<p>Hello and welcome to CC.</p>
<p>It’s really great that you are thinking about grades on your study abroad now.</p>
<p>Every so often I get a PM from someone who has ruined their GPA by studying abroad. It is surprising to me that most schools do not make it clear to students how GPA from study abroad will be calculated, and most students don’t ask until it is too late!</p>
<p>Somehow your Edinburgh grades will have to be “translated” into US GPA. This is easier said than done and there are several methods.</p>
<p>1)You do same course work and exams as UK students, take your grades home and someone at your home schools “translates” them to GPA.</p>
<p>2)You do same course work and exams as UK students, and someone at Edinburgh “translates” them to GPA.</p>
<p>3)You attend classes but do not take same course work and exams as UK students. You are tested by your home school or not at all (ie you pass if you attend. Note if this is the case most UK schools don’t keep much record of attendence. Make sure you do!).</p>
<p>All of these methods have their flaws and you must do your best to discover how you will be graded before you start at Edinburgh. It is no use aceing the exams to then fail for non-attendence (UK students will not fail for this, so you go out with them instead of to class and the consequences follow).</p>
<p>If any grade “translation” is going on, you need to look into it to see if it is fair. UK grades are quite harsh. To get the top grade, a 1st, you needs to get around 70% in exams. If your US school translates a 1st as 4.0, great. But what if they use the percentage? Not so great. It may be that some kind of harsh grade translation like this will apply and there is nothing you can do about it as it is part of the program. Then you may have to accept your GPA will go down if you study abroad.</p>
<p>Very often study abroad students end up going to the first year (freshman) classes. This may be good if the subjects studied are new to you. But if they are in your major, you have have covered some or all of the material before.</p>
<p>If you have to take UK exams look into how they work. Very commonly they are essay based exams. You get a blank piece of paper and 3-4 hours to write about a topic. Alien to most US students. So you can end up doing badly not because you don’t know the material but because you are unprepared for he exam format (get practising that cursive!)</p>
<p>Is your program intended to be an academic experience? ie are you expected to attend everything and academically excel, or will you be spending all of your time on trips around Europe? Will this affect your course choice? </p>
<p>In the UK students get much less contact time with teaching staff, and this especially applies to arts students who get about 12 hours a week. You are expected to be motivated and organised enough to do a lot of studying in your free time. Be aware of this as you may find it difficult at first and grades may go down (especially when you see your timetable, think you only have to work for 12 hours that week, and immediately book that trip to a German Beer festival/French ski resort/Spanish Island etc in order to fill in what you think will be your spare time).</p>
<p>Good luck with you program</p>
<p>Cupcake</p>