<p>When going through the recruiting/interview process senior year, if a college student has a GPA of, say, 3.585, is it dishonest or otherwise objectionable to state it as 3.6?</p>
<p>My initial thought is: you wouldn't round it at all if it were 3.525 (who wants to round down?), so no, don't round up.</p>
<p>But I know that I don't know about such things. Please advise!</p>
<p>I think a 3.585 can easily be rounded to a 3.6 with no ethical quandaries, but I think it’s amusing on CC to see some kid quote a GPA out to 3 decimal places in the first place. IMO, there’s no additional insight from going beyond 1 decimal place. A GPA is 3.6, or 3.8, or 4.1, or whatever the heck it is … more than 1 decimal place strikes me as overly precious.</p>
<p>The general rule of thumb is to just round to the hundredths place.</p>
<p>thank you.</p>
<p>No preciousness, just how it is figured by the college.</p>
<p>I think the student should just state what the GPA is on the official transcript. They shouldn’t need to do any rounding or even any calculations themselves.</p>
<p>When my daughter interviewed at her two top choices, she hadn’t yet seen her transcript and had no idea exactly what the GPA was, so she estimated and I don’t feel a bit uncomfortable with that. Her applications will indicate her GPA to the hundredth, but I don’t think you have to be exact in an interview. I hope not, anyway, because she didn’t know her rank AT ALL at that point and her guess was off.</p>
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<p>Right - I’m just saying. For example, my kids’ GPA’s are calculated out to x.xxxx. But there’s absolutely no context in which anything other than x.x is relevant. My college GPA was calculated out to a bunch of places too. I just figured it was a computer, but I reported it as x.x when applying for jobs.</p>
<p>So since my GPA is a 3.99 would it be okay to say in an interview that I have a 4.0?</p>
<p>No, that would be called bragging! JUST KIDDING!!!</p>
<p>Say “about 3.x”. Round up. Round down. Quote it to six decimal places. Whatever. If they want more detail, they’ll ask.</p>
<p>And as for you with the 3.99: who cares? Your kind are a dime a dozen here. Go post in the “Chance Me” forum.</p>
<p>Sorry, I should have been more clear! The question pertains to the resume that will be submitted as part of the recruiting/interview process senior year of college.</p>
<p>I’ve never asked about GPA or SAT scores in my alumni interviews. The college’s evaluation form has no space to record that data. That will be well covered by the paper/electronic application submission to the admissions office, and the admissions office will know what to make of it. The interview is designed to, among other things, allow the applicant to communicate things that are not in the paper/electronic file.</p>
<p>But I see no ethical problem in rounding the GPA to the nearest tenth.</p>
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<p>I apologize if you feel I was bragging, but that’s not the case. The reason that I asked is that having a 4.0 usually means that you got A’s in all your classes. Thats not the case for me since my GPA is weighted and I wouldn’t want to give anyone the wrong impression. Sorry if you were offended but it was an honest/innocent question- not an excuse to say something that I already know wouldn’t impress anyone on this site.</p>
<p>What ever happened to significant digits in GPA calculations? Or to be specific, the notion that your average can’t possibly be any more precise (carried out to more decimal places) than the grades that first went into its calculation? Any statisticians or scientists care to comment?</p>
<p>If it’s for a resume when the final grades aren’t in yet then again, it seems that the GPA that’s on the current transcript s/b used. Employers know that it could vary once final grades are in. Is there some reason not to just use the grades on the most recent transcript?</p>
<p>I don’t know how many digits the university asigns to the grades. Is an A- computed as 3.750? I don’t know.</p>
<p>For UCLA the student can see their current GPA anytime by accessing their stats online. For UCLA it would be indicated as in your example - 3.750 for the cumulative GPA. I suppose not all colleges have this info easily available online but hopefully many do.</p>
<p>For the GPAs assigned to letter grades, I’d expect that to be fairly clearly stated on the college’s website somewhere as well. To actually calculate it to include with the other grades one needs to account for the number of units the course is worth as well - i.e. an A- in a 4 unit course will have a different impact on overall GPA than an A- in a 5 unit course. They basically call an A- a 3.7.</p>
<p>Here’s a reference at UCLA so see if there’s something similar at your college’s website. The particular college may calculate GPAs differently and use different weighting and GPA assignments - i.e. they might call an A- something different than a 3.7.
<a href=“http://www.ugeducation.ucla.edu/counseling/handouts/GPA%20Calculation.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ugeducation.ucla.edu/counseling/handouts/GPA%20Calculation.pdf</a></p>
<p>uscd-ucla-</p>
<p>That is an unfortunate page break. Yes, the college does post the gpa: computed to 3 places. My response above was to ProxyGC’s query about “the notion that your average can’t possibly be any more precise (carried out to more decimal places) than the grades that first went into its calculation?”</p>
<p>IMO, the fact that these things are calculated to 3 or more decimal places is simply because some computer program was set up to do so, not because 3 or more decimal places is managerially meaningful. If you were choosing between two students and needed to know their GPA’s to make a distinction, 1 decimal place is all you really need to know.</p>
<p>This is a pet peeve of mine with my employees who report things from survey data like “67.58% of women do XXX.” Just make it 68%; you’re losing the story by getting into the detail, and it’s not managerially significant.</p>
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<p>From a sig digits perspective, that’s really just a 3.75.<br>
Technically, I think ProxyGC is correct; however, that would mean, for a school that only used 4.0 = A, 3.0 = B, etc., that you could never take a kid with 3 A’s and 3 B’s and say he has a 3.5.</p>