GPA Calculating

Finals are approaching and people start to care more about their GPAs. It becomes very conspicuous by this time every year that people care about their grades all of a sudden despite the irony that each summative and the final exam do not differ very much from the proportion they take in the overall grade.

What does GPA stand for and what does it mean?

Grade Point Average – the grade point average (GPA) allows you to translate the letter grades you typically get from your classes. IB classes such as TOK or CAS do not provide a letter grade for reports and hence are not included in GPA calculations.

Our school’s GPA translation from letter grade to number is:

A+/A/A- : 4.3/4.0/3.7

B+/B/B-: 3.3/3.0/2.7

C+/C/C-: 2.3/2.0/1.7

D+/D/D-: 1.3/1.0/0.7

*For every IB Higher Level subject, there is a 0.5 boost. e.g. A in a Higher Level subject would be a 4.5.

Technically pluses and minuses are X.33 an X.66, but people in general use X.3 and X.7 for the sake of convenience.

Calculations

Now here comes a bit of maths involved. High schoolers probably all know how to calculate the average (professional term: mean) of given numbers. Just translating the formula to easy English, it would be:

Add up the grade points of all subjects and divide it by the number of subjects you take.

An IB student who takes three HLs with 3 solid As and 3 solid Bs would make

(4.0*3 + 3.0*3 + 0.5*3)/6 = 3.75.

Mental maths

It would be impressive to go over the process above in your head in a few seconds to tell your friend, “oh, your GPA is 3.8”. But for people who just want a slight glimpse of what their grades are, it would be easier to look at their cluster grade (the letter grade which you usually get or get the most; the mode letter grade). Then get the grade point and you can see that the grade points pretty much balance out.

e.g. Let’s say an IB student who takes three HLs has 3 A-s 2 As and 1 B+.

A normal IB Diploma student has his boosts for the GPA by 0.25 as it is 0.5 per HL for 3 HLs.

Mode: A- (3.7 + 0.25 = 3.95)

The mean of one A and one B+ is A-, so it cancels out.

The difference between the mean derived so far and the last grade point is 0.05, and dividing it by 6 would be too minuscule and trivial to calculate. So we can know this student has a weighted GPA of somewhere between 3.9 and 4.0.

Remarks

Personally, in a peculiar only-IB-American-school, the GPA does not seem so important, since the IB predicted score shows pretty much everything of how diligent or intelligent the person was. However, for those who are paranoid of GPAs and final exams, I would say you need not worry if you worked hard enough for your formative and summative tests.