How do I handle this? (GPA and Rank)

International Students
1

I was finishing my applications and one of the things I left for last was filling in the information about my school and a few details like my GPA, now I just realised, I’m not entirely sure about what to put as my GPA.

You see, in Spain secondary education is divided between a compulsory part (first 4 years, known as ESO) and a non-compulsory part (last two years, called Bachillerato). In Spain, the grades in ESO are basically useless, as long as you pass (i.e. anything over a 5/10 for every subject) you’re good to go. It’s only Bachillerato that’s taken into account for admission to a university, in fact, admissions are purely based on grades, I’m not going to go into how the proccess works but it means that basically the grades in Bachillerato are the only relevant grades in Spain (prior to university I mean).

Now, there’s also a few problems with whether to put a weighted or unweighted GPA, for example, in ESO, I attended a semi-private school in which courses where quite harder than usual, in physics for example, I learnt during the last year of ESO much more content than we even touched on in the first year of Bachillerato in the school I’m at now. But none of that was because of it being a special class or anything, it was just that the teacher was much more efficient and the class was smaller, similar situations are found in most of my courses. As a result, my average grade during ESO is 7/10, as opposed to an 8.7 in the first year of Bachillerato.

Now, the simplest rute going by logic is just getting the mean of those two averages and saying it’s unweighted but something doesn’t feel right. In all GPA calculators I’ve seen there’s a field that reads “credits/hours”, are subjects supposed to add more or less depending on the ammount of hours per week each subject had? Should Iattempt to get some kind of weighted GPA by contacting my previous school? Should I use just the GPA from Bachillerato?

Lastly, what do I write in the “Rank” field? Is it just rank of my grades from last year in relation to the rest of my class? Is it the average of the ranks I’ve had through secondary? We never keep track of this kind of things so I’m not familiar with the concept.

2

I think that you are going to need to ask admissions at the schools where you are applying. Perhaps you should ask whether you should put in your GPA from your Bachillerato only and ask them whether that would be appropriate.

3

@DadTwoGirls What about the common app then? The GPA field is not college specific.

4

For the GPA, you can report just about anything that’s reasonable. There’s no magic standardized formula even within the US. Count every class the same or weigh by intensity (e.g. # of hours per week). Compute it over the Bachillerato years only, or also add your ESO years. Whatever. American high schools all do their own thing too.

I reported the GPA that would have been used for university admissions in my home country, which was calculated over the last 2 years only and has un-intuitive weights on different classes and test scores. No college complained.

Colleges that care strongly about GPA will re-compute all applicants’ GPAs from the raw grades on their transcript.

Ditto for class rank. The whole point is to get some idea for how you compare to your classmates. Nothing is standardized in the US - the same set of grades might be below average at one school and in the top 10% at another school. Context is important. The more context you can provide, the fairer the evaluation of your application.

If your high school does not rank formally, colleges appreciate an “estimated” rank. It’s fine to estimate how your GPA ranks against your classmates in the most recent school year. As a rule of thumb, I would only provide an estimated rank if it places you in the top 10% of your class. Anything lower can hurt you for admission and scholarship purposes. (Alas, college rankings care about the number of students in the top 10% of their high school class…)

5

Thanks a million, you made it perfectly clear and resolved all my doubts.