I checked blogs, online and their Institutional Research page. I can’t find any official data except of those site with self-reported GPA.
I know that schools use a different GPA ranking style so that maybe a factor but on their CDS (http://ir.mit.edu/cds-2019/#C) there is a section about GPA which has no information.
Is there any other reason other than schools using different GPA rankings?
Better things to do? Waste of time? Low ROI?
What does it matter? They say that 97% come from the top 10% so what more do you need? The first GPA break on the CDS is 3.75, so it’s likely that 97% +/- are above that.
As to why? Who cares? Although my guess is that since it is not required, and since not every school uses a 4 point scale, there is no need to spin wheels to recalculate GPA to conform.
Lol, yes. Anyone interested in MIT should be concerned with more than gpa of admits or the class.
Tippy tops look at the transcript. They see rigor or not. Who gamed it with easy or fluff. All you learn from gpa is what you should already know: very high performers. It doesn’t tell the rest.
5o focusing on one metric misses the point of what it really takes. Obsess over some smaller detail like this and you may miss the real points that matter.
I don’t know specifically about MIT, but because HS transcripts report GPAs in so many different ways, many colleges do not calculate averages due to the required time investment. Schools aren’t required to complete a CDS, let alone every section if they do choose to submit it. Regarding the ‘average’ GPA section, there are no CDS guidelines as to how to calculate it…and there are a wide variety of ways it is calculated, if at all.
For the schools that do calculate an average GPA, here are some ways it can be done:
2)Recalculate uw GPA for all classes on transcript, including electives and PE. Some SRAR schools do this, I expect others do as well.
3)Recalculate GPA based on unique system wide calc (e.g., UCs not counting frosh year and limiting honors/AP class weighting)
4)Take whatever GPA is reported on transcript (which is often weighted, at least for the high schools that offer multiple course levels). These GPAs may include all courses or only core depending on HS…my kids’ HS reports ONLY weighted GPA for core courses. This wGPA is then ‘converted’ to an unweighted in many ways:
—Some colleges will consider any wGPA >4.0 to be a 4.0 uwGPA
—Along those lines some colleges will consider a 3.8 wGPA as a 3.8uwGPA
—If the GPA is on a defined scale set higher than 4.0 , a 4.5/5.0 which is 90%, would be converted to 3.6 uwGPA (90% of 4.0)
Some of these ways, or a combination of them, will lead to an inflated average GPA. IME some form/combo of these calculations is most common
5)I am sure there are many other ways…
tl;dr Bottom line…there is no consistency in the way colleges calculate an ‘average’ GPA so it’s impossible to make comparisons across schools. If one does know how the sausage is made, then one could convert their HS transcript to compare how they measure up to a given school’s applicants and/or matriculants. IME institutional reporting staff will generally share how they calculated their reported averages. If no averages are reported, we are left with resources like Naviance, admissions pres statements and/or conversations with AOs as to specifics re: how they interpret and measure GPA across applicants.
Do understand your academic profile is only an indication of if and how well you can handle the workload.
Once that has been established, the MIT adcoms will move on to the rest, (more important part) of your application to determine how well they deem you being a match for MIT and what you bring to the student body.