gpa conventions

[keyguy]

Hi there.

I'm a first time poster.  I'm going into 3rd year undergrad in Canada.  I was wondering what the 'gpa' numbers mean.

Is it out of 4 or 4.5?
What does a 3.8 or 3.9 mean in percentage?

Thanks

[Andrew]

Generally US high schools go up to 4.0.  Some schools allow a little more for AP classes and such (maybe an "A" is worth 4.3).  Thus it's possible to have a little over a 4.0.

In terms of percentage, do you mean percentage to get the grade or percentage in terms of class rank?  Generally, A's are given for scores ranging from 90% to 100% on exams.  (This is very flexible of course.)  As for class rank percentage, I don't think there is a clear answer, rank is usually determined by GPA, not the other way around.

Does that make sense?

[Andrew]

By the way - I don't know why I was talking about high school GPA instead of university GPA, but university GPA follows the same rules as high school GPA - GPA above 4.0 occurs less frequently though - as universities are less likely to give grades above 4.0.

[keyguy]

Right.  So US universities go up to 4.0.  Let's say someone in Canada ends up with cumulative average of 85% in undergrad (not percentile gpa or 'ranking' in class).
So what would this be in terms of gpa; would it be 3.5 or so..

[Andrew]

That sounds logical to me.  If 4.0 is 100% (that's generally fair to say - that is 100% of the best you can get), and 0.0 is 0%, than 2.0 would be 50%, 3.0 would be 75%, and 3.5 would be 83ish%.  Certainly there's someone on this board that knows more about this than me though.  Don't be shy...

[Ivy_Hopeful]

i/m going to go with 3.4 GPA (US) is equivelant to 85th percentile (Canadian 85%) just do this math plug in numbers to equate to 85% of 100

3.4 / 4 = 85% (in other words)

3.4 (plugged in for x) divided by 4 (the perfet GPA 4.0) equals 85%

That is assuming what Andrew assumes is that it is raw number math othewise consult a CAnadian undergrad for this answer if it is different than the obvious. Right Andrew?

Does this clarify things keyguy?

[Gildwulf]

 Canadian GPA is done differently than American.  I am also a 3rd year undergraduate at a Canadian university (McGill).  Here, an 85-100 is an A (4.0), an 80-84 is an A-(3.7), 75-79 is a B+(3.3), 70-74 is a B(3) and so on and so forth.  The number grading depends on what school you go to and whether you are in US or Canada.  But generally, a B is a 3, an A is a 4, and so on.  A 3.4 at McGill would be a mid B+(3.3-3.69 is a B here), but that would be a very high mark at this particular school.  

Cheers

[Ivy_Hopeful]

Thank you, that clears alot up. My understanding of the Canadian GPA system has become much better  

[jgruber]

As a computer programmer, I helped to design and build a student information system for a large state-supported university.  We had to build a great deal of flexibility into the grading component to allow for the many variations on GPA just within the colleges of that one university.

I think that some of the colleges just wanted to be different.