<p>I disagree. If the intial value for a computation has 3 digits, the implication is that the value is, for example, 3.750, not 3.751 or 3.749.</p>
<p>So, if an A is 4.0 and an A- is 3.7, the tenth place cannot be disregarded simply because it is a zero.</p>
<p>If recruiting/interviewing is taking place in the fall semester, then I would assume you’d put the exact grade as it’s stated on your last transcript and put a date after that. No rounding should be required. It’s being honest.</p>
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<p>I wasn’t disregarding the tenth place. I was disregarding the thousandth place. (the 0 in the 3.750 example)</p>
<p>The thousandth place (third number after the decimal) doesn’t really seem relevant in real-world as opposed to val/sal calculations, but the hundredth place certainly does. In the specific situation the OP raises I’d say the best response is that “it’s between [or about] a 3.5 or 3.6.” But I certainly would not suggest rounding up; it simply isn’t true. And in addition to the ethics of the untruth, most transcripts will show the real thing to the hundredth place and the untruth will be obvious.</p>
<p>I have long maintained that since most teachers grade to ONE significant digit (A, B, C… etc.) that GPAs with more than ONE significant digit are meaningless.</p>
<p>I have never understood what the difference was between a 92 and a 93 on any test that didn’t have one hundred single answer questions… I taught chemistry, I gave essay questions on tests, and a point or two here or there was not a significant difference; on lab reports, it would have taken me years to grade to two-sig-figure accuracy. But still, the school reported the GPA as if the difference between a 3.75 and a 3.74 in GPA had some kind of meaning. It didn’t.</p>
<p>I think the right answer to “what is your GPA?” is “somewhere between 3.6 and 3.7, depending on how that last test went.” Then smile.</p>
<p>I think it sounds / looks funny and geeky to do anything other than an x.x, because that’s the vernacular of grade point averages (“Johnny’s so smart - he has a 4.0!” Not “Johnny’s so smart - he has a 4.00”! But that’s just me.</p>
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<p>And that’s probably technically true, but again - a 3.5 seems like the best way to describe a kid with 3 A’s (=4.0) and 3 B’s (=3.0) on his report card, no?</p>
<p>Change one of the A’s to a C, and the kid has a 3.166666666666 … Change that C back to an A, change one of the B’s to an A, and the kid has a 3.666666666 … Change another B to an A and the kid has a 3.833333333 … Doesn’t it seem stupid not to just say the kid has a 3.2, a 3.7 or a 3.8? What possible purpose is served by saying that the kid has a 3.17, 3.67, or 3.83?</p>
<p>Pizzagirl–your example, to me, just points out the absurdity of calculating GPAs at the end of ninth grade. By the end of junior year, a kid with half A and half B would have 18 grades and a 3.5 would have some meaning.</p>
<p>Our school system (and S1’s college) uses two decimal places. Some level of detail is needed to distinguish for class rankings.</p>
<p>ucla_ucsd, what is on S2’s transcript is all high school courses, regardless of when they were taken. For my kid, the 9-11 GPA is decently higher than the transcript GPA, which includes two years of HS math and two years of HS FL taken in 7th and 8th grade. (S1 had a course taken when he was 10 yo on his HS transcript!) OTOH, those tough courses in which he got mostly Bs enabled him to get into a top-notch HS program. The GC is going to specifically mention the 9-11 GPA in her letter, because we know some of the schools on S2’s list will not recalculate GPAs.</p>
<p>To the OP, the GPA would round to 3.59. I am looking at the handbook from my daughter’s high school and GPA is to the hundredths place is an A- is 3.67 not 3.7 and a B+ is a 3.33 not a 3.0. An applicant with a 3.990 would not claim a 4.0 while someone with a 3.999 would. Hope that helps.</p>
<p>dmd77–I agree with your point. How can individual course final grades be any more precise than the assessment grades that went into their calculation? And by extension, how can GPAs be any more precise than the course grades that went into their calculation? Here is an analogy–if you measure with a scale that only can detect differences to a tenth of a gram, your average of 10 measurements cannot be any more precise than that because your measuring tool is not sensitive enough to detect differences. A more precise average misrepresents the sensitivity of the original measurements, and makes artificial distinctions. I realize this may not be the prevailing practice in education, but I maintain that grades and GPAs cannot be more precise than the values of the original assessments that make them up. In the case of the average of 3.0’s and 4.0’s, if there are tenths of a point in the original assessments that were averaged for the course grades of 3.0 or 4.0, or if the final course grades were converted from a more sensitive scale (like 0-100), then an average of 3.5 would be appropriate.</p>
<p>I’m with Pizzagirl on this. We are talking about an interview situation. If asked “what is your GPA” it seems alittle geeky to say “I have a 3.999.” If that’s the image you want to portray -then, yes, go for it. The college admissions will get the actual GPA on the transcript, remember the OP asked about what to say in an interview.</p>
<p>In an interview situation if I were asked for my GPA and I had a 3.999999999, I’d say something like “It’s just shy of a 4.0.”</p>
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[QUOTE=kitch12]
I apologize if you feel I was bragging, but that’s not the case.
