Graduate admissions without GPA?

Graduate School
1

My college doesn’t calculate GPA. I don’t know why they just don’t. How is this going to affect my chances when applying to graduate schools? (I’m going to apply to places like Oxford/Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, etc.)

2

Does it give letter grades, or does it use narrative evaluations or some such without letter grades?

If it uses letter grades, calculating GPA is not a difficult task. For each course with a letter grade, multiply the grade points for the grade by the number of credits for the course. Add all of these products together and divide the sum by the number of credits of letter graded courses.

Grade points would be the usual A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0. If there are +/-, there are minor variations based on whether +/- is worth +0.3/-0.3 versus +0.33/-0.33, and whether A+ earns the + bonus or not.

3

It uses evaluations. I thought originally when I enrolled there would be letter grades but I only recently found out that they don’t use them.

4

Talk with your advisor about this. They know where their graduates have applied in the past, and they will have a system for this.

5

Not your question, but have you actually started at this college? b/c it’s June, and you “just found out”. I’m also surprised that it’s a surprise- b/c most of the schools that I know that don’t use cards put that up front as one of their best things.

Regardless, it will matter the school, but there are quite a few colleges that use evaluations with strong grad school acceptances (thinking of Reed, NCF, Sarah Lawrence, Antioch in particular, but there are others) (and there’s Brown, which is sort of an odd hybrid).

6

Just a correction, @collegemom3717 Reed gives standard grades on transcripts just like most other schools. The difference is that comments are routinely given on papers and exams, rather than letter grades Standard grades are given each semester and students can always find out what they are just be asking https://www.reed.edu/academic/gbook/acad_pol/eval_student.html

7

Sarah Lawrence also assigns standard grades for transcript purposes.

8

Thanks for the updates, @Mintwood & @allyphoe. I had forgotten that that Reed did (and that you can see them if you ask), but didn’t know that SL does. Makes sense though.