I agree… while I understand there was no formal calculation of the GPA (not even on each report card?), how on earth did anyone think Cs and Bs equaled anywhere near a 4.0. I just don’t understand the story. I just doesn’t make sense.
Could you elaborate on your son’s grades each year? People has asked… did he have As or Bs or Cs?
I transferred schools when I was a high school senior. I also graduated early, so only had one semester of grades (at the time, they did not carry over the other grades, I started again). So I went off to college in Jan, and when I called in the summer to get my gpa and class rank for college transfer applications, I called and she said “You were 280/1000” and I said gee, I didn’t expect that, and she continued “and your gpa was 3.2” Um, no it wasn’t. I only had one semester of grades and knew they were much higher. She looked at the grades and said there had been a mistake, yelled at me for not bringing this to their attention before because it affected all the rankings, and said she’d call back. Just looking at the grades she could tell there was an error, and when she called back I’d gone up ~230 places and had a much higher gpa.
OP, as others are saying your son should know (and school should know) if he’s a C (2.7) student or an A (4.0+) student. I’d get a copy of the transcript and go through every grade. I know in NY they use a 100 point scale, so make sure every 97 is not a 79, make sure every A is an A.
OP Here’s a pretty conventional grading scale. I didn’t go below a C presuming he didn’t have any Ds or Fs, but you can google this also. I agree that it could be beneficial to examine the entire transcript starting with grade 9. Every high school weights differently and there are some crazy formulas out there, so you might as well calculate the unweighted GPA which can be more meaningful and useful for next steps.
A 93-100 4.0
A- 90-92 3.7
B+ 87-89 3.3
B 83-86 3.0
B- 80-82 2.7
C+ 77-79 2.3
C 73-76 2.0
IF you are like most of us pack rat parents, you probably have all of the report cards, especially the semester end report cards.
Look through the report cards. If you see the final report card grades are b/c or numerical grades in the 70’/80’s, then there is no way that you or he could assume that he has a 4.5 gpa.
Are you saying that you have never reviewed a report card for 3 years?
Are you saying that you have never been to a parent teacher conference and have gotten feed back from your son’s teachers?
For you to believe that you son has a 4.5 gpa, he would have had to be getting A’s from the end of term one, taking some pretty weighted courses.
I know at my high school, the GC meets with students at least once a year and review credits and grades.
The student has to sign off that the review was done. Junior year, the GC sends a copy of the transcript and the permanent record home.
The parent has to sign off on the transcript attesting that all information is correct.
The first week of senior year families are once again sent a copy of the transcript with ranking where they have to sign off that the information listed is correct.
Our school never had anyone sign off on anything, but you could go online and see the kids’ grades if you wanted.
And there could be the possibility of an honors bump for certain classes. Here, an AP/honors class is weighted on a different scale, with the letter grade of O being the highest. Hence, some kids have above a 4.0 with a B hidden in there (my daughter’s case - she got a B in an honors course sophomore year).
So a grade of something like “80” was entered into the GPA field instead of the Grade field and his GPA was inflated for 3 years, slowly declining from an impossibly high number to something almost plausible of 4.5 GPA as if he had all A+ or 100% grades?
I can see that a kid with some honors or AP weighting might think he’d done something that mysteriously raised GPA. But agree that the lack of solid banks of A grades could/should have triggered some check.
At my kids’ hs, the W calculations were a challenge to follow. H, AP, and one-semester classes counted differently. In a few, an A got a different bump than a B.
@Madison85 - that is what I inferred as well. What a nightmare to discover this at this point in time.
@MsFranklin Can you please tell us what grades your son got on his report card? Was he mostly straight As? Likely not. He was likely mostly low Bs and Cs. How could you not have suspected the GPA was wrong? You seem to be an educated person so I’m guessing you knew there was there was something off and thought you might get a way with it.
You don’t need a course on GPA monitoring to know that B & Cs over 4 years does not equate to A+ (4.5) GPA. The congressmen’s office must have noticed this as soon as they saw the numbers lined up with the grades. The school of course FAILED - they should have reasonability checks on the report cards and GPA to make sure mistakes are caught.
Your son’s new GPA reflect what he actually did in high school.
I agree with everyone else that this level of discrepancy between one’s expected and actual GPA is odd, but I do think it is worth a reminder that students and parents need to check the school’s calculations periodically. My daughter’s school incorrectly weighted (well, didn’t weight) her grades from DE classes. It took me months of pestering her GC to get it fixed (and she responded only because I finally cc’d the principal). I am positive that her final GPA, whatever it is, is incorrect, but at least the GPA submitted with her college app was close to correct.
Please clarify. What were your son’s actual GRADES for the last three years. We’re the mostly B and C grades which would be a 2. something. OR were they mostly A grades which would place him in the 4.0 range.
If HS grades were not all A grades with maybe a smattering of a couple of B grades, his GPA would NOT have been above 4.0 in any possible way.
And your son did get report cards/progress reports which would have shown his course grades.
I’m sorry, but this is not making any sense to me. The GPA disparity you are describing indicates that for the most part your son got B and C grades…not mostly A grades.
Is that the case…or not? And I’m not talking about only THIS semester.
yeah.
The first thing I did my son’s freshman year was create a spreadsheet to calculate his GPA versus the school’s GPA. I learned a long time ago that the school district screws up things all the time so I wasn’t going to take any chances. Both GPA’s always matched up so I had no complaints.
So you thought your child was getting 4.5 GPA even though he was mostly getting B’s and C’s, because Naviance or some unofficial grade report said so due to the school’s mistake, And now upset because the school fixed it back to the correct 2.7 too late?
And you had no idea that mostly B’s and C’s translate into 2.7 rather than 4.5 because it is very complicated system and the school did not train parents for that?
If it made sense to his teachers based on his grades, why doesn’t the drastic change NOT make sense to someone? If you tell us his grades, we might be able to at least give you an idea which GPA is closer to the ballpark. Something isn’t right, and I wouldn’t trust the recalculated GPA until I did it myself.
Is this a weighted or unweighted GPA younare talking about. Schools have wildly varying formulas for computing weighted GPA. WILDLY varying.
Old timers here will remember my “discussions” with our school guidance department when DD’s weighted GPA was lower than her unweighted one,despite her taking all honors and AP courses. Now that WAS wrong. But they had calculated everyone’s GPA weighted the same goofy way. It took me two years to finally get them to see that her weighted GPA should have been higher than the unweighted.
I sent her transcript to about ten different school district guidance folks I know. All different districts. They all computed her weighted and unweighted GPAs…and the numbers were not the same…but inneachncase, the weighted was higher than the unweighted,because of the strength of her courseload.
This poster would need their school’s formula to calculate the GPA herself…weighted and unweighted.
But still…to the OP…please post your son’s actual course grades here. As noted, we can give you a ballpark of which GPA is closer to the actual unweighted…2.9 or 4.5. One of them is not right.
^shouldn’t EVERYONE’s weighted GPA be higher than unweighted (or exactly the same, with no honors or AP courses)?
I remember having a “discussion” with a teacher about her “extra credit” computations. She included the extra credit points in both the denominator and the numerator of her calculation. So it wasn’t really “extra credit”. It was another assignment, and could hurt students who were already near the top of the class…
Our schools lowest level of courses have a weighted gpa where an A is less than a 4.0. So if someone took only those lowest level courses and got all As their weighted GPA would be lower than their unweighted GPA.
^Weighted seems like the wrong word for that. More like “lightened” .