What is more reliable collegeboard or the college's actual website?

[fallenchemist]

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But if you think about it, the higher up the grades, the harder attainable towards the magical 4.0. Therefore the spacing of one 100-scale point would mean less of an interval wrt the 4-point scale, which would seem to be a natural occurence.</p>

<p>2.0 is -.01 gpa point of falling into the “D” catagory. 3.0 is -.01 from the “C.”

I don’t understand all of what you are saying, but you are confused. Specifically, you are confusing absolute numbers with relative spacing. To make it clear without going into long explanations, I could take someone’s score on a 100 point scale, divide the whole scale by 100, and now claim that it is a 0-1 point scale and the difference between falling from one category to another is 0.01. I could divide by 1,000 to make it a 0-0.1 scale and say the difference is 0.001. It is completely arbitrary. Even using the scales as currently constructed, it depends on how many decimal places you want to take things out.</p>

<p>I honestly have no idea what you mean about the people that made the conversion scales being lazy. It is Princeton Review and College Board, lol. You continue to use 70=2.0, but that is not the convention used by anyone else I know of. 75=2.0 in most peoples “book”.</p>

<p>Let me try a different example. In our system it might be 75 degrees F outside, and then the next day 85 F. A 10 degree difference, right? But not to a European. The temperature went from 23.9 to 29.4, only a 5.5 degree difference. But of course the change was the same. For these two grading scales, it is similar except that you LOSE precision in converting a precise number (87) to a designation that represents a range of possible quantities (83-87 perhaps), so that seeing a B means you don’t know if that person earned an 83 or an 87 or something in between. Now converting that B back to yet another scale, the conventional GPA scale, would be a 3.0. But again, you don’t know if that person averaged an 83 or an 87 to earn that 3.0. If we had left everything as the 0-100 all along, and reported it that way with no conversions, you would know if they got an 83, 84, 85, 86 or 87 rather than just seeing a 3.0.</p>

<p>You don’t need to answer, because this is really fairly basic and I am right. It also doesn’t matter much to most colleges that they lose that bit of precision, because 1) it tends to balance out where you got the benefit of having an 83 be a B versus an 87 being a B; and 2) they don’t need things to be that precise in their decisions. Still, it makes one wonder why we ever moved away from just reporting the simple 0-100 number.</p>