<p>Hello,</p>
<p>My school only has GPA up to 4.0 and does not rank students. Will this hinder my chances of getting into elite schools?</p>
<p>My friend, who lives in an another city, says that her school has up to 5.0 and thus will have a greater chance. </p>
<p>True?</p>
<p>schools will recalibrate the GPA based on their own formula and your grades. Depending on the school, they may weigh APs as greater or certain classes differently. Everyone is on a level playing field as to how GPA is calculated and viewed by the Adcomm.</p>
<p>Also, your school may not make rank widely known, but your counselors must know what it is, just ask them, and they should be able to tell you. If they don’t badger them until they do.</p>
<p>The universities have to recalculate the GPA or else those schools that marks out of 100 will have so many students having higher than a 4.0 :D</p>
<p>The admissions committee considers each applicant within his/her school’s context. No school gives an unfair advantage over another.</p>
<p>Thanks ppl!</p>
<p>Wait… my school stated, “[name of my high school here] DOES NOT RANK STUDENTS”. </p>
<p>So do you think they the rank in their records</p>
<p>No, if they state that they don’t rank students, then they don’t rank students. Colleges understand that not all schools have ranking systems. They ask the school for information such as the highest student GPA, how many people share your GPA, etc. to get a qualitative sense of where you are in comparison to your classmates.</p>
<p>MIT and Ivies don’t use a weighted GPA. Since there are so many ways to factor GPA’s they only use unweighed GPA’s so that everyone is on the same playing field GPA wise.</p>
<p>Your GPA is, at best, a brief summary of your academic performance in high school. Colleges ask for the highest GPA, the percentile range (top 10%, 10%-20%), and rank (if available) to compare you against students in your own school. If anything, your GPA is more revealing in terms of your academic performance relative to other students in your school rather than across schools.</p>
<p>Many schools may calculate UW GPA (take your grades and reset everything to a standard 4.0 scale) to compare across schools, but I don’t actually think this is very revealing since some schools grade easier than others (it’s much easier to get a 4.0 UW in a rural public school than a prep school, for example). US high schools just vary so much in terms of grading systems and course rigor that it’s often difficult to make comparisons across high schools scientifically.</p>
<p>Case in point:
My high school grades on 4.0 for regular, 5.0 for AP (4 offered). My weighted GPA was 4.14.
My friend’s high school grades on 4.0 for all classes. Her weighted GPA was 3.98 at grad.
My other friend’s high school grades on 4.0 regular, 5.0 honors, 6.0 (!) for AP. Her weighted GPA was 5.49.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, we figured that we’re pretty much the same if you just looked at letter grades. :D</p>
<p>You and your friend are both idiots.</p>