<p>I was just wondering what scale that colleges use, I know that most high schools use different grading scales but when the college calculates your gpa, does an a minus go in as an A or what?</p>
<p>Just wondering, thanks</p>
<p>depends on your grading scale and how your school weights it</p>
<p>ok, so whatever my school chooses it to be is what the colleges accept? they dont have their own grade scale to kind of standardize everything?</p>
<p>well unless they have the numeric grade it would be difficult to</p>
<p>what hellUVAchance said is correct. for example, in my math class an 88% is an A-, so unless they knew that (which they won’t) they don’t know whether that A- is a 90.00 or an 88.00 or whatever.</p>
<p>I’d say it depends more on the college than the high school. Some schools might recalculate your GPA just using A, B, C, etc.; some will just use the GPA calculated by your school. Each college has their own method – if you look at the admissions page on a college’s website, they might have more information on how they consider your GPA.</p>
<p>As for what thenerdyjew says, that’s not necessarily true – maybe it is for his or her school, but in many instances, a high school will report exactly how their grading scale works to colleges (ie a college will know that an A- at your high school ranges from an 87% to 90%, or 90% to 93%, whatever the case may be).</p>
<p>They know your school’s scale, and they can spot overall patterns and such. However, bear in mind that schools are more than willing to cut you some slack, especially on the A/A- range if the course is difficult. In all reality, if it’s an A in any form, most schools look at that as being successful. Generally, it’s what you’re taking, not your actually grade in it which is evaluated. Also, most schools (mine included) submit a bit of a grade distribution to the schools which demonstrates the difficulty of the class and the number of people who took it. Now, if you’re in just a plain brilliant class, you might get screwed over a bit by this, but generally a holistic view is taken to the application, so a single blemish should not penalize you on an otherwise impeccable surface.</p>
<p>@thenerdyjew, They will know that. Guidance counselors send our explanations of the school’s grading system.</p>
<p>so do they adjust it or do they just keep it in mind when they are looking over the app</p>
<p>They keep it in mind.</p>
<p>i dont mean to keep asking the same question but Im just trying to understand the concept, wont a minuses lower your gpa compared to someone from a school with no a minuses, wont my lower gpa look bad comparitively?</p>
<p>Regina and Matt-thenerdyjew says “they don’t know whether that A- is a 90.00 or an 88.00 or whatever,” which I took to mean that colleges just see the grade-they don’t see that you slid in with an 87.5 (which I think is almost always true. I can’t speak for every school, but I’ve never heard of one that lists the percentage grade as the “grade” on the transcript).</p>
<p>What if the grading thresholds are set by individual teacher’s discretion? For example, in my Micro class, 95 and above is an A. Anything below from 80-94.9 is a B. For other teachers, they may round up at 89 for an A, so our grades depend largely on the teacher’s grading scale.</p>
<p>In this case, the school does not send a specialized report detailing each teacher’s grading policies. Would an admissions officer never know the discrepancies among our school’s grading system?</p>