[olliej]

Seriously, schools in Palo Alto or Stanford itself, producing GPA>4 only means that they’re cooking the numbers by giving some courses a greater than 4 average.

I think the correct thing is to require schools to publish their minimum and maximum grades, and then everyone can just scale that range as appropriate - because why should some kid going to Stanford get to report a 4.0 GPA when they’ve got low grades, but a kid at CSUEB has to report something lower because they’re a state school that can’t invent new grades?

From my personal experience, my GPA when I graduated was 8.7 or something, which at least makes it clear that I’m not on the same scale as you might normally think - whereas a 3.9 from Stanford might seem really good but is bolstered by courses with >4 scores. An extreme would be if you heard someone from my school talk about a 3.9GPA, which if IIRC would imply an average grade in the region of 60% (and yes you could in principle go negative, but that would get you on the “let’s talk about whether uni is right for you” list with the uni admin)

[dieselgate]

Is that a typo or did you actually have an 8.7 gpa? I don’t understand how that’d be possible

[olliej]

Which is entirely the point I was making - having anything based on GPA requires that the GPA have an agreed range, and a bunch of private universities in the US have decided to give students >4.0 GPAs - now if you see someone with a "4.5 GPA" you immediately know they're cooking the books, but a person can also have a 3.9 GPA with a bunch of bad grades countered by a few >4 grades.

My university's GPA was (IIRC) -2..9 or something where 9=A+, 8=A, 7=A-, etc but that wasn't used in any externally facing mechanism, because a GPA as a single score is not useful outside of the school administration. Single average GPAs aren't remotely robust enough to warrant any kind of external value, and they actively discourage any course experimentation because if you are wanting to do anything GPA gated you cannot risk anything that you don't already know you'll get a high grade in.

[dieselgate]

For sure. But weird I didn't know of any universities/colleges that gave above a 4.0 for GPAs (in the US) - thought that was more of a high school thing relating to Honors/AP classes.

[olliej]

Stanford and Harvard at least do this.

[anonymoushn]

Scaling the ranges doesn't fix things for the students. At my high school, some electives only awarded grades up to 4 and others were offered in flavors that went up to 5 or 5.5. Every foreign language actually spoken by modern humans had the first year offered with grades up to 4 only, so optimal play was to take Latin or take Spanish 1 in summer school since that counts for qualifying for Spanish 2 but does not contribute to your GPA. Most kids took Latin because they had lives.

[olliej]

If you want insane you should look at the old sixth form certificate system in NZ - each school is allocated a set of grades to assign to kids based on the grades the prior year got from school certificate. As in say your school got 5 As, 5 Bs, 5 Cs, etc in school certificate exams (the nationwide standard tests from when you are 15), then your school would get 5 1s, 5 2s, etc (1 being the best). Then the school gets to choose how those available grades are distributed - so say the 5 As came from math exams, the school could allocate all the 1s to the English department, so the best grade you could get in 6th form cert outside of the English department would be a 2. I had a friend who was a super talented musician, but his highest possible grade in 6th form music was a 3. Despite getting essentially As across the board in school cert music his best 6th form cert grade for music was notionally a C+/B- or some such.

Given you could get into uni on a high enough 6th form cert grade this is obviously absurd (I think that it was something like your total score for your best 4 subjects had to be less than 6, so you can see how one course consuming 3 points even if you were absolutely perfect screws that)