GPAs can be greater than 4 ?

International Students
1

<p>Hi,
I just read on a university’s website that average scholarship recipients have a GPA of 4.3. What does that mean? I thought that GPA was out of 4. How do I calculate GPA from percentages? </p>

<p>Thanks</p>

2

<p>Weighted GPAs can exceed 4.0, but there is no standard way to do the weighting.</p>

<p>For example, a school might decide that AP classes should be worth 1 more point than regular classes, so that 5.0 = A, 4.0 = B, 3.0 = C, 2.0 = D, 0 = F. And maybe honors (but not AP) classes should be worth .5 points more than a regular class.</p>

<p>Other schools might add .5 for an AP and .3 for an honors class. Yet another school might treat AP and honors classes the same and add .3 to both. Yet another school might bump AP classes up but not honors classes. </p>

<p>The basic idea is that schools want to reward students for taking harder classes when they compute class rank. For example, who do you think should be ranked higher:

  • student X, who receives straight As in non-college prep classes
  • student Y, who receives mostly As but a few Bs in the hardest classes offered by the school</p>

<p>X got higher grades than Y. But most people would argue that Y’s class rank should be higher than X’s because Y took the harder courses. X might have not managed to do well in Y’s classes at all, but Y would have probably received straight As in X’s classes. The weighted GPA is meant to address these issues.</p>

3

<p>Thanks!</p>

<p>Any ideas on how you can <em>approximate</em> A-Level scores to weighted GPAs? (What would an average of 95% on four A-Levels be? What about five A-Levels?)</p>

4

<p>^^ Take an A-level subj equivalent to 1 AP + last 2 years of High School</p>

5

<p>A-level score tests are equivalent to AP scores, which might have absolutely nothing to do with performance in the class in school.</p>