Calculating GPA

College Search & Lists
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There’s a lot of talk here about unweighted / weighted GPAs, but I can’t figure out how to calculate it. I know each college has their own way to calculate it, but how do I calculate it so that I can have a general idea about which colleges to look at? Do you include all classes in calculating an unweighted GPA, including things like health, PE, and art? And then just core courses to find a weighted GPA? Or does weighted GPA include distinctions for Honors and AP courses?

My kid’s school uses a 100 point system. Is everything between a 90-100 an A, 80-90, a B, etc.? And then an A is 4.0 and a B is 3.0?

If every college calculates GPA’s using their own system, how I am supposed to know whether my kid’s stats fit?

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The steps are:

  1. Convert each semester of grades to ABCDF letter grades. For percentage grades, this may be school-dependent. Health and PE would generally not be included in academic college prep courses. Inclusion or exclusion of art can be controversial here; some colleges require or recommend it as part of college preparation, while others do not. I would lean toward including art, because it is a subject normally taught in general or liberal arts colleges and universities and therefore considered an academic subject.
  2. Convert A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, F=0.
  3. Add up the letter grade values from the previous step, and then divide by the number of grades.

Weighted GPAs normally include bonus points for honors, AP, IB, etc. courses. However, the bonus point values vary, so there is not much point in calculating it unless you know what a specific college does, in which case you can calculate for the purpose of that specific college.

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3

Understood your students school may be on a 100 point system but if you get a transcript it still should show (I would think) what the GPA is based on that 100 point scale… so if it’s a 92 that would be an ~A- or ~3.7.

@ucbalumnus gave a good way to calculate but need to also account for 1/2 year v full year courses if the school offers them. In the average a 1/2 year course would be half the value.

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4

I note I think this trips some people up. For example, usually a 100-point school will tell you how to convert to letter grades. If they do use -/+ grades, then you should too. If they don’t, then you don’t have to. This can make a difference sometimes, like some kids might or might not have a 4.0 depending on whether their school uses A- or not.

But if your school doesn’t explain how to convert to letter grades, then what do you do? I personally think you should probably use a scale that does use -/+, for the sake of comparing your GPA to reported statistics on GPAs and such. But that is really a judgment call.

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I find this confusing, too. Our high school’s transcripts show the +/- but don’t calculate anything but 4,3,2, etc. They also only list weighted GPAs. Is it up to each college to decide if they use a +/- in their recalculations, where an A- is 3.7, a B+ is 3.3…?

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Ours are the same as this (ie A-, A and A+ are all 4.0, etc), and I believe the UCs calculate it this way which could be why CA schools do this?

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7

Best to take all As as a 4, Bs as a 3, Cs as a 2.

That’s the most common.

So in this case a 90 or 100 are 4, an 80 or 89 are 3, etc.

Count all the key classes - leave off PE and Health as an example.

Add up your points, divide by the # of inputs / classes - and that gives you a baseline for unweighted.

There are so many weighting systems - I wouldn’t worry about that.

Some give + .5 for Honors and 1 for AP. Others are on a 6 or 7 point scale.

Just focus on unweighted and then you can look at rigor separately.

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So aside from public colleges subject to some sort of specific policy on this, colleges are largely free to do whatever they like with your transcript when using it as part of assessing your academic qualifications. This could involve calculating a GPA, but not necessarily–various colleges reportedly use an internal academic rating system which does not take the form of a GPA.

Someone else linked this once here, and I have in turn suggested it to many other people, because I think it is really helpful to get a better sense of what this really looks like internally:

This is Holy Cross showing how they use Slate, a common software package, to process an application. The first part shows how they use the School Report to help them process a transcript.

At around 4:23, they pop up a transcript, and next to it is what they call a reader sheet. One of the interesting things that happens as this reader fills out the sheet is they are normally marking just the number of As or Bs (so no -/+), but then with a C they note it is a C+!

