Physics GRE Discussion Forums

Hi everyone.

I'm an Italian student and I'm applying for PhD these months for 2020. I have an excellent Master GPA, which is very close to 4.0, but I got a bad semester back in Bachelor. I'm not sure, however, how this will be counted, and I don't know exactly what my reference is.

Let me explain: my bachelor was 6 semesters: in the first 5 i got around 29/30 on average (that's the Italian grading), but in the last semester went particularly bad for personal difficulties, and my average dropped to 28.4/30. which is still good fro Italia standards. I am still deciding what universities to apply for and I would like a reference. The fact is that for me things like 3.8 or 3.5 are kind obscure.

I have tried two conversions to US GPA:
28.4/30 --> 28.4/30*4 = 3.78 still very good
or, taking into account the fact that in Italy PASS is 18/30:
28.4/30 --> (28.4-18)/(30-18)*4=10.4/12 = 3.46 I would say "only" good ?

I was wondering which one would have the most significance, to better choose the aim schools

Thank you in advance for any help

I am not sure how it is done in the US but every university should have some sort of conversion table or something. You can ask the university to be sure.
According to McGill University, 28.5/30 should be around 3.7/4. you can check this link https://www.mcgill.ca/gradapplicants/in ... quivalency to see their conversion table. McGill is just one university in Canada but I would assume other universities in Canada and the US would have a similar conversion table.

I am an international student. For the moment, none university has required to convert my grade to gpa.

I understand that the evaluation of your transcripts will consider the context of your country. There are country where it is not normal to reach the maximun grade, even for the best students in the country. Other countries is easier to reach the maximun score. Therefore, a linear transformation does not have any sense.

For instance, Mexico and Spain use a similar scale for grading. However, they are different country, this implies that how amounts of people reach the maximum score is different.