how to convert high school grades from 100 to 4.0 scale?

Parents Forum
1

<p>Hello all, I need some help here, since I got lots of great advise from this cc board before.</p>

<p>My oldest daughter is a freshman in high school. I don't know how to convert her grades to 4.0 scale:</p>

<p>Her current grades are:</p>

<p>AP Psychology: 89
Pre-AP Biology: 95
Pre-AP Algebra II: 99
AP Human Geography: 88
Pre-AP English: 86
Pre-AP Spanish I: 89
PE: 99</p>

<p>I know it's still early. But since her school use different scales comparing to other schools: 6.0 for 100 in regular class, 7.0 for 100 in Pre-AP class, 8.0 for 100 in AP class, I would like to know what is the GPA the universities will use with her current grades. Thank you in advance for all of your response.</p>

2

<p>I hate to tell you this but… not all colleges calculate GPA the same way.</p>

<p>Many use an unweighted GPA, which would be the 4.0 scale you want to convert to.</p>

<p>Some (the UMass system and Northeastern Univ for example) use 4.0 for college prep classes, adding .5 for honors and 1.0 for AP. I call that a 5.0 Scale</p>

<p>Some Southern schools use 4.0 for college prep, and add 1.0 for Honors and 2.0 for AP. I call that a 6.0 Scale.</p>

<p>(Keep this in mind when being scared silly by the GPAs some kids post on CC… they may be using the 5.0 or 6.0 scale).</p>

<p>What I would do - not the scientific mathematical method, but it will be close enough - would be to convert each grade to it’s letter equivalent and from there to the corresponding number equivalent on each scale.
example: AP Psych - 89 = B+. Since it’s an AP class, on a 4.0 scale, it’s a 3.3. On a 5.0 scale it’s a 4.3 and on a 6.0 Scale it’s a 5.3
Pre-AP Bio (I’d call that Honors?) - 95 = A. That’s a 4.0, 4.5 or 5.0 on the scales I listed above.
Pre-AP Algebra II (call it honors) - 99 = A+. 4.0, 4.5 or 5.0.
AP Human Geography - 88 = B+ 3.3, 4.3 or 5.3
Pre-AP English (honors) 89 = B+ 3.3, 3.8, or 4.3
Pre-AP Spanish (honors) 89 = B+ 3.3, 3.8, or 4.3
PP: 99 = A+ 4.0, 4.0, 4.0 (no honors or AP) Most schools won’t count PE in your D’s GPA.</p>

<p>So averaging her 6 academic classes:
on a 4.0 scale (unweighted) I’d say she has a 3.53
on a scale that weights .5 for honors and 1.0 for AP (5.0 scale) she has a 4.2
on a scale that weights 1.0 for honors and 2.0 for AP (6.0 scale) she has a 4.87.</p>

<p>On any scale, she’s got strong grades in a challenging curriculum!</p>

3

<p>Lafalum has given a great answer. I found that it’s much less stressful if you really don’t even think about this until end of sophomore year. Even now with a senior child, I’m not fooling with the GPA - it is what it is and the colleges are going to re-calculate it - or not.</p>

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<p>The pain about GPA’s is that a college will say their mid 50% of accepted applicants had, for example, a 3.1 - 3.6 GPA. But if they don’t tell you if it’s weighted or unweighted - and if weighted, how? - then that info is kind of useless.</p>

<p>My son is at Lafayette. Their website used to specifically state that they use an unweighted GPA of core academic classes. (They changed their website and I can’t find that info now). My daughter looked at UMass and Northeastern - UMass told us their weighting scale, and I emailed NEU’s admissions office to find out their scale (+.5 for honors and +1.0 for AP). Daughter is now attending Elon, which - if asked - will tell you that they add 1.0 for honors and 2.0 for AP. If you didn’t know that, and saw that Elon’s average GPA is 4.0, you’d be scared to bother to apply there. But under their weighting system, your daughter is significantly above that.</p>

<p>With my kids, I set up an excel spreadsheet to calculate all this. That said, I didn’t do it until the beginning of junior year, and I used year-end grades for 9th and 10th grade.</p>

<p>Don’t spend too much time freaking out about your daughter’s GPA. As long as she’s doing her best, that’s all that counts. Use the GPA as a tool to help you to see what colleges will be a good fit for her, beginning after the end of soph year. </p>