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<p>I was grumpy when I wrote that. I appreciate that your question was for real and apologize for biting your head off.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone. OP here.</p>
<p>To try to clarify: it is interview season at my son’s college. He is a college senior. This gpa question is for his resume. </p>
<p>His transcript will likely accompany the resume. The transcript will show the gpa as x.xxx
I am wondering is if it will appear dodgy to round the gpa to the accustomed x.x, as that does round up.</p>
<p>You people crack me up. Rounding a 3.585 to a 3.6 is not “rounding up”. It’s just rounding. I do a fair amount of interviewing for my company and would think it a little odd to see a GPA reported as x.xx on a resume. Doesn’t everyone know an x.x GPA includes 5/100ths of a point up and down?</p>
<p>Decide if you want to report to a 10th or 100th. If you’re starting at 3.585, it’ll show up as 3.6 or 3.59. (If it were me, I’d definitely hold it to one place to the right of the decimal.)</p>
<p>My high school did not calculate a precise GPA, and my college reported only one decimal place. Things were not so insane 20+ years ago (or maybe they were, just not where I was). Now that I am homeschooling my kids, I plan on using 2 decimal places for their transcripts, so we’ll match the community college transcripts they’ll have as well.</p>
<p>My stats people do this all the time. They give me cluster and factor analyses that are taken out to 6 decimal places, and then they wonder why the first thing I do with them is round them to 2 decimal places. That’s because it’s managerially significant to do it that way. There is nothing managerially significant about the 3.585 vs the 3.584. Because no one says, “Aha! Mr. 3.585 is so much smarter than Ms. 3.584”! </p>
<p>If I say to you, “68.542% of women voted for Obama,” has that given you any more meaningful information than “69% of women voted for Obama”? No – the extra “information” just obfuscates the point, which is really that a bit over two-thirds of women voted for Obama (example made up). </p>
<p>No one is going to think it’s dodgy to report a x.x just because some computer in the bowels of the college calculates it to more decimal places and prints it so on a transcript. The transcript also refers to me as “Lastname, Firstname Middlename” because that’s how I am in the records but that doesn’t mean I have to use my middle name either. It’s just a computer printout. A reference piece. Not an arbiter of style.</p>
<p>If it helps, I just looked up my son’s resume from his job applications last fall (he graduated in the spring). His resume was put together with the support of Tufts’ career services. Whether they told him to or not, I do not know, but his was an x.xx format.</p>
<p>I just received a resume today where the grad stated a GPA of x.yy. Most applicants just have x.y. The bottom line as an employer is that I really don’t care one way or the other and am flexible enough to realize that some people/colleges/countries may typically use a different convention than others. And what does the student know regarding GPA significant digits anyway other than what they were told or guessed at? I won’t hold it against the applicant and can easily do my own ‘rounding’ if I want to (although really I see no significant difference between someone with a 3.3 and a 3.4 for example, and would view each of them on the same level).</p>