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US Unis and your GPA


IBStuck

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Ok. So a today there was at least 2 people asking about American unis and GPAs. If you are an international student you usually don't have a GPA but there is a way to calculate it. The uni I am going to next year in the states has a calculator on their website, but it only good for their school... I think, but I have googled it for all of you.

This is the page at my school explaining what a GPA is:

http://www.missouristate.edu/registrar/gpa.html

this is a link from that same page to their calculator which might provide some help:

https://www.ws.missouristate.edu/admissions/gpacalculator/

this is one is for you GPA by semester... to get your cumulative GPA, just take the average, because that is all you GPA is:

http://www.back2college.com/gpa.htm

Good luck to all!!!

It is also important to remember that students in the US can not have GPA too. You need to be in one school for about 2 years to have a GPA. And also... i think it would be inmortant if the school knew that you had calculated your own GPA, but I don't know hw you would tell them.

Edited by IBStuck
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what i ending up telling Mark was just to call the schools... they will be able to tell you exactly what they want.

call the office of addmissions... the phone number wwill be on thier webstie and the hours at which you can call them.

you can emial them too if you don't want to call, but i think the phone is better coz it is faster, and you can ask the different questions you might have as they pop in your head, but then again i live in the states so it isn't an overseas phone call.

good luck to all.

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nice...if you look around you can find sites that show you scatter diagrams of students that made it into specific unis and those who didn't. it's plotted as GPA over SAT scores if u can visualize what i mean...i'm gonna look into it to see if i can provide some links

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How can you have GPA if you are doing IB?

does 7 = A

6 = B

5= C ...etc?

there is a scale that we have at my school with my IBC here but i think it might differ from school to school. the one you have is wrong. it is close though to the one we use.

i live in the US.... i wll graduate with a regulat high school diaploma, and and IB one. IB is differnt her in that way that i have a GPA. if i don't get my IB diploma i still will recive another diaploma. so we don't get IB grades in our classes. the final tests really arn't made a big deal of. i don't know how to really explain it.

the best thing to do if you are concerend about not haveing a GPA nad appltying to schools her is to contact the schools that you are interested in. Call them or email them. all of theinforamtion you would need is on thier websites. of you have a hrad time finding it on their main page, there should be a search box, and type in "offic of admissions" or "admissions" and make sure that they know you are an international student and that you aer doing the IB diploma program, and that you don't have a GPA, and were concerend about what you need to do to apply to thier school.

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  • 3 months later...
there is a scale that we have at my school with my IBC here but i think it might differ from school to school. the one you have is wrong. it is close though to the one we use.

i live in the US.... i wll graduate with a regulat high school diaploma, and and IB one. IB is differnt her in that way that i have a GPA. if i don't get my IB diploma i still will recive another diaploma. so we don't get IB grades in our classes. the final tests really arn't made a big deal of. i don't know how to really explain it.

the best thing to do if you are concerend about not haveing a GPA nad appltying to schools her is to contact the schools that you are interested in. Call them or email them. all of theinforamtion you would need is on thier websites. of you have a hrad time finding it on their main page, there should be a search box, and type in "offic of admissions" or "admissions" and make sure that they know you are an international student and that you aer doing the IB diploma program, and that you don't have a GPA, and were concerend about what you need to do to apply to thier school.

Same here...we get graded on a numerical basis from essentially 0 to 100 marks per class, where 90-100 is an A range (you get minuses and pluses), 80-90 is a B, 70-80 is a C, 65-70 is a D, and anything below 65 if a F. These grades are then adjusted to the IB scale and it varies by the class. Generally though A 7 = A, 6 = B+ to A-, so forth.

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if your school doesn't convert your IB scores to Percentages, or letter grade you just have to talk to that uni becasue that means you really don't have a GPA. tell them that you are an internation student who did the IB progamme, and beuse it was based off of the IB scale you don't have a GPA. they should be able to work it out for you. *i hope that i am not repeating myself here*

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  • 6 months later...

YAY IT'S MY TURN TO GIVE THE MATH ANSWER USING SOME COOL METAPHORS!!!

Allright, GPA works kind of like this. Imagine you have a chest and in it go all the classes you take starting in 9th grade, sort of (technically they take classes before this but only if they're honors or AP but since it's a completely different world outside of the US we'll ommit this). GPA's are really easy to calculate if you're in the States because the classes you take are very systematic, most of the times at least. On average, most public US schools offer either 6 or 8 classes a year with a total of 24 or 32 credits at the end of the four years. Basically, an A is 4 points a B is 3, you know the rest. So say you took the 32 classes and got all As:

4*(32)/(32) = 4.0 so you have a 4.0 unweighted or in other words you have no life, lol jk you probably do but you're still weird, go outside and play WOW or something jeez... Allright so the unweighted is pretty much self-explanatory, just grab all of your classes, international students are probably gonna have more or less, idk and it doesnt matter cause its an average. By the way, I have a 3.7 becuase I got a B in weightraining and precalculus...how ironic huh?