<p>And my advice to ALL freshmen parents - don’t focus too much on college and rush thru these 4 years of hs. They will FLY by, and then your child will be gone. Enjoy the time, and let them enjoy high school. They only get one shot at being in high school, and in the end, they won’t remember whether they got a 95 or an 85 on that History test, but they will remember the fun they had at the pep rally or the concert with their friends.</p>

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<p>If your school ranks that may be a more useful indication. My son also has grades reported only in numbers. I think it’s easier to take the average of all the numbers and use that to estimate a 4.0 scale GPA. Our school reported their weighting system only as a cumlative weighted GPA, schools saw the unweighted grades in each course. Our high school weights honors and AP the same - 100–>110 and while they say they only use academic courses they counted orchestra as academic which upped my son’s GPA a lot. In the end I figured his GPA was anywhere between 87 (no orchestra), to 93 (school reported unweighted) to 97 (school reported weighted). Since that’s a pretty big variety, I just made sure that his safeties would be happy with the lowest possible interpretation and that the most generous system made the reaches seem feasible. I found ranking was a lot better as a predictor and of course the school’s Naviance data. </p>

<p>For unweighted grades this is a good start: [GPA</a> Conversion Chart](<a href=“http://inquiry.princetonreview.com/leadgentemplate/GPA_popup.asp]GPA”>Calculate Your GPA With Our GPA Scale | The Princeton Review)</p>

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<p>There are several methods that are most common, if you search on GPA calculation or some variable I’m sure they will pop out. Our school doesn’t weight and uses one of the more common scales. The other common scale is more lenient and considers 90-100 as an A. The first chart shows the GPA compared to the letter grade and the second chart converts the kids scores on a 100 pt. scale to a letter grade. The minuses and pluses fall at the high and low ends of the range. Dropping phys-ed your percentage is 91. Two of my kids were notorious for getting 91s so had a ton of B+s on their transcript…drove me crazy.</p>

<p>A = 4.00
A- = 3.70
B+ = 3.30
B = 3.00
B- = 2.70
C = 2.00
C- = l.70</p>

<p>A - 92-100
B - 83-91
C - 74-82</p>

7

<p>I agree with Lafalum84 - Don’t worry too much at this point about calculating GPA just have her doing the very best she can… At this point because too much is up in the air and each school calculates a little different… </p>

<p>For Example —</p>

<p>Elon uses the same WGPA as all public schools in NC, it’s not unique to Elon. </p>

<p>It quite simply is +1 for honors and +2 for AP. So, getting a C in an AP class gives you a unweighed GPA of 2.0 and a WGPA of 4.0</p>

<p>And that sounds incredibly generous… But…</p>

<p>Grading in North Carolina requires a high grade point to receive a good letter grade.
here is the standard K-12 letter grade/grade point scale
A+ 99 - 100
A 96 - 98
A- 93 - 95
B+ 91 - 92
B 88 - 90
B- 85 - 87
C+ 83 - 84
C 80 - 82
C- 77 - 79
D+ 75 - 76
D 73 - 74
D- 70 - 72
F 0 - 69</p>

<p>Elon then looks at your core classes (no PE / many electives) and assigns a WGPA…</p>

<p>Lots of (but not all) NC counties require students complete one or several prerequisite courses (and receive high scores) before a student can take a AP class in the subject (think honors Physics BEFORE you can take AP Physics). So access to AP’s and high WGPA can be very limited. </p>

<p>So - Funny thing, in our North Carolina county and school it’s actually much harder to achieve a high WGPA than it is for most OOS or private school students, who’s schools are not as restrictive with honors and AP classes.</p>

<p>One more fun fact - some high schools run Block schedules that allow only 4 classes a semester. If you take an elective or many AP’s they can take up 1 Block each in both semesters, and that leaves you with few options to boost a WGPA.</p>

<p>I think Elon does a good job of balancing out GPA and studious commitment given all the crazy GPA differences… But each school has it’s own unique twists…</p>

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<p>Ours doesn’t even weight AP classes on the transcript, although for determining senior honors they add +1 to the class so a student getting a C would get “credit” for a B but only if they score a 3 or better on the test. Scoring 1 or 2 on the test and no weight. Only one AP allowed as a sophomore…none for freshman. I always thought that was a tough road and that the colleges would never give my kids ‘credit’ but somehow I discovered colleges are very astute at looking at a transcript and figuring out the kids! You can just scan the 3.3 - 3.6 thread and see that the system, however imperfect, seems to work. OP I wouldn’t give this another thought for a year or so. The other posters are correct, just encourage your D to do the best she can.</p>