They also go through the school profile, testing, recommendations, interviews, and so on. All along, you can see on the reader sheet on the right they have drop downs for an Academic Rating and Personal Rating. Somewhat frustratingly, they never actually use those on the video, but presumably they do in the real process. Eventually around 44:27 they show the summary report that goes to the Committee, and you can see how it carried over the reader sheet (including the C+!). The Academic Rating and Personal Rating are still left blank.

OK, so what to take from all this? Well, certain basic things. They can see your whole transcript. They can evaluate it as they see fit. They do that in context, using things like school reports and school profiles and so on. They also consider testing, recommendations, and so on. And then they come up with some sort of Academic Rating. And while the school-reported GPA was on the reader sheet and committee report, in the greater scheme, it didn’t seem like an overwhelmingly dominant part of the analysis.

This is just one college, but I think it is really helpful to know all this can be going on behind the scenes. Lots of kids I see online spend a lot of time worrying about exactly how their school calculates GPAs, or about how their GPA compares to others, but I think for the most part, those concerns are misplaced. It is really their whole transcript that matters (for good or ill), and there is no knowing exactly what a reader or committee is going to do with anything in particular on your transcript.

As a final note, I know that at least Dartmouth has been using AI-type tools to help them generate at least first-look academic ratings. I strongly suspect they are already not alone, and that this is going to become a very common practice. These tools can potentially combine even more information together when forming academic ratings, and do it so quickly it can save a lot of reader time (basically the time spent doing that on this video). And that in fact is what Dartmouth’s Dean of Admissions implied it was doing for them.

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I think I’m far more comfortable with AI being used for something like this (stats based/with an objective method to calculate or rank) than, as some think is happening, being used to filter essays.

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Virginia Tech in fact confirmed it was using AI to help evaluate essays. At least UNC as well.

I think in a world where certain colleges feel like they are being overwhelmed with applications that are not very competitive, they are going to find it hard to resist the temptation to use AI to help them identify a more limited pool of applications they think are worth a lot of human time.

I agree with you that processing academic factors seems a more natural use of AI, but from what Virginia Tech said, they think their AI has been trained well enough that it normally does right around what an experienced reader would do. And in their current system (one human reader, one AI), if there is in fact a significant difference between the ratings, a second human is brought in.

Anyway, if colleges are heading this way with essays, they are almost surely open to doing it with academic things like transcripts. And I think this underscores that whatever your school is doing to calculate GPAs, or whatever you could do, isn’t really a reliable predictor of what a college is going to do when evaluating your whole transcript in combination with a long list of other factors.

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Colleges are all over the place as to how they recalculate GPA. And I think it’s still true that most don’t recalculate GPA. Unless we know exactly how the college calculates the GPA, that number is not as helpful as it could be. Even more complicated is the fact that some CDSs or class profiles calculate a class GPA in a way that is inconsistent with what’s used in the admissions process. (And again, many college admissions teams don’t recalculate GPAs, even if an average might show up in the CDS.)

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12

But then you have schools like Auburn that basically admit based on your GPA/SAT/ACT - they don’t look at anything else (or at least as of a couple of years ago that was the case).

I’ll also add another wrinkle I found with UTK. They recalculate your GPA based on their requirements. Lets say you took 4 years of science and they only require 3, they use your 3 highest science grades in the calculation of your GPA. So when you put in the information into the Self Reported Academic Record tool they us it kicks out a GPA that has no association to any other report you have.

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13

Thank you for all of this information! Its a lot to absorb, but basically what I’m getting from all of this is to not obsess over grade numbers (it seems like a huge difference between a 91 and a 98 on a report card) because I have no idea how each college will look at that, and just to generalize it into an A and move on.

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Thank you for this! That’s a very helpful video.

It’s further confusing when the college reports GPAs in the CDS or elsewhere and you’re left to use it to figure out if you’re in range… and yes you have no idea how they are actually calculating that particular number.

