u/National-Print-5235

Hi everyone,

I'm helping my son fill out the Gates Scholarship application and we've gotten stuck on the class rank and GPA section. His school runs the IB program and, as many of you probably know, these schools don't rank students (there's no "you're number X in your class" thing).

I have two questions:

1. Does anyone know if the fact that the school doesn't rank could work against him in the application, or is Gates already used to this and it's just a non-issue?
2. We're also a bit confused about the GPA part. The final IB score (out of 45) is only known once you finish the full two years of the program, but in the meantime each semester's grades are given on a scale of 7. We're not sure how to "translate" this for the form — whether we should convert it to the American 4.0 scale, put the grade out of 7 directly, or something else.

If anyone has gone through a similar application (IB school, no ranking, grades on a different scale) and can share how they handled it, I'd really appreciate it. Any experience or advice is welcome, we're a bit lost on this part.

Thanks in advance 🙏