<p>Hm, yes, I wasn’t very clear that early in the morning. He said that he could see a 4.2 on his transcript, and I said that he could not, simply because Stanford doesn’t put your GPA on the official transcript, thus leaving it very open to interpretation. 
Of course A+ grades show otherwise why would I be talking about how grad schools interpret them if they weren’t there? ;)</p>
<p>So in conclusion, while you might get an A+, in practice nobody outside of Stanford would think that you have a GPA above 4.0 because A and A+ both get calculated as 4.0 in the real world. Prominent example: AMCAS and med schools.</p>
<p>P.S. I agree that A+ grades are not common. Usually, they are only for students in the 99th percentile.</p>