The weighted GPA which is the one that everyone really looks at is the one that measures how hard your classes are. What do I mean by this? Well try to follow me here. The regular GPA is an average of what you got on your classes. There are thousands and thousands of students only in my state that have higher unweighted GPAs than me, but that has nothing to do with how smart you are because you could literally take all 24 regular classes against my 6 IB, 6 AP, 15 college, 6 honors, and 2 regular and still have a higher GPA than me. The weighted GPA is a little more fair (to me at least :D ) and it measures how much you've tried in High School rather than how well you've done in the classes. It goes something like this:

Any IB, AP, or college classes, or any other hard-sounding class give it a value of 2. Any honors class give it a value of 1. Regulars get 0. Add up all those points, in my case 2(6) + 2(6) + 2(15) + 1(6) + 0(2) and divide it by 15; don't ask, some angry Republican woke up one day and decided that 15 was the fair ratio for weighted GPAs and now they calculate it like that. So that ends up giving me 4.0 exactly. You add that to your unweighted and get the grand total of...

7.7ish

Now lets adjust it for our eager international friends. A few things I should mention: one, everything I just said is completely useless to you. That's pretty much it. STOP WORRYING ABOUT GPAs! The colleges, if they're decent enough, which they probably are if you're applying to them, will find their own way of testing whether you've taken challanging courses or not. If you want go ahead and try to approximate it, but even this GPA system isn't recognized in MANY parts of the country. Take MIT for example. They compare you to almost every "GPA" system there is and make their pick from that. Of course there are always going to be people who tell you that all that matters is SAT scores and GPAs. Well that's not true, take it from someone who doesn't have a great GPA or great SAT scores and yet managed to make it into an awesome school. It definately helps your nerves to know you did the best in a certain area, like GPAs. But in the end just remember there is always someone with more classes than you or better mixed SAT scores so think about being a normal human beign...being...beeing, I don't know how to spell that word.

Good luck to all 2013 college freshmen!! And remember, IB math studies is NOT math.

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Good luck to all 2013 college freshmen!! And remember, IB math studies is NOT math.

Holy cow! O.O;; I need more info on this... how is Math Studies not math? T^T My IB Coordinator sucks and told us that it's math and we students will get our credits in college for it. T^T

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Holy cow! O.O;; I need more info on this... how is Math Studies not math? T^T My IB Coordinator sucks and told us that it's math and we students will get our credits in college for it. T^T
LOL. He's right it isnt math. You better not be taking math studies if your going into science/business/economics/engineering basically.. should only be taking it if your gonna become a writer/literature person/ lawyer?

you are slightly wrong. in the US it doesn't matter. so if you are planning to go to uni in the US Krazim then you are not accepted into the university or chosen degree program based off of your IB scores. you can get college credit for studoes, but not a lot of unis give college credit for that. i would honestly suggest dual enrollment if that is possible, and if it is from a large enough uni, and not from a community cllege so that it will transfer.

if you know the unis you are intersted in, then look at their websitre to see how they accept IB as credit fi they do at all.

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  • 3 months later...
I don't mean to generalize, but I've heard that unis that take IB credit are mainly the California schools? And a small cluster in Florida?
Lots of universities take IB credit for our HLs, including the ivies.

There are unis all over that will give you credit for IB. I go to a medium sized school in Missouri and it is my first year here but I am already a sophomore. So, that isn't necessarily true. You would just have to check with the unis that you are looking at. You can usually find it on their websites, and then just searching for IB.

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  • 2 years later...

More and more universities are starting to accept IB credit in the United States, though the level of credit compared to AP is usually a pittance... Several years ago Virginia actually passed a law mandating that state schools accept AP and IB credit because some schools were giving no credit at all for IB classes. However, many universities, particularly the more "elite" ones such as the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, tend to only give credit for high scores on the HL exams. Most of such info can be found on the undergrad admissions portions of their sites.

One of my (IB) teachers actually has recommended that if you take an IB SL but do pretty well, to consider taking the corresponding AP test if there is the opportunity, to get the college credit for the course. (This would be assuming application to American universities)

Edited by erganizer
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  • 4 weeks later...

My school allows upgrades (so when we get a B we can do extra work to get an A), and i get 4.0 GPA.. I'm just wondering will US unis depend more on GPAs or IB scores?

Many things factor into admissions into US unis and have different weights depending on the uni, but generally it's GPA over IB scores. US unis tend to give unconditional admissions where passing IB or getting a certain score is necessary for admission (like in the UK).

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