<p>Is there a big difference between a 3.69 and a 3.7 if applying to Duke? Just Wondering…and this is for an African American student</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s a big difference between a 3.69 and a 3.7 anywhere. Your GPA is not the only thing they look at.</p>
<p>i can’t believe ur applying to duke and asking that question</p>
<p>Are you posting in every forum?</p>
<p>Ive seen this in every forum as well VPAt. This is a ridiculous question.</p>
<p>so wait… are you like, kidding?</p>
<p>[Sarcastic and kidding]</p>
<p>Actually, the way rankings work, it’s very important that you pass discrete cutoffs. Depending on how schools work - and Duke works on a .1 basis - you’re rounded DOWN into a certain bracket.</p>
<p>So a 3.69 is the same as a 3.6, and a 3.7 is the same as a 3.79.</p>
<p>At a school like Harvard, which works on quarters, you’d see that a 3.75 was the same as a 3.9999 and a 3.74 was the same as a 3.50. Don’t even ask about Princeton, which works on halves. [I cannot emphasize enough that I am not telling the truth.]</p>
<p>It has to do with the way US News ranks them - if you look at the percentage of students who score a 3.7 or better, and then rank the schools based on that, of course they’ll have an incentive to treat 3.7s different from 3.6s.</p>
<p>[Once again, I’d like to emphasize that I’m not being serious. Of course there’s basically no difference between a 3.69 and a 3.7 
]</p>
<p>Yeah, the Duke policy on the infamous 3.7–>3.69 leap is: “students applying with a 3.69 cumulative GPA will be rejected without further consideration. In addition, a Duke representative will hand-deliver his or her particularly caustic rejection letter to the student, and then slap the student across the face for wasting Duke’s time with such a low GPA.” I took that from the undergraduate admissions website.</p>
<p>Why are so many of you so bitter? He just asked a simple question. If you feel it is stupid, you do not have to answer it.</p>