Hi all,
Does anyone know (or know how to find out) how Penn State converts high school GPAs onto their scale? Like how they take AP or honors classes into account? Is there a scale or chart or what? Did they even release that information?
Thnaks!
I guess the best place to start would be to call Admissions. I called last year and they said “we use the GPA on the high school’s transcript” and didn’t seem interested in offering up more info then that. I had found PSU Admissions to be the least transparent (by far) of the half dozen or so schools to which my son applied last year. Doesn’t mean you can’t call and ask though. I have never seen a conversion scale on here or anywhere else for them. They obviously can’t just use the GPA on all of the transcripts when different states/school districts have so many different grading scales, but that is what I was told. Good luck.
We are a homeschool family. So during the admission process, I had to submit a form that a guidance office would normally submit with a transcript. The form asked for my grading system (A= what to what, B=what to what) , how I determined the GPA (did I weigh AP, honors or college prep classes), how cumulative GPA is calculated (based on 4.0 or 100 point scale) and class ranking.
So it looks like PSU realizes that schools use more than one grading scale and GPA determination and then uses an universal method to “even it all out”. Personally, I didn’t weigh any grade and left it up to PSU to determine GPA according to their method.
I was told that they will evaluate your child based on the scale from their school and how they performed against that. They told me that they never compare students from different schools. In my D’s school, an A is a 94, in a neighboring school it’s a 90. You can’t compare final GPA’s. That’s why the “chance me” threads are impossible to accurately answer.
They aren’t very transparent, and while there are outliers, you will see admission trends if you review the admission threads here on CC.