Calculating the GPA (again!)

calmom
Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:58:05 +0000

I agree that it would be nice to have some standardization – but truthfully, I never bothered with it. The UC’s did their own recalculation – my kids had mostly A’s in academic subjects, some B’s & a C in non-academic subjects (my couch potato son didn’t do so well in P.E.) – and I figured that the other colleges would know what to do with the transcripts. Then again, my kids had high end UW GPA’s – I think my d’s UW was about 3.85 – so there really was no reason for us to sweat – I knew the grades were “good enough” and I spent my time agonizing over my d’s SAT scores instead. ;)

If you are trying to figure things out as far as “chances” – I’d say look at the whole picture including class rank, if you’ve got that. You probably will have an easier time if you simply ball park your kid as an “A” student, “B+” student, etc.

I do know that when ad coms meet to make a determination, they look at the whole transcript (or whatever rendition of it has made it into their file), and correlate the grades with the classes. They like to see a rising trend, so they will be more forgiving of B’s & C’s in freshman or sophomore year. They also are going to look at the grades in context of the individual student – if the student is leaning toward humanities, they will want to see strong grades in courses related to the students intended course of study (A’s in Calc for prospective engineering students) – but be more forgiving of weaker grades outside the area of strength.

So really, rather than compute the numbers, you are better off looking at the overall transcript to observe the pattern or trend, because that is what the college will be doing.