Table 1: Aggressive Version

Table 2: Moderate Version

Table 3: Conservative Version

Here is an example of converting a person's Chinese scores into a GPA score according to Table 1: Aggressive Version. Let us assume that you have scores from 3 courses. The first course is a 4-unit course and you have a score of 93. The second course is a 3-unit course and you got a score of 87. The last is a 2-unit course and you have 75. Then your GPA is:

GPA = Sum of [ (Course unit) x (GPA scores)] / Sum of (Course units)

= (4x3.7 + 3x3.3 + 2x2.3) / (4 + 3 + 2) = 3.256

Course Unit: In the US, universities use two systems: Semester (one academic year is divided into 2 semesters, Fall and Spring) and Quarter (one academic year is divided into 3 Quarters: Fall, Winter and Spring). In the Semester system, if a course is taught 3 hours a week, then this course is usually counted as a 3-unit course. This is true in the Quarter system, but a 3-unit course in a Quarter system is not the same as a 3-unit course in a Semester system; the former is shorter than the latter. Therefore, a university with a Quarter system requires a Master's student to take 36 units and that with a Semester system requires to take 30 units. Chinese instruction hours is generally longer than American. A similar course is usually taught 4 hours per week in China and 3-hours per week in the US in a Semester system.

You may also find some useful information from the websites listed below:

http://www.bebeyond.com/StudyAbroad/Application/FAQ/FAQ.html

http://www.bebeyond.com/StudyAbroad/AppCenter/FAQ/GPA.html

A Reader's Comments (1)

Thanks for Dr. Erkin Sidick's great work for doing this for future Uyghur students in the States. I believe they definitely get a lot of benefit from all this, and also appreciate it.

Actually GPA is a hot topic among all the potential international students to the States, since they need to convert the percentage grades to grade points. According to my and my friends' application experiences, many universities never question if you use percentage score 90 as 4.0, 80 as 3.0, 70 as 2.0, and so on. I was also told they tolerate even lover percentage scores for the same grade points. Because many US universities believe the percentage scores in the overseas have somewhat different meanings from school to school, and country to country. That is the reason they did not set up exact one to one converting numbers, but just recommend some range. As to the graduate studies, the top 100 universities and many others require 3.0 or higher GPA. However, among the American students, it is very easy to find many many students with the GPA higher than 3.0, but it is NOT easy to find them in the Chinese universities, especially in those famous ones, like BeiDa, QingHua, and many others. Do you think American students are smarter than those from China. NO. When American professors generously give several students A and A+ in a 30-student class, those Chinese professors only give few of them scores higher than 80, and often times no one can get higher than 90. When I was a college student, a Chinese professor said, in the first day of the class, please work hard from today, at the end of the semester, only one of you 29 students will get 85 (highest score), and 3 of you must be failed! Here two counties are telling us two different systems.

Now, if we look at our Uyghur students who came to the States by taking TOEFL and GRE (GMAT) in China during the last 10 years, we would find most of them were graduated from those Chinese universities in inner provinces (nei di). There are some from universities in Xinjiang, but very few ones. This fact is telling us that our future Uyghur American students may still largely graduate from the universities in inner provinces. According to the tough Chinese grading system talked above, our Uyghur students who attend those Chinese universities may end up with even lower grades even if they work very hard on their school works. Because when we say excellent Uyghur students can get 80-90 in math in the college entrance exam in Xinjiang, however excellent Chinese students may even get a full score, 120 in Hebei or Shandong. So when our best Uyghur students go to inner provinces and merge with those Chinese guys in a same class, they would face a great challenge to get that crazy Chinese professor's 85, top score! So most excellent Uyghur students there finish their undergraduate study with ZongHeCePing (GPA) 80 or lower, which means 3.0 or lower in American way. However, I strongly believe if those Uyghur students go to any US universities, they can be successful, may even get scores like A and A+. One of my friends who got 3 classes less than 65 in his undergraduate, recently successfully finished his Ph.D in one of the world famous universities in a very developed country, and gave two excellent presentations in international conferences. I am really proud of him. He proved how excellent he is!

Therefore, we need to send the best signal to our fellow students at home. Here, besides providing the score converting information, we can let them know some other good ways to handle this. 1. When they prepare their class tables, they can drop those classes like SiXiangPingDe (moral education), SheHuiZhuYiJianShe (socialism construction), DangShi (history of communistic party) if the scores are low in these classes. I don't think US professors are interested in competencies on these fields. 2. They can use a converting table like 88 to 4.0, 78 to 3.0, 68 to 2.0, and so on. 3. In their Study Plans (Personal Statements), they can mention about the tough scoring system their university or department has. 4. They can also say that they care more real ability not just high scores, if you say you are more research oriented the US professors would be delighted! 5. They also can provide the rank in the class if everybody is got very low scores. As to those excellent students who graduate from the universities in Xinjiang, this is not a big issue, because most excellent students there can get scores higher than 85 even 90. Then, spent time to improve their English if they are in Uyghur education system.

At the end, I hope we all can exchange our ideas and share our experiences to provide some valuable guidelines for our future Uyghur American students. Please don't let those excellent Uyghur students happened to have Chinese GPA 75 (<3.0 US GPA) be away from their American Dream!

By Sada

A Reader's Comments (2)

Hello Sada,

You pointed extremely important issues and I am very sure that the future Uyghur applicants benefit from your explaination. I scored the highest at my hometown on the college entrance exams and my score was the second highest ( the first one only higher 2 points higher than I did) in my class in college. I studied pretty hard and I was one of the top intelligent students in my class when we had to discuss but I did not do very well on the exams because of the professors' scoring system. Our professors said the same thing at the beginning of each class that at least 2-3 students must to be failed on each exam and 3-4 students would not recieve the BAs.
During the teaching practice period, I received the highest praise from my students but I got 90 and I was very discourgaged but later I learnt that mine was the highest. Then we had to write a paper for the BA degree and I got 80 even though my professor liked my paper very much and wanted me to send to a publisher. Again, I was very discouraged about the score but agian, 80 was the top score for the papers.

My GPA in the Chinese system was 78.7 and I was somewhat happy as I compared mine with the others but when I was applying schools in the US, I was very disappointed again. My American colleage said, " Honey, I am not sure if you will be accepted because they want a GPA of 3.0 and yours is a little bit lower." I told her that it is high in the Chinese education system but she said the schools in the US do not care. However, I went to school in the US and my GPA has been always higher than 3.70.

I think we should put some of your explainations on the website by the GPA system so that the new applicants will learn and will not be discouraged. You did make excellent points. I was a teacher myself and I had to fail at least 4-5 students in each course according to the rules of the school. That is very bad.

By Gulkiz

Closing Remarks:

When I received the above comments, I had only Table 1 in this section. I added Table 2 and Table 3 above after I received some inputs from our readers. I am more than happy to consider any comments/suggestions you may have, and hope you feel free to give me your inputs by sending an e-mail to: erkinsidiq @ gmail.com . Thanks.

Erkin Sidick