ʻATENISI UNIVERSITY

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GRADE POINT CALCULATIONS

The following procedure is followed to determine whether a student has obtained sufficient credits to graduate with an associate or bachelor degree.

Every course is assigned a certain number of credit hours or units, determined by the duration and intensity of the course. Most year courses count 12 units. A one semester course (1/2 of a year) usually carries 6 units, and so forth.

A student needs to pass a total of 108 units to obtain an associate degree, and an additional 96 for a bachelor degree, making a total of 204 units. In case of a good associate performance, (that is a associate gradepoint average of 2.50 or more, as explained below), the bachelor requirement goes down to 84, or 192 total. Also note that failed courses, including withdrawals, incompletes, repeats and audits do not add up to the total unit requirement.

At the end of the course, the instructor will assign to every registered student a grade, according to a fair scheme, which should be explained to the students at the begin of the course. Grades run from 0% (absolutely bad) to 100% (absolutely perfect). However a lettergrade, A (excellent), B (good), C (average), D (below average), or F (fail) will appear on the student's transcript, adjusted with '+' or '-' according to the following scheme:

percents	lettergrade	gradepoints
0...59	F	0.0
60...62	D-	1.0
63...66	D	1.3
67...69	D+	1.7
70...72	C-	2.0
73...76	C	2.3
77...79	C+	2.7
80...82	B-	3.0
83...86	B	3.3
87...89	B+	3.7
90...92	A-	3.9
93...97	A	4.0
98...100	A+	4.0

A course is deemed to have been passed with a 60% or more grade.

Once the lettergrade is given, the number of gradepoints directly follows from it. A student needs an average of 2.00 gradepoints or more (C- or better) to graduate for an associate degree and 2.50 or more (between C and C+) to graduate for a bachelor degree.

The used formula for the grade point average (GPA) = sum of (grade points x units) / sum of units

In this formula the sums are taken over all attempted courses, failed or passed. However withdrawals, audit courses and repeated courses are excluded.

Example
A student takes the following 2 courses and obtains the results as shown:

course title	units	grade	total gradepoints
Tongan dance practice & theory	4	B+	4 x 3.7 = 14.8
Difficult academic concepts	12	D	12 x 1.3 = 15.6
total units	16	total gradepoints	30.4

Ignoring the total unit requirement for the moment, the grade point average therefore is 30.4 / 16 = 1.90, which is not sufficient to graduate. Also note that a bad grade in a major course (one with many units) is not fully offset by a good grade in a minor course.

Now imagine that this student takes another course and fails it:

Tongan philosophy before ʻAhoʻeitu	12	F	12 x 0.0 = 0.0
total units	28	total gradepoints	30.4

The gradepoint average now becomes 30.4 / 28 = 1.09. It can be seen that since a F grade does not add anything to the total gradepoints, but does add to the total units, it usually is very detrimental to the gradepoint average. Students are urged to avoid getting insufficient for any course.