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<p>I don’t doubt it. That is why a teacher will spend half an hour deciding which student gets the 0.0001 point advantage on the basis of a single errant comma or similar or perhaps on the basis of whom the teacher happens to like more.</p>
<p>I’ve mused upon occasion the problem of a 3.97 or even a 3.95. </p>
<p>If you round to one decimal place, they each would be 4.0.</p>
<p>Yet if you tell someone you have a 4.0, they assume straight A’s, which isn’t the case.</p>
<p>My daughter’s school recently changed from three decimal places out to two. I was told by a counselor that the projected effect of this will be to have more than one student occupying some ranks, such as happens when ranking XC runners – for example, there may be two students who are 4th in the class and then it skips to the student who is
6th, but apparently when it’s reported, the counselor must check a box saying whether the student is the only one occupying that rank or not.</p>
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<p>Hmm, I actually took closer to 50 classes in high school (or at least that’s how many were on my transcript), so it would be more like 9 B’s vs. 5 B’s. I could easily see that making a difference to some colleges (albeit not huge), whether it’s statistically significant or not.</p>
<p>m.s. Our grades are scored on a 100 point scale. Our school never translates them to a 4.0 scale. Some one with a 102.3333 did get marginally higher grades than some one with a 102.3331. Even if it’s only a 99 vs a 98 in some freshman unweighted course. For the school of course it has the advantage that they’ve never had more than one valedictorian.</p>