Hello,
I’m a permanent resident in the U.S. but I’ve graduated from an Egyptian high school. The problem is that my school didn’t use the credit hour system. Now, I want to apply for a college in the U.S. but I can’t decide on which colleges should I apply for because I can’t calculate my GPA. I don’t want to underestimate neither overestimate my grades. Has anyone here been in this same position?
Did you spend your 4 years in Egypt? How can you still have GC?
Also, it’s not your job to calculate your GPA. Either schools you are applying to will take care of your trascript with their own methods, or you have to use 3rd party to translate your high school records
Each year I spent my summer break in the USA so I still have GC. Yeah I know that’s their job but I should choose 7~10 colleges to apply for. My choices should be reasonable. Since I don’t know my GPA, it’s impossible to determine which colleges I have a good chance to get accepted in.
Did your school have any kind of grading system? Or anything similar to it?
Not just alphabet grading system, but something like good, bad, normal, etc. There HAS to be a way to measure your aptitude, otherwise how are egyptian students supposed to apply for college in EGYPT??
For one, you can certainly ESTIMATE whether your grades are comparable to other accepted freshmen, and leave the detailed grade conversion to the school.
Obviously, to be a competitive candidate for the Ivies, you must be a top student, among the top in all of Egypt. Or if your performance puts you within – for example – top 25%, there are plenty of schools you can apply to.
Don’t forget, that grades are just one of the criteria. Your SATs/ACTs will be crucial, as will be your ECs if you’re looking at the more selective schools.
Egyptians attend American universities. They found a way to translate their grades - you will too, with a modicum of effort.
The transcripts show the raw grade. For any example my physics score last year was 60/60.
Is this approximately how exams are scored in the U.S. : >90% is an A
90%~85% A-
85% ~ 80% B+
???
Grading is a bit different in each high school and colleges, but in general,
100~97+ is A+
96.99~93 is A
92~90 is A-.
And on and on. Some schools don’t use +and- sign
My cumulative score in percentage is 91% which is think is equivalent to GPA 3.3. Suppose I get 2300 + in SAT
and 3 800s in SAT2 and with some mediocre ECs. Would I be able to get into a top public school: One of the UCs, U of Michigan,U of Virginia, U of Maryland, U of Washington, or Georgia Institute of Technolgy…,… etc
Btw, public schools will consider me as a domestic student not an international one.
Also think about what your family can pay for. OOS public tuition is going to be steep.
I’m a NJ resident. I’ll just apply for Rutgers 
, and then hopefully I may transfer to an elite school as a rising junior.
Do you have a parent who lives in NJ permanently? Summer breaks won’t be enough to get in-state classification.
Yeah my parent does, and by the time I start my fresh year I will have been staying in NJ for about a year.
Maybe the following grade equivalency scale will help? Since many institutions fall back on the judgement of external evaluation agencies (of which WES is a major player), this might be the closest-to-official conversion table you’ll find.
https://www.wes.org/gradeconversionguide/index.asp
That being said, the burden is on you to help colleges interpret your grades correctly. The “school profile” that’s submitted as part of the school report usually contains information that’ll help colleges interpret grades. For example, it may indicate the distribution of final grades in the previous year’s graduating class. (e.g. 3 students had an average above 80%, 23 had an average of 70-80%, 124 an average of 60-70%, 54 an average of 50-60%) An estimated class rank would be very helpful for colleges as well.
If colleges struggle to interpret your grades, they may rely more heavily on your standardized test scores and other measurable achievements for admission decisions.
Actually, raw numbers don’t matter. What matters is what they mean.
So, if a 60% in your school places you in the top 10%, it’s good. If it’s about “expected minimum”, not so good. if it means “below minimum expectations”, it’s bad.
You’d need to indicate what each performance means in relation to national exams, too. Ie., a 60 = top 10% in your school AND ALSO a 60 in your school means you’re likely to get a 65 for national exams (your school has grade deflation, meaning your grades are lower than they’re worth) or a 50 (your school has grade inflation, meaning your grades are higher than they’re worth).
This is so difficult since GPA heavily affects one’s chance of acceptance.
But this what I know:
High school in Egypt is 3 years not 4.
During the first two years I was always in the top 15%.
In the third year I was in the top 10%.
In about 50 % percent of the subjects I took I scored between 85% and 90 %
And in the other 50% of the subjects I scored between 90% and 100%.
When I added up all the my high school grades and then calculated the percentage I found it to be 91.5%.
Some people online say that I can calculate my GPA by multiplying 91.5% by 4. This equals 3.64. I don’t know whether that’s correct or not.
Using my total percentage 91.5%, I always get around GPA 3.3 ~ 3.7 when using online scales.
b@r!um I used the WES scale it says that 75 ~ 100 in Egypt is equivalent to an A in the U.S.!! I’m so confused now.
What do you guys think?
In the US, tests are typically constructed so that 90%+ corresponds to an A and 80-90% to a B, etc. The expectation is that students who completed all assignments (paid attention in class and did their homework) will be able to score above 90%. Most test questions are taken straight from the textbook or homework assignments. Tests should not ask anything that students haven’t seen before.
However, tests are constructed differently in many other countries. For example, in Germany, exams will have “knowledge transfer questions” that test if a student can apply the material they learned to new information. E.g. on a history exam, students might be given an excerpt from a speech that was not mentioned in class and asked to make an educated guess who gave that speech, based on their knowledge of the political situation of the time.
Exams like this would typically have lower scores than exams that only repeat homework questions. If you know everything from class and homework assignments, you might be able to score 70%, whereas 90% would be “exceeding expectations.” In that case, WES would say that 70% corresponds to an American A.
Long story short: don’t use American grade conversation calculators to convert your foreign percentages to an American GPA scale.
WES says in Egypt 75~100 is A.
That means I got A+ and A in most of my subjects. Should I trust this?
No one here can tell you that because no one knows how grading worked at your particular school. Your best bet is to provide colleges with some kind of information that will help them to interpret your grades in context.
Below is a sample school profile from a high school nearby. You can see that 31% of their seniors had a GPA between 3.75 and 4.0, i.e. “mostly As”. Is that how approximately how grades would be distributed at your Egyptian school if you used the conversion guide provided by WES?
http://paly.net/sites/default/files/paly_profile_and_grading_key_13-14.pdf
I doubt that my school has records like this. In Egypt, the grades mean the same in the the whole country. All schools give the students test of the same level of difficulty.
As I said before I scored around 91% and I’m in the top 15%. Half of my scores are above 90% and the other half is between 85% and 90%. WES says that in Egypt ( it never specified a certain school ), 75~100 is equivalent to an A in U.S. Does this express anything?
By the way, you’ve been so helpful.
Thanks so much.
Interesting. WES also puts a disclaimer on the page for Egypt: “Grading scale may vary. Please refer to grading scale on transcript.” That disclaimer does not appear on most other country pages. Not sure what to make of it.
I wish I could be more helpful, but I really don’t know anything about Egyptian grades. The best I can do is to offer you generic advice and point you to other resources.
If you really need a GPA figure, e.g. to qualify for scholarships, it might be worthwhile to pay for a formal WES evaluation. If you are only worried about admission, your best strategy would be to apply to a range of schools and hope for the best.