<p>I'm trying to work with the school to understand its system, but thought I'd get some outside perspective, too. My daughter has a waited GPA of around 97 (based on taking all available honors classes and 3 APs to date). I was told that this converts to an unweighted GPA of around 3.7 on the 4.0 scale. This confuses me somewhat, since that would seem to suggest that she has some Bs in her transcript? But according to the school's stated policy she has received only A grades based on their posted information that an A = 90% and above. All classes she has taken have had a 90+ final grade. </p>
<p>I note that according to some schools, anything below a 93% = A- or lower. When her school translates her grade into a 4.0 does that fact suddenly kick in? Or does a 3.7 sometimes mean all As?</p>
<p>A 3.7 would not mean all As. The problem seems to be the weighting which may have driven some of the GPAs above a 90 when the un-weighted was not. You can ask for her UW GPA by class and calculate it yourself as a check.</p>
<p>Well, I suspect something strange to do with the weighting. Although I have no personal experience with this, others who have gone before us have complained that class rank, and even Valedictorian has gone to those without honors and AP courses, but simply good grades, while those with all honors and a significant number of APs and consistently awarded highest honors (for grades 90 and above) have ranked lower. I guess I’m not party to the math on all this, or the extent it has happened (this is shameless hearsay), but one would have thought that such students would have received some sort of leg up from their more rigorous courses. Ah well. I guess we’ll never know.</p>
<p>Are you trying to figure out what colleges will likely regard as her GPA, or just out of curiosity trying to understand your school’s system? If the former, will the school give you her unweighted GPA as a 100-point-scale number? There are numerous online calculators to check the 4.0 conversion. Or, does her transcript have unweighted number or letter grades by class? There are also calculators for that (google “calculate high school GPA”.) Note that some are more specific than others, allowing for + and - grades. Also note that if there are letter grades only, the colleges will receive that scale stating that anything over 90 is an A, and they will take that into consideration. Colleges usually re-formulate GPAs according to their own weighting system and do take the school’s system into account. (At least this is the case for the smaller LACs my D applied to.)</p>
<p>Thanks for your response, Staceyneil. This came up after trying to do college matches based on stats. I had always assumed D had a 4.0 based on all I wrote above, but then I noticed for the first time ever that her (new) counselor had inputted her gpa on Naviance as weighted 97. When I asked what that was as unweighted on the 4.0 scale she told me that it was about 3.7. This does seem to alter the groupings of colleges that matching systems present to her, even though I realize this isn’t hard science that is being applied (at least not for the colleges that apply more holistic evaluations), but it does seem to place her in a different category.</p>
<p>When I had this discussion with another parent she told me that there had been several years of disappointment and surprises at the school when ranking and Valedictorians were finally revealed in the last quarter of the senior year - that those who had taken much more challenging (weighted) courses and been highest honors (90% and above in all courses, which the school declares as an A letter grade) were often coming in behind non-honor, non-AP students in the rankings. So I just started to wonder how their weighted system actually works, since class rank is also a determining factor in the admissions game, and yet is not revealed to the student at this school until after college applications have been submitted.</p>
<p>As I said, I’m awaiting a response from the school. The counselor is new and doesn’t have answers to my questions herself, so she’s taken it to the registrar. </p>
<p>So to answer your question, I guess it is a bit of both - I just need to understand her school’s system so it makes sense to me, and so we can take an appropriate approach for college applications.</p>
<p>I actually found this conversion scale (from Princeton Review) very helpful since it gives a 4.0 conversion for every number, not just groupings:</p>
<p>GPA Percentile Letter Grade
4.0 95-100 A
3.9 94 A
3.8 93 A
3.7 92 A
3.6 91 A
3.5 90 A
3.4 89 B
3.3 88 B
3.2 87 B
3.1 86 B
3.0 85 B
2.9 84 B
2.8 83 B
2.7 82 B
2.6 81 B
2.5 80 B
2.4 79 C
2.3 78 C
2.2 77 C
2.1 76 C
2.0 75 C
1.9 74 C
1.8 73 C
1.7 72 C
1.6 71 C
1.5 70 C
1.4 69 D
1.3 68 D
1.2 67 D
1.1 66 D
1.0 65 D
0.9 65 D
0.8 65 D
0.7 65 D
0.6 65 D
0.5 65 D
0.4 65 F
0.3 65 F
0.2 65 F
0.1 65 F
0.0 65 F</p>
<p>I agree with Esat936. A 93 is an A is a 4.0, at least a the high school level. I know that some schools, such as UT-Austin, have a scale similar to that. They just changed it within the last few years.</p>
<p>My daughter’s HS gave grades for classes awarded on a 100 scale and then a 95 and above equal to 4.0 with 90-94 equal to 3.75 (these are unweighted)
Her college teachers have mostly had 93 and above equal an A which is 4.0</p>
<p>I guess my D’s school must do something similar to Kiddie’s D’s HS, but it is just not explained anywhere that some “A” grades are 4.0 and other “A” grades are actually 3.7 or less, and are de facto A-'s. It would be nice if this was explained with a bit more clarity. I think it probably makes more sense for a school to label a 93+ as an A and 90-93 as an A-. Also, I only knew any of this a week or so ago (this is D’s senior year). So not having full understanding of this skewered some of her match results and scholarship awards for colleges we were researching. There again, this is weighted (which puts her at 4.0), but I’m not sure if most colleges will just automatically ‘unweight’ it. </p>
<p>I have to say, though, the whole non-standardized approach to GPAs generally seems a bit crazy to someone who was educated outside the US.</p>
<p>The school did get back to me and merely said it is difficult to convert from a 100 point system to a 4.0 system since “90 gets calculated differently than a 99 although both fall in the “A” range.” In other words, not all "A"s are created equal!</p>
<p>Thanks for hanging in there with me over this while I catch up to speed on all this.</p>
<p>Wow you guys, really??? Then my D’s GPA is a lot higher than we thought. She graduated with a 90.313 which we figured -according to the Princeton table- was 3.5-ish. (And we did a complicated calculator online for each individual class, and came out even slightly lower)… but by the scale you’re all using, that would actually be 3.7? (There’s a big difference between the 87-89 = 3.3 and 90-92=3.7 !!!)</p>
<p>Our school also grades on the 100 point scale. I was also told my the counselor it is hard to convert from a 100 scale to 4.0 scale. Not to worry about it, the colleges are aware of this.</p>
<p>Which didn’t help me at all when looking at the NPC’s and other stats. </p>
<p>So she told me that DS with a 96.7 unweighted GPA should just be considered a 4.0 for those purposes. </p>
<p>The high school will most likely document their grading scheme in their school report which they send to the colleges (it lists stuff like how GPA is calculated, number of kids in the class, numbers taking AP tests etc.) Ask your school for a copy of this document.</p>
<p>One more thing to keep in mind. My daughter’s school converted the grades first and then did the average to get the GPA. So if all your grades were 100 (4.0) except for one 94 (3.7) then although your straight numeric average would be probably 99+ (which would be a 4.0) , your GPA would be calculated as below 4.0. (although it might be 3.9 something)</p>
<p>…and to make it even more complicated, many colleges will calculate their own GPA by removing non-core courses (goodbye nice boost from A+ in orchestra and health!), use only unweighted, then assign their own score to the rigor of the course load. </p>
<p>A few even take out freshman grades entirely. Whee :)</p>