Everyone always says colleges recalculate GPAs. I find that hard to believe given the sheer volume of apps received. Any evidence that colleges recalculate GPA and if so, how do they manage to process thousands of transcripts?
Some colleges recalculate GPA.
Well, in the case of the UC’s, they make the applicant do it. Other colleges may use work-study students.
Some colleges use GPA for admission, financial aid, merit aid, etc. It is a step in the admission process.
High schools compute GPA their own way. most are 4.0, some are 6.0 etc. And their is no standardized weighting scheme. Many schools will recalculate GPA by their own formula.
Most schools send transcripts electronically through Naviance. A basic computer program can take each high schools school profile’s grading scale and recalculate. For schools that don’t send transcripts electronically, manual entry by temp help can get those transcripts converted.
All hypothetical. Does anyone have evidence of a school actually recalculating? Does it say that on the admissions pages?
UCs and CSUs describe their GPA recalculation process.
http://www.csumentor.edu/planning/high_school/gpa_calculator.asp
Applicants self report courses and grades into the application. Then the computer calculates the GPA. Final transcript on matriculation verifies the self reported courses and grades.
@itsgettingreal17 Northeastern, Fordham, etc… all recalculate based on their own scale. It has been mentioned at College visits we attended.
Today we met with my kid’s college counselor (who used to be an admission officer at a LAC) and she said that for schools that use Naviance, the transcripts are sent electronically and batch loaded into each college’s system. She says almost all the colleges she deals with recalculate the GPA based on the scales and course descriptions provided on the high school’s college profile. She assumes that since the transcript data is loaded electronically, the conversion is also done electronically.
This all makes perfect sense- there is no way colleges are taking the transcript GPA at face value for each high school student using different GPA calculation methods. Some schools send weighted, some unweighted, some weight 1.0 for AP and .5 for honors, some weigh honors and AP the same…etc… That would be comparing apples to oranges.
I’m sure some internet sleuthing would reveal that many colleges use similar application process systems to process and present the transcript information in a consistent manner.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Let’s dispense with the snark of whether X.YZ/6/0 is better than A.BC/4.0. For starters, nobody here is an AO and does not know what they thing. For another, civil discourse is required at all times. Several posts deleted.