<p>Hey guys. I keep hearing different variations in regard to GPA's. Some say an "A" means 90-100, and therefore, if your average is above a 90, then you have a 4.0 UW (Btw, I am only discussing UW GPA's, seeing as my school does not weigh GPA's, regardless of the course). Others say and A+ , which is a 95-99 is a 4.0. But my college guidance said that we had to calculate GPA's by the 4 method, meaning that whatever our composite average was, we had to take that and multiply it by 4, then divide it by a 100. So, with my 96.7 average, I'd only end up with a 3.87! That's totally unfair. How do so many people have 3.9's and 4.0's? I'm in every honors course, and I work pretty darn hard....I want to get into a nice college! I haven't got a B in my life!</p>
<p>Have fun at community college, loser.</p>
<p>Completely mature.</p>
<p>You are right that your school’s way of converting from percentages to GPA is non-standard and yields artifically low GPAs in the top range.</p>
<p>However, that shouldn’t matter for admission purposes. Your class rank and letters of recommendation will clearly indicate how you compare to the other students at your school, and your GPA as stated is high enough to qualify for any scholarship out there.</p>
<p>Another peculiarity of your school’s approach is that it makes low scores appear much higher. For example, a 60% average would convert to a C+ GPA although a student with a 60% average probably failed many of his classes by traditional standards.</p>
<p>@b@r!um : Yes, it seems quite unfair. Regardless of course rigour, this seems to be my school’s operation. And unfortunately, they don’t weigh GPA’s, or rank students, and my only concern is that colleges with have a lack of academic references.</p>
<p>Your school will send a school profile along with your school report that should indicate information about the distribution of grades and how the conversions were done. In addition, colleges will see your transcript and you can self-report your GPA on a percentage scale. </p>
<p>I understand that this might be a frustrating position for you to be in, but I don’t think you need to be worried.</p>
<p>You can’t convert directly between a 0-100 scale to a 0-4.0 scale. You have to convert from one scale to a letter-grade system and then to the other. </p>
<p>When you’re using a 100-point scale, the range of grades that correspond to Fs covers much more ground than the rage of grades that corresponds to Ds, Cs, Bs, and As; when you’re using a 4-point scale without pluses and minuses the range of grades that correspond to Fs is the same as the range of grades that correspond to each of the others; when you’re using a 4-point scale with pluses and minuses the range of Fs is the same as the range of As, and the ranges of Ds, Cs, and Bs are larger.</p>
<p>A system that lets you convert between 100-point scales and 4-point scales directly, without even an implicit reference to letter grades (such as specifying that everything below a 65 on the 100-point scale gets you a 0.0 on the 4-point scale) is going to end up giving you a GPA on one of the scales that just can’t be fairly compared to the GPA other students using the same scale get.</p>