As for AI, ugh. I’ve seen it make so many mistakes—sending me to addresses that don’t exist, give me information I know to be false, etc. that it sucks to know that my kid’s hard, very human work will be subject to that evaluation. I certainly get the temptation. But when there’s so much attention given to whether students are leveraging AI to apply that it has scared families into fretting over whether their kids’ essays will be flagged as AI when they are not, it seems there’s not an equal amount paid to the admissions teams.

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15

Yes, the main answer is trying to calculate your GPA for comparison purposes might have very little value. I mean if the available data says a college normally enrolls kids with a 3.3 to 3.5 and your best guess is you have something like a 3.7, then you are probably good. But if your best guess is you have a 3.28 and you are wondering if that will be good enough, eh, then for many colleges tht is very likely cutting things way too fine such that likely the only way you can really find out is apply and see what happens.

Yes, I mentioned this above but it is worth repeating. Lots of colleges, usually publics, might in fact use GPAs for some important purpose–admissions, merit, or so on.

Fortunately, usually they have some sort of instructions on what to do. Like, the University of California has specific instructions on how to calculate the GPAs they use. But sometimes colleges will also defer at least partially to what your HS reports.

So in cases like that, you have to do your best to understand what the college instructs. Hopefully it will be clear enough.

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16

Yes, don’t obsess over it because it’s out of your control how a given college will assess your grades (unless they tell you that, like the UCs and CSUs do.) The grades you have are the grades you have. FWIW, IMO there is a quite a difference between a 91 and a 98, regardless whether the 91 is an A, A-, or B per the HS’s grading scale.

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17

I think that is the right approach. Of course all this is a major part of why selective US college admissions can have a large amount of uncertainty–we don’t know the details of what is happening behind the curtains and so at any given college, what they end up doing with a given application could be more or less favorable.

But the answer to that is just to make sure you apply to a range of carefully-chosen colleges.

What I don’t think you should do is talk yourself out of applying to some selective places where you might well be competitive given a plausible assessment of your academic qualifications. Assuming everything else looks good, you can apply and just see what happens.

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18

That’s y give yourself 4 for any A, 3 for B etc.

At least u can see an UW # but yes you are who you are.

But you want to know you are in range b4 applying.

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Yeah, as I was just discussing in another post, at best that information is an extremely blunt instrument. Of course I think sometimes it can be clear enough that your grades would either be very competitive, or not competitive. But for any sort of close call, the quality of information available is just too poor.

You may or may not find this comforting, but it seems pretty clear that these Admissions Offices are not just using some off-the-shelf AI product. They are instead spending considerable time training and testing a custom AI until it gets reliable enough to be useful. And even then, so far they all seem to be making sure there are also humans in the loop somewhere.

And while I do think this is primarily a labor-saving move, they also suggest this should improve consistency of evaluation. Which is plausible to me. It was always a known problem that different readers could evaluate applications differently. Colleges were sometimes trying to deal with this using two readers, but that still might not be perfectly consistent as you could get “unlucky” or “lucky” two readers in a row.

So the way Virginia Tech is doing things, they are basically replacing one of the standard human readers with an AI, which means that basically everyone gets one reader who is the same–the AI. And then if the AI and your human reader disagree, another human reader basically breaks the tie.

That is maybe not so bad when you think about it. Obviously reasonable people could disagree, but I think maybe reducing some of the “reader luck/unluck” factor could be good overall.

And not just for essays, for academic evaluations too. There are a lot of potential judgment calls, opportunities for human error, and so on when doing contextual reviews of things as complex and variable as transcripts. So I do think giving every applicant at least one consistent “transcript reader” could also be good.

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I know you are focused on selective colleges, but it would so interesting to see how the CSUs’ software does transcript evals. They’ve used software to fully evaluate apps for decades (not sure it’s technically AI or not), and humans don’t touch the vast majority of apps. Of course they aren’t doing a holistic read in the same way that other schools do (with no essays or LoRs.)

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