA will be on the lower side.

Basically, you can get an 89 GPA by either having many low As, and few low Bs, or by having Many high Bs and few high As.

Calculating using a 9 point scale (using partial grades) will narrow it somewhat, but a GPA of 89 could still be an A to a B.

It also means that the class rankings, based on the 100 point system, may not stay the same. A student with a GPA of 89 may have a 4 point GPA of 3.6, while a student with a GPA of 88 may have a 4 point GPA of 3.7.

@MWolf Wait, are you referring to your school? The schools with which I am familiar have different numerical equivalents for each grade. A B grade would not have the same numerical number as a B+. Yes. Grades can/cannot be weighted ( depends on the school).
So the only thing we have seen is within that specific grade. An 80 grade would count like an 82( as both are B minus).
Is this unusual? I know many schools do unusual things with GPA.

Well now you do. Our does.

Grades are published without decimals and rounded per standard mathematical practice.

At your school, if a student received 273 of 305 points from tests, quizzes, HW, etc - 89.51% - they would receive an 89 and a B+ on their report card?

We don’t have +/-, so it rounds to a 90, which goes on the report card, along with the corresponding A letter grade.

90 is a very standard cutoff for an A at schools without +/-, and in my time working with our school administration revamping our weighting process, none of the 20 peer schools we studied truncated decimals or used +/-.

At schools without +/-, an 81 is the same as an 89 when it comes to GPA - a 3.0. If a school has +/-. then obviously this only hold true for the same letter grade.

@RichInPitt Wow, with that scoring, I can now figure out why 50% of kids in the US are A students. I guess that the scoring rubric would go along with the grades making it possible for colleges to which your student is applying to see how GPA is measured.
At our school, the 89.5 would be a B+. Grades go to two decimal points and are not rounded up. They are reported as the numerical and letter grade as previously mentioned.
It’s funny we know someone in admissions for a major university and they were talking about grading as it related to my kids’ school. They said they know schools like X (which my kid attends), don’t inflate grades and they can clearly see more variation as few kids have all top grades. She also said that’s why they accept more kids from schools with tough grading standards. I had no idea what she was talking about. I get it now.

If my kids had your grading rubric they would have all A’s in every subject. Wow, just wow. I always wondered how so many on CC had such high GPA’s.

At my D’s school an 89.5 would have been rounded to a 90 but still would have been a B+.

This was her school’s grading scale:

Grading System
Letter Numeric Grades
A+ 99-100 4.3
A 95-98 4.00
A- 93-94 3.67
B+ 90-92 3.33
B 87-89 3.00
B- 85-86 2.67 3.17
C+ 81-84 2.33 2.71
C 77-80 2.00 2.25
etc…

There is so much variability between grading scales which is why colleges request the HS’s profile.

@Happytimes2001 High schools that work on a 4.0 scale have no partial grades, so no such thing as a B+ exists. so 80-89 is a B, and 90-100 is an an A. So both an 80 and an 86 would be a B. That is the way it was at my kid’s high school, and at the high schools of a few of my friend’s kids.

As for partial grades, for some high schools a 90 would be an A-, while for others, like that of @momofsenior1, a 90 would be a B+.

It is mostly in high schools in more affluent areas, in which the average GPAs are now pushing 3.5, compared to 3.0 for the rest of the USA

However, what is true is that the real scale that USA high schools have is C, B, and A. D is considered to almost be failing, and is a very rare grade in the USA, so the vast majority of GPAs land from 2.0 to 4.0. Moreover, the different tracks that high schools in the USA often have mean that students are usually assigned to the track at which they are assured to do very well.

The good part of this is that most students do very well, and that is one of the reasons that the most common grade in many schools is an A. The bad part is that students are challenged a lot less, and students come to believe that an A is the grade that one receives for doings everything that is required, not for excelling in the class.

Then they get to college, where they discover that most professors give a B for doing everything. Well, except for those colleges with grade inflation, which are generally, surprise, surprise, the colleges which are attended by the same students who enjoyed grade inflation in high school…

@MWolf Yes, I think a lot is dependent on SES as well as how the grading system was originally set up. One of the reasons we flipped over to private schools was the grading system. Sadly, where we lived everyone thought kids should all receive the same grade in the public school. The advanced courses were filled with kids who though they didn’t test in, had parents who wanted them there and that slowed the class for the actual advanced kids. The private schools mainly had a criteria whereby you had to have a certain grade to be at the highest level the following year.

As you mentioned, it’s not surprising those kids are surprised by their grades. As I mentioned a kid with only A’s would be in the very top tier at my kids school ( perhaps top 2-5%). If your grade rubric was used I’d bet about 80-90% of kids would be in that tier as well. The school accepts a small % of applicants so they leave off the bottom half of kids academically ( perhaps the bottom 80%). The average grade at my kids school is B- according to the head of school. They work on a 4.0 scale.
Thanks for pointing out how your rubric works. I’m thankful my kids’ is very different.