<p>So my school uses some esoteric, inscrutable system to calculate GPAs, which means that I have no idea where mine stacks up to the colleges I'm interested in. I went on a couple of online GPA calculators, but some had decimals for minuses and pluses and some had just As Bs Cs and so on. It was really confusing.
So here's my sitch:
1) I go to a religious school with a dual religious studies curriculum. My only two eighties grades are in this dual curriculum. All of my others are ninety and above. According to everyone from my school I've asked, the school sends in the full transcript and GPA and the colleges recalculate with only the subjects they want. I have a couple classes where I'm not sure where they fall, and all in all I have no idea how this will work.
2) My school uses numbers only. My full GPA right now is a 94.076, with grades ranging from 86 to 100. I have no idea where these go on a 1-4 scale, let alone an ABC scale.
3) My school has its own crazy weighting system to determine that GPA, so I have no idea how colleges will recombine. My AP classes are not weighted- will colleges weight them on their own?
So, does anyone have any guidance? Anyone know what I can do if anything?
Just saying, this is NOT a troll post- I'm not trying to show off my grades by pretending to bemoan them. I'm just mentioning them in the first place to give perspective.</p>
<p>Someone is going to link how ‘most colleges’ calculate GPA. I feel that’s inaccurate- at my school, we’re a bit ‘easier’ because your academics are harder than the average high school.</p>
<p>To me,
69.5-79.49 is a C
79.5-89.49 is a B
89.5-100+ is an A</p>
<p>C = 2 base points
B = 3
A = 4</p>
<p>Bonus modifiers for honors and AP
Regular, no multiplier
Honors = Base * 1.125 = Weighted GPA
AP/DE = Base * 1.5 = Weighted GPA</p>
<p>Example - An A in an AP course is 4 points times the 1.5x multiplier for a total of 6 weighted points.</p>
<p>Just factor in the multipliers and then take the average of your course grades (sum of grades)/(num of classes) to find your weighted GPA.</p>
<p>As far as schools recalculating, they will often not include classes like pottery in their calculations since it’s a non-academic course.</p>
<p>However, what is probably more important is your grades relative to your peers. Class rank within a school says more about a student than comparing the GPA from a student of one school to that of another at a different school.</p>
<p>Oysh… see, that could be a problem, because I come from a long line of brilliant underachievers so that my grades are not exactly considered top of the class. I’m tolerably sure that most people I know do much better on their GPAs. I think that valedictorian is usually 98.5 or thereabouts, but it may end up higher in my grade.
So according to one GPA calculator I used, my general-studies-only GPA would be 4.0 because they did 90+=4.0. Another one had it as 3.93 because they factored in 2 3.7s. So it really doesn’t matter as long as the colleges get my original school transcript?</p>
<p>An average of 94% is considered underachieving at your school? That’s some incredible grade inflation…</p>
<p>Just because you’re not valedictorian doesn’t mean you won’t be accepted to good schools. If you’re in the top 5-20%, that says a lot though, especially if you go to an academically well respected school. Just send in the transcript. The college will sort through it.</p>
<p>Could you use the above guidelines to calculate your weighted GPA and also post your class rank? It’s hard to tell where you rank for colleges from the info you’ve provided.</p>
<h2>Class rank within a school says more about a student than comparing the GPA from a student of one school to that of another at a different school.</h2>
<p>though it could depend on if your school uses Unweighted vs Weighted for class rank.</p>
<p>^ That’s a good point. It would mean a lot less coming from the OP’s school since it doesn’t even weight AP courses.</p>
<p>Trust me, there is NO grade inflation at my school.
I’m not saying that it’s a BAD or even 50th percentile- I honestly don’t know, as that’s not released to the public. However, I’m tolerably certain that compared to the people I associate myself with as far as intelligence and ability are concerned, I’m pretty much on the low part of the scale, and these are the people I’ll be competing with to get into my dream honors program (it’s very popular in my school), I think I’m in trouble.
But whatever.
Based on your scale, in my full curriculum I’d have a 4.11, though I didn’t count my pass/fail classes, which I passed. In the curriculum most of my colleges (not all, because one I’m applying to is a religious college that cares about those grades) will use, I’d have a 4.44. If my school graded like that, then, I’d probably be on par with a decent chunk of those kids, though perhaps a trifle lower.
My school doesn’t rank, which means that I’ll never really know where I am compared to most people. However, those people are a lot less lazy than I am, so I assume they do a lot better. What’s getting me down is all of these convos on the bus where people are complaining about their ninety fives in calculus and driving me up the wall because I’m so thrilled with my ninety in algebra 2. /endrant</p>