What do American GPA's mean?

Factual Questions
1

I see people proudly quoting GPA’s of 3.9 and 4, so I assume they are very high. In Australian a GPA of 3.9 would be a conceded pass, a 4 just a pass.

Our grading system is as follows -

85-100 - High distinction - grade of 7
75-84 - Distinction - grade of 6
65-74 - Credit - grade of 5
50-64 - Pass - grade of 4
47-49 - conceded pass - grade of 3
25-46 Fail - grade of 2
0-24 Fail - grade of 1
(not sure of the difference between the 2 fail grades)

I believe most, if not all universities in Australia use this system. Can anyone enlighten me as to the US system?

2

US high schools and colleges are usually on a 4-point scale, which means that grades range from 0.0 to 4.0. Grade points are reported to one or two decimals, usually. I’ve always seen it such that 4.0 corresponded to an A, 3.0 corresponded to a B, 2.0 to a C, 1.0 to a D, and 0.0 to an F. My college also had 3.67 corresponding to an A-, 3.33 to a B+, and so on, but I don’t think this is universal.

So a Grade Point Average of 4.0 means straight A’s.

3

That’s normal, but not universal. My college, for instance, used a 5 point scale, and my children’s high school uses a degree-of-difficulty weighting that lets GPA’s get above 4.0.

4

The University of New Mexico does it this way (and I imagine others do as well):

Each professor gives a letter grade for his or her class. These grades can be calculated in any way he or she wishes; on a straight scale they would be 90-100% = A, 80-89% = B, 70-79% = C, 60-69% = D, and 59% or less is an F, which means no credit at all. The professors can also give “+” or “-” grades, so that, say, a 92 is an A-, an 88 is a B+ and so on. Some classes are graded “on the curve,” meaning that the group’s scores are compared, with those in the middle getting a C and a certain percentage on either side of the mean getting the other grades.

The letters correspond to the GPA in this way:

A = 4.0
B = 3.0
C = 2.0
D = 1.0
F = 0

In this system, an A- is 3.67, a B+ is 3.33, and so on.

Looking at it all written out this way, it sure does seem unnecessarily complicated and somewhat odd, but that’s how they do it here.

5

We have a letter grading system which usually breaks down one of two ways:

10 point scale:

A: 90-100%
B: 80-89%
C: 70-79%
D: 60-69%
F: Below 60

7 point scale:
A:94-100%
B: 93-86
C: 85-79%
D: 78-70% (they give a little room here)
F: below 71

The GPA is calculated by assigning the letter grades to a numeric scale as follows:

4: A
3: B
2: C
1: D
0: F

and then multiplying each class’s grade by the number of credit hours the class is worth. Add all those together and divide by the total credit hours taken, giving a weighted average.

So for example, if I took 9 credit hours consisting of a 4 hour class, a 3 hour class and a 2 hour class, and made a B in the 4 hr class, a C in the 3 hr class and an A in the 2 hr class, my GPA would be:

(3 x 4) + (2 x 3) + (4 x 1) / 9 = 2.44.

A 3.9 or 4.0 grade point average would mean that this person made either straight A’s or damn close.

There are also US institutions that have a more granular GPA calculation system- i.e., a 100% = 4 grade points, 95% = 3.75, 90% = 3.5, etc… but the classical system is what I described.

6

My high school does it on a six-point scale. For Advanced Placement/G&T/IB/Etc classes, you get 6 points for an A. For honors, 5 points. For standard, 4. This is how class ranks are determined, but they also calculate it on a 4-point scale, mostly so colleges know what the hell you’re talking about. So while a 3.75 may seem great, it may be a C average.

7

Er, bump, your math is wrong. You multiplied the 2-hour class by 1. Assuming the credit hours and grades are as they are given in the rest of your example, it would be:

(3 points x 4 hours) + (2 points x 3 hours) + (4 points x 2 hours) = 26 hours*points

26 hours*points/9 hours = 2.89 points. In other words, a bit under a B average.

8

As others have pointed out, the traditional US GPA scale is 0-4. Purdue University used to have a strange 0-5 point scale where 0 was a failing grade and then everything else was assigned on 2-5. There was no grade corresponding to a 1.

9

Thanks all, that explains a lot. Here our marks are also usually distributed via the normal curve, with 50% the pass mark, at least in subjects where a markers subjective opinion is involved (eg essay questions). It all makes it hard to make comparisons between the systems, we don’t use the A, B, C grading at all in most universities. Having a mark of 71% as the cut off for failure seems very harsh, yet somehow I don’t think your standards would be all that differnt from ours. Its all a matter of the system used I guess.

10

auliya writes:

> Having a mark of 71% as the cut off for failure seems very
> harsh, yet somehow I don’t think your standards would be all
> that differnt from ours.

I suspect it’s really no difference at all. A system in which a 70% on a test is just barely passing is probably no different in practice than a system in which a 60% on a test is just barely passing, which is probably no different in practice than a system in which a 50% on a test is just barely passing, which is probably no different in practice than a system in which a 40% on a test is just barely passing, etc. A teacher simply decided beforehand how much knowledge of the subject he thinks deserves a barely passing grade and then he makes the test just hard enough that someone with that level of knowledge will just barely get 70% or 60% or 50% or 40% or whatever on the test. There may or may not be significant differences between the level of knowledge expected in courses in different countries (or even between different schools within the same country), but you can’t use the percentage-based grading systems to tell what those differences are. The percentages are simply an arbitrary artifact that teachers fit their own standards into.

11

auliya-

You hit upon my biggest peeve regarding grades. The bell curve, which I feel is a crock of shit.

Why should an exam result be based in any way on what one’s peers do? Then what does a grade mean? I can only compare results within a group.

The idea of a grade is to reflect “absolute” mastery of a subject, not “relative mastery”.

If I get 89 out of 100 questions right and no one else had more than 89, I deserve an “A”, but if everyone else score higher than 90, I’m a failure? How assinine.
That grading system has no merit to me!

12

The 10-point scale is the most common, but in my school district in Chicago, both in primary and secondary schools the following breakdown was used:

A = 93-100
B = 85-92
C = 75 - 84
D = 70 - 74
F = 0-60

Grades on the cusp were given pluses or minuses. “e.g. a 93 would be A-, a 92 a B+”

Occassionaly, curves would be used, but I don’t know of any teacher who used the standard normal-distribution bell curve. Depending on the class, most of the time the curve would be weighted so the average grade is a B, with basically an equal number of A’s and C’s on either side. (The few left-over stragglers would get D’s and F’s.)

In terms of GPA, the 0-4 schedule is used, but some schools add and subract for pluses and minuses. (In my case, 0.3 is the amount. In other words, a B would be 3.0, a B+ is 3.3, an A- is 3.7)

To further complicate matters, in high school, honors and AP (advanced placement) classes are very often weighted differently from normal classes. In my high school, we had a 1.2 multiplier for honors classes, so that an A was 4.8, B 3.6, C 2.4, D 1.2, F 0.
In other schools I’ve seen they use a 5,4,3,2,0 system for weighting advanced classes.

Classically, though, a 4.0 GPA is considered perfect.

13

Shoot, the “F” should be “0-69” in the first chart.

14

If you want a really screwey grading scheme, I once had a gym teacher who gave us a 4-point grade on each of several events, then added those up and turned them into a percentage on the 90-80-70-60 scale. So if you got a C in each of the five events, that was 10/20, which is 50%, which is an F. When I confronted him about the obvious illogic of this system, his reply was that hey, he didn’t write the laws of math.

15

My law school used a 12-point scale, where a B=10.