Is there a difference between A+, A, and A- in the eyes of the admissions staff?

<p>At my school, all A's or B's or C's are weighted the same regardless of what plus or minus is attatched to them. Does it matter to colleges if a grade has a plus attatched?</p>

<p>No. An A is an A. If your school doesn’t use a +/- grading scale, then it doesn’t matter.</p>

<p>None of us know what goes on in the admissions room, and in all likelihood it will differ from college to college.</p>

<p>This being said, some colleges claim to recalculate GPA after the receive your transcript. In this way, they can also determine what weight if any to give to AP and Honors classes. For those colleges, one would suspect that the + and - factor in, but we don’t really know.</p>

<p>At the very least we can say that having the + on the transcript won’t hurt, and it may help.</p>

<p>I don’t know about you, but I’ve read books written by people with firsthand accounts of what goes on in the admissions room. It’s no good to act as if it’s a big mystery.</p>

<p>Top colleges basically don’t pay attention to number once it’s identified as a letter.</p>

<p>So it would be disadvantageous to have straight A-s and yet have a 4.0 GPA if your school counts A- and A as 4.0?</p>

<p>Grades are only one piece of the puzzle. For the elite schools I think a 3.8 is the magic number. If you have it, Adcom will look at more pieces to the puzzle in a somewhat balanced method of consideration. If you don’t, all is not lost, but Adcom will expect the remaining puzzle pieces to compensate for it.</p>

<p>Straight “A+” has to look better than straight “A-”.</p>

<p>@OP - it depends on the college. U Mich admissions rep just gave a presentation the other day stating the college recalculates gpa and that A, +/-, are equivalent in calculations! I would think that they could still look back at those grades and make a distinction if they wanted to.</p>

<p>Straight up quote from Stanford adcom - “An A is an A, we don’t look at the symbol next to it”</p>