Ask Stacy Blackman

Hi Sir,

Actually I am a little confused regarding my conversion of GPA into the US scale GPA. Although my college is an NIT( just below IITs) however my particular department ( Production engineering) has a history of giving mediocre grades to students. To cite for example over the last 5 years ( if not more) the maximum GPA from my department has been hovering around a 8.5 or an 8.8. I haven't quite seen a pointer above that. Although this isn't the case in other departments( Mechanical, Computer Science..) where there are people above 9.5 GPA as well. Elaborating a little further, among a batch of about 40 only 8 students or less have a pointer above 8.0 ( my rank would be around a 15 or so and a GPA of 7.0), which made me feel a little different about my particular department. Also this has been a tradition for quite sometime. Actually these combined facts gave me quite a confusion while ascertaining my US scale GPA, which is of course why I turned to the forum. I have heard quite many a times my GPA on plain conversion routes out to a 3.0 on a US scale. I wanted to know your calculation on this.. as an approximation.

What worries me is whether the Adcoms be aware of this fact considering that it applies to only one particular department in our institute? If not how will I address this issue..?Our department has seen admits from London business school, IE business school, Wharton,HEC Paris,Columbia etc but I am still in a doubt as to how far would the rest of the universities know about this particular aspect..? Or rather how would I prove this because neither does my department furnish information that helps Adcoms figure the grading pattern nor has a student been able to provide an additional transcript, for stating our rank or statistics etc from our academics section?

Was wondering on your take on this ?

Thank you! I think that would help me out in this issue.