<p>sorry if the title is a bit mess up.
Is it just me and myschool (Hong Kong International School) or do people have pathetically high HIgh HIGH GPAs? My school has never seen a 4.0 student before...
The highest Culminative GPA our school has ever seen is a 3.97 (50 years i believe). The 3 highest GPAs in my class are 3.95, 3.92, 3.88 (300 students)</p>
<p>Wouldn't this be a huge disadvantage when i apply? </p>
<p>I have a 3.67 and im ranked 15th (9 APs)</p>
<p>(we dont weight our APs, which means that some of the people with higher GPAs than me will graduate with sub 3 APs and no honors courses)</p>
<p>From what i have read a 3.67 would be a 'bad' number compared to all those 3.999999999 im seeing on these forums. </p>
<p>Am i ****ed?</p>
<p>=(</p>
<p>(p.s- ive heard come colleges re-calculate. Would they do that for every applicant? Is the recalculation standardized?)</p>
<p>I am not sure how does your school do the calculation, but in US, A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, and so on. And that's for UW GPA. If your UW GPA is 3.67, that would probably mean you had 2 or 3 Bs in your grade. Those people who have 3.92 GPA probably had one B in one semester of the class. Although you have taken 9 APs, colleges usually wish you still do well in them, meaning getting As......So you might be in slightly disvantage from those people who took fewer APs but do well in them.</p>
<p>You're not at a disadvantage... there's MASSIVE grade inflation in the US. Generally colleges look at your GPA relative to the rest of your school. It would be impossible to do it any other way, bc for example, it's practically impossible to get above a 100 average at my school, only 2 people in recent history have done it bc of extra points for honors classes, but at some other schools they give so many bonus points for honors that you can have way above a 4.0. Each school grades differently...</p>
<p>I've been wondering something similar - in our district, course grades are shown in percentages, but the GPA is calculated by converting to a 4.0 schale, where 100% = 3.0, 95% = 3.5, etc. (For honors & AP classes, you get a +1, so a 95% in an AP class would be 4.5, etc.) Thus, a cumulative unweighted 4.0 GPA would mean that a person made 100 in every single class s/he took throughout high school, which I would have thought would only occur in a handful of cases over the whole country. I've seen enough "4.0 GPA" references (for example "post your stats") to make me wonder if that means a person made, say, 95% (or some other number) or better in all of her/his classes. Could someone clarify for me how the cumulative unweighted GPA's are calculated for the purposes of such CC stat postings?</p>
<p>It's for reasons like this that Ivies go entirely by rank within your class. For example, for the OP (original poster), the rank of 15th out of 450 (or however many students are in the OP's graduating class), is what will be used in determining admission chances at any Ivy where the person applies. </p>
<p>Thus a person from the OPs class who got a 3.92, but finished first in their class, would be ranked the same as someone from a class here in the US who got a 4.0 GPA at their school.</p>