My school has 92 and above as A’s, 89-91 as B+'s, and 83-88 as B’s. I’ve heard of high schools in which a 90 and above or a 94 and above are considered A’s as well. Is there a standard grading scale that colleges use when assessing transcripts? For example, if I were in a school in which 94 and above are A’s, and I got a 93 in a class, would the college take it as is and leave it as a B+, or would they convert the grade to a standard scale in which a 93 is perhaps an A?
I was just wondering because I calculated my GPA and it said that 90-92 and above are A-'s, whereas in my school a 90 is a B+ and a 92 is an A. Also, the calculator said my GPA was 4.78 on a 5.0 scale. Is that good? What sorts of colleges would that put me in the running for? I also have extracurriculars (TSA, community service with my church, clubs) and have self-taught a few languages to the point where I’ve taken the AP exam/subject SAT without even taking the class. Does this make me competitive for the “good schools” everyone talks about?
No
It really depends on the college. Some recalculate GPA’s; some don’t. Regardless, it’s not like you can do anything to change how a college will view your transcript.
Yeah, I realize that, I was just wondering if a different scale would make my grades go up/down. Especially when calculating GPA. Seems kind of odd that a high school could do something crazy like make only 96 and above an A or 87 and above an A, and colleges just take that at face value without looking into it. Don’t they want an objective point value and not just what one school district considers an A? Do they look at point values? Is a 93 the same as a 100 to them? Seems really weird if that’s the case.
Lots of colleges recalculate your GPA for that very reason (and sometimes to exclude non-academic courses). If they do, they are looking at your number grade. However, our state has a standard grading scale of 93 and above is A and they are changing it to 90 and above I think next year. The reason is to make it easier to compare GPA for colleges and not have our students lose out for scholarship opportunities in other states. So I guess not all colleges recalculate.
Also, colleges get a HS profile from HS that describes school, what they offer, how they grade, etc. so that colleges can take into account how student perform in relation to own students, not compared with every high school in country.