Grad and professional schools will do what they will, but an extra .33 can only help when reporting your GPA to employers who likely don’t take their own approach to what you self-report on your resume. Assuming your own school counts it into their GPA calculation. Which mine did.
An “A+” was very difficult to earn, however. It was not automatic that a given class/professor would give out any. It was truly for unusually outstanding achievement.
My daughter’s school didn’t use + or -. A B C D F only. Seems to work fine.
I find it ironic that D19 got A+ for the lecture portion of her Chem 1A (3 credits) and A- for the lab portion (2 credits). The lecture portion is typically much harder. A+ for a weeder class at Cal is no small effort. So overall at UCB she has more than 4.0 for the class. But for med school calculation it would be less than 4.0. No reward for +, punishment for -
Hmm, UW-Madison started adding AB , BC… grades while I was there. Not sure, and don’t want to think about how my freshman gpa would have turned out under the then new system eons ago. I sure hope professional schools pay attention to the school attended- equal grades can be so misleading when one considers flagship honors, regular courses, number of courses, subjects… Ayt any rate, I got a much better education I feel than those in my medical school class who were not surrounded by peers as I was.
On another note- it is also good not to have standardized percentage points for assigning grades. My undergrad profs were able to challenge us on those blue book exams- not make them easy. Humbling to find out how much you didn’t know as well as how much you did.
Agree that the common high school standard percentage scale of A=90, B=80, etc. means that instructors tend to load up tests with lots of easy problems so that C students can get enough of them correct.
However, an instructor can game the system by giving 50 points for showing up and writing one’s name on the test paper and then having five 10 point questions of varying difficulty to distinguish between students of different competency in the material. But probably not many do that.
My son’s college gave A+s sparingly but counted them as a 4.0 when calculating GPA. I think his GPA was 3.96 and so his A+s would have pushed him over 4.0. I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference. I think the presence of 7 A+s (which were in math and economics) on his transcript enhanced the impression that he was an unusually good student.
He applied to grad school and business school and I think that impression (combined with a humbleness that he showed in the interviews) was actually more important to business schools.
My DD is a freshman at Rice - they did away with the 4.3 for A+ a few years ago. She was bummed because last semester she got an A+ and an A- and the rest As. Unfortunately it didn’t average out to a 4.0. (On the bright side, she doesn’t have to keep chasing a 4.0 because it’s impossible now!)