Did your high school give more points for an A+ than for an A? Did anyone have higher than a 4.0?
Our S24’s HS uses a 4.33 system with no weighting.
The top students have above a 4.0, and above a 4.1 (so roughly at least 1/3rd A+s) is usually at least a few people a year, and above a 4.2 (roughly 2/3rds A+ or more) is rare enough there may not be one in a given year. My S24 was just under half A+s so applied with a 4.16. His friend with above a 4.2 may be the only one in his class (we don’t know), and has been admitted to multiple HYPSM-level colleges and has gotten the Morehead Cain from UNC.
Thanks for your detail. My daughter homeschools and I originally had her GPA based on 4.0, there were pluses and minuses but no extra for an A+. Another homeschool Mom whose child is a senior showed me that she was doing it from a 4.3 and I verified most schools near me so the same. I just wanted to make sure it seems normal that way because an unweighted GPA above 4.0 looks weird to me.
I note the “normal” 4.0 scale where a B+ is a 3.33 or 3.3 and a C+ a 2.33 or 2.3, but an A+ is just a 4.0, offends my sense of logical order (admittedly a minor problem) and is clearly contrary to the interests of highly selective colleges who need as much discrimination at the top as they can get (a more serious problem if you are applying to such colleges). I am in fact sure that is why our feederish HS uses that system, that it on net helps our kids get into top colleges even though no one gets a “perfect” GPA.
In any event, yes, it is not the most common system, but the most selective colleges will have seen it a lot before anyway.
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My kids’ HS weighs all variations on a grade the same (A+, A-, and A are all 4.0, etc., or 5.0 for a weighted class). So the highest possible UW GPA is 4.0. I assume that’s district wide, but I don’t really know. I gather it’s unusual, but it probably doesn’t make a huge difference in the end, except for students who are getting mostly A+ grades (but that’s evident on their transcripts).
Colleges seem to be more likely than high schools to consider +/- as +/- 0.3 or 0.333 or whatever in their own college GPA calculations.
Medical schools and law schools recalculate college GPAs for admission purposes with +/- (but 0.3 for medical school and 0.333 for law school). But an A+ is 4.0 for medical school admission and 4.333 for law school admission.
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This is just more largely pointless complaining, but I really envy the countries where the standard system is something like 100 points. The fact we commonly take 100 point scores, convert them to letters, and then convert them back into numbers on a totally different scale, strikes me as something that could have been included in this sketch:
In any event, the point for the OP is they can use whatever (reasonably common) system they like for highly selective US colleges, because those colleges are used to seeing all sorts of variations, including international systems, and they are likely just going to do their own thing with the transcript anyway.
Of course, the 100 point scores commonly used in US high schools effectively compress the interesting range at the top, while leading high school teachers to make 70% of the grade be based on easy stuff of C students, with only a small portion of the grade based on harder stuff for B and A students.
Certainly relative to uninflated versions, but there are still 11 different A-level grades available, versus 3 in the letter system, and 2 in the 4.0 system.
So maybe there are 100-point schools where as many people get 100.0 GPAs as other schools have people getting 4.0 GPAs, but they seem rarer to me in practice.
Our kids’ school doesn’t give A+s so the gpa is out of 4.0. It seems illogical to me that you can get an A- but not an A+
My boarding school (I graduated mid 90s) did the 100 point scale, which I agree is better. Our valedictorian had the highest average in our class - an 87 - and went to Princeton. How times have changed!
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Particularly if you can get a B+ or C+!
Awesome.
One of my personal favorite grading scales is the Chicago Law 186-point scale:
It is intentionally impossible to intuitively translate into anything familiar to most.
I wonder if any homeschool families have ever used it? Probably a bad idea but it might work for Chicago!
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Basically, that Chicago Law grading scale is a scale with 32 different grades (with 5-8 grades corresponding to each of the typical letter grades), with competitive grading (the median is forced to be the 8th to 10th highest grade, or the higher part of the B range).
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You got it, with the additional note that the 0-31 point scale is reported with +155 (meaningless) base points.
The basic history of that is it used to be +55, so it was a 55-86 scale. But this was considered confusing, possibly in an adverse way, given the superficial similarity to the common 100-point scale. So, they made it +155, aka added a 1 in front of the old scale.