<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>Well if your high school ranks, the grades will have context, no?</p>
<p>As for the scales, at columbia the scale is</p>
<p>A+= 4.333
A = 4.0
A- = 3.667
B+ = 3.333</p>
<p>and so on. some colleges/universities don’t have a 4.33/A+ grade. </p>
<p>As for HS gpas, mine also had a 0-100 grading scale. No letter grades. I’m pretty sure I put my gpa on the hundred point scale onto my application. Does that no longer work? Why bother converting. As it is, I’d imagine a 3.87 is just fine for an unweighted HS gpa.</p>
<p>I think it’s more intuitive to divide it by 100 and then multiply by 4, but of course that makes no difference thanks to our old friend the commutative property of multiplication. At any rate, I second what ConfucianNemesis said. Your 3.87 (UW) won’t be compared against someone with a 4.8 (W) by Columbia admissions. I mean, it will, but only in context. As far as how people manage to get 3.9’s, they achieve averages of 96.5/100. Maybe they take easier classes (these grade are all unweighted so you don’t know what classes they’re taking when you just hear the number), maybe they’re at crappy schools, or maybe they’re just genuinely better students. The important thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter. Columbia admissions does not just look at your GPA; they look at your transcript. Whether or not your GPA is weighted, they can see the rigor of the classes you’re taking and how you’ve done in each of those classes. Finally, to give you some peace of mind, this was my overall high school GPA for the first three years (I applied ED so they didn’t see any of my senior year grades):</p>
<p>frosh: 3.83
soph: 3.72
jr: 3.63
for a grand average of 3.73.
My senior year grades were significantly better (~3.9, thank you seminar-style electives) but since I applied ED, Columbia never saw them. In the interest of full disclosure, I was coming from a very rigorous private school, had three 5’s on APs, and a 2310 SAT score. And of course I had ECs, a personal statement, and I applied ED. So your mileage may vary, but it’s certainly possible to get in with a 3.73, let alone a 3.87.</p>
<p>But then there’s schools like mine that give people huge advantages by saying that ANY A (no +/-) is a 4.0. I’ve gotten straight As all 3 years of HS so far, so I have a 4.0 UW GPA, and a 4.9 W GPA, even though most of my grades are in the 94-96% range. pwoods makes sense in saying that they won’t compare your GPA directly with another kids’, because that isn’t really fair.</p>
<p>Yea that’s how mine is. Anything above an 89.5 translates to a 4.0 UW. You really can’t compare say a kid at my school with a 4.0 who got all 90s to another kid somewhere else with a lower gpa but a much higher % average. AdComs are smart, they’ll figure it out :)</p>