About GPA Calculator

The GPA Calculator website facilitates translations from international schools' GPA scales to the US 4.0 scale.

International school GPA values are often reported on a percentage or other scale (e.g., 100=A, 90=A-, 80=B, etc.). For use in graduate admission, these values need to be translated to the US 4.0 scale. These translations vary by country and sometimes by individual institution.

The GPA Calculator website contains a list of schools and translation data. For each school, the translation data editor enters the school name, school code and and a set of GPA translation points (e.g., 100=4.0, 90=3.6, 80=3.0, 70=2.0).

Staff can search the website for a school by name or code, and enter a total international GPA value to calculate the US value. For values between the correspondence points, linear interpolation is used (e.g., 95=3.8, 73=2.3).

When integrated into the UCI legacy Graduate Application Tracking System (GATS), applicants are prompted for their school name, school code, and international GPA value. For known institutions, the US GPA value is then calculated and stored.

When integrated into Technolutions Slate, the Reader Form displays a search box for School name or code. Once a known institution is selected, its GPA translation points are displayed, and a Scale button is enabled. An international GPA value can be entered and then translated to a scaled (4.0) value.

The GPA Calculator website was designed in June 2017 by John Romine, Director of Computing for the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, and Amy Pham, Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, at the University of California, Irvine. The website was developed in PHP with Drupal 7 by John Romine.

The School GPA translation data was developed and maintained by Amy Pham, and Jean Bennett, Director of Graduate and Professional Studies, in the UCI Henry Samueli School of Engineering.

Integration into Technoloutions Slate was developed by John Romine with assistance from Audra Hansen, Associate Director of Graduate Admissions, UCI Graduate Division, and Charles Wilson, Slate consultant and Director for Technology Operations at the University of Chicago.

Special thanks to Court S. Crowther, Assistant Graduate Dean, UCI Graduate Division, and Ruth M. Quinnan, Director of Admissions & Academic Affairs, UCI Graduate Division for their leadership and direction on this collaborative work project.

Other work: An early booklet of GPA translation tables was developed at UCLA and was key to realizing this solution. Amy Pham developed Excel calculation spreadsheets used to translate course grades and compute GPAs. John Romine developed a web browser extension for Firefox and Chrome to test integration with Slate, as well as a GPA website implementation using Google Sheets and Google Apps Script. A calculator app for Microsoft Windows was coded in Python by Daniel Huy Tran, an undergraduate student in UCI Computer Science and Engineering based on requirements from Natalie Imondi, Graduate Admissions Program Coordinator in UCI EECS.