GPA Question

Applying to College
1

My daughter’s HS uses a 5.0 scale for grading - with 5 being an A and 1 being an F, which is easy to convert to a 4.0 scale - just knock one point off. However - the school has no + or - grades; it just operates in 10 point chunks. A 90 is a 5.0 (technically, an 89.5 is a 5.0) and a 100 is a 5.0, same for B’s , a 79.5 is a 4.0 and an 89.4 is a 4.0.

This is in contrast to my own high school, back in the dark ages, that gave 3.6 for an A-, and a 3.4 for a B+, etc.

Is there a standard scale that colleges use for these sorts of things? Will they translate to the 3.6/3.4 scale or do they work off the 4.0 is a 4.0 is a 4.0 scale?

Hope that makes sense.

I just want to make sure that I’m correctly interpreting her GPA. While most of her final semester grades are in the middle of the bracket, there are some that are on either side and would be a (+/-) if her school did that. I was wondering if she should do some mental math to account for those when she’s looking at scholarship requirements, etc.

2

No

It depends. Usually, they will just look at the GPA as is reported on the transcript and make no adjustments. Some, the best example being UC and CSU, strip +/-, so that A+/A/A- are all 4.0. Some will also back out gym, auto shop, etc, from the calculations. I’m not aware of any that will change a 4.0 to a 3.7; indeed, unless the transcript reports grades 0-100, it’s pretty impossible to do so. But bottom line - it depends.

3

When my kids were applying I decided to just not worry about how GPAs would be calculated. Our high school records grades for each course with numbers 1-100), and then also reported a separate weighted and unweighted GPA (also in numbers) as well as a class rank. I trusted to the college to translate as they wished. I found Naviance, and the SAT the best way to estimate what was a reach or a safety.