How US colleges read A-level, IB and foreign transcripts

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office see transcripts in many shapes every season, and the families holding the unusual ones are usually the most worried. Not every transcript looks like the standard American one. Some private schools skip APs because they consider every class college level, some schools have no AP teachers at all, and some grade with words instead of letters, while international students bring a range of systems, from A-levels to the IB to national exams.

Families in all of these situations fear that their record will be misread, and the fear often pushes them to guess at how they compare. They rarely need to, because the person reading the file has very likely seen their school before.