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<p>Ask your D’s high school for a copy of the “school profile” that is sent to all the colleges. That should have a table translating the 100-scale grades to the 4.0-scale. The colleges refer to it.</p>

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<p>I scanned through the above, so this may repeat some things, however as you can see grading scales run the gamut. There are 10pt scales (90-100=A) where you have no ‘minuses’, you do have ‘pluses’ worth .4, but no A+. Honors or PreAP are largely unweighted with the exception of some third year foreign languages and a few math classes, and APs are weighted 1.0. Some schools offer the same only on a 7pt scale (93-100=A).</p>

<p>Some, but not all, universities will recalculate grades. This is done in many different ways. Sometimes using only core classes, sometimes stripping all weighted grades.</p>

<p>Even schools that do not weight or rank have information on their profile and transcript that allow the universities to discern which students were the highest achieving. Rigor of study is obviously important.</p>

<p>At face value it may seem impossible for universities to determine where each student fits in the mix, but they do. I have one son whose grading scale was changed half way through high school. Tell me his transcript isn’t going to be a mess, however every other student in his year went through the same thing so it’s all relative. In-state schools may be pretty familar at looking at this. Out of state…who knows? What I do know is the ‘key’, or information on the transcript that shows what an ‘A’ actually means is taken into consideration. His will simply have two, stating which years were covered by which grading scale.</p>

<p>Just to show the differences, in our county the OPs classes listed would be a 3.6UW and a 3.89W. I am guessing the difference between my calculation and Lafalum84’s is that we don’t get the weighting for Pre-AP. Another difference is that our students are limited to AP classes generally starting in their Jr year (one available as sophomores), leaving the amount of classes available to take that are weighted less than some other schools.</p>

<p>So that 3.89W could be a 3.6 if a school doesn’t weight, a 4.2W for schools that give a bump for PreAP, or a 4.87 for the 2pt bump. This is subject to small changes if a school is on a 7pt scale, 10pt scale, gives pluses, minuses, .5 for pluses or .4 …</p>

<p>This is the very reason why, as other posters correctly pointed out, you can’t get your knickers in a knot over what appears to be soaring GPAs here on CC. You don’t know the many facets of their grading scales. It gets even more complicated if they change schools during high school or take college classes (DE) that are not weighted.</p>

<p>I’ll stop now. I’m confusing even myself!! Your student is doing beautifully!! :)</p>

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<p>Thank you all for your wonderful replies. Since I did not go to high school in this country, I am really confused by this GPA thing. I think my DD is taking the most rigorous courses available at this time (as of now, she is the only Freshman taking 2 AP courses), however, I don’t know if it’s wise to do it this way, since it is very difficult to get all A in these courses. We are still debating it in our family.</p>

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<p>“It quite simply is +1 for honors and +2 for AP. So, getting a C in an AP class gives you a unweighed GPA of 2.0 and a WGPA of 4.0”</p>

<p>Yes, that does sound pretty generous. In many of the public HS’s in our area you earn 2 extra points (on a 100 point scale) for basic college prep courses and 5 extra points for honors or AP. So, a student who gets an 88 (B+) unweighted in Regents US History earns a 90 (A-) unweighted, while a student who earns an 87 unweighted in APUSH earns a 92 (A-) unweighted.</p>

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<p>Note: That APUSH 92 should read “weighted.”</p>

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</p>

<p>Wow, that’s a huge difference. In our system a 75 in an AP class would get you a 82.5 as a weighted grade. But weighted grades aren’t reported on the transcript only a cumulative WGPA, so any college skimming the transcript will see the 75 long before they see the weighted average. We have the same weighting for both Honors and AP (110%) as well.</p>

<p>One son took 1 AP as a freshman (Comp Sci he had self taught himself more than enough in middle school). As far as I know he was the only one in his class taking an AP that year, though I do know of one science kid who may have taken a science AP a few years earlier. Most kids in our high school take their first AP as sophomores. (Either AP Physics B, or AP World, rarely both.)</p>

<p>BTW our high school does not provide a translation into 4.0 scale though they do tell you what letter grades they translate into. For us the rank of the student (combined with SAT scores) is the best prediction of how college acceptances will turn out.</p>

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<p>The more I read about AP and GPAs the more confused I get. I really don’t think the colleges get enough credit for wading thru all this and trying to find a level scale!</p>

<p>Like OP, I do find it difficult to guide my kid through “most challenging” HS program that looks good to colleges without drowning in “too challenging and works against the kid” in the long run.</p>