GPA conversion

That post from VandyGrad is excellent. I'd say that's the most common grading scale there is in the US. Sometimes (and I think this is mostly before you reach college), the scale starts at 70, so a 69 is an F, but for the most part, the logic is the same and the numbers presented are the ones most commonly used.

When I was on the adcom, the questions you've raised were ones that were difficult to understand. In fact, I'm thinking of doing a blog post just on this precise topic, b/c it seems to come up so often.

IMO, there are a couple of factors that confound the adcom's ability to understand international GPAs. The big ones are:
(1) The translation table you've cited above is VERY difficult to conceptualize. There's an understanding that in general terms a number above 8 out of 10 is solid, but it's still not the same level of precision an adcom reader could make about a US undergrad GPA that is on the trad'l 4.0 scale.
(2) Class ranking + GPA is helpful for demonstrating the significance of the UGPA, but even this was difficult because we didn't know the competitiveness of some of the schools. Everyone has heard of U of Tokyo, Seoul National, or the IITs, but there are many many excellent programs outside of these that are world-reknown, and I always felt graduates from the lesser known schools had a disadvantage, simply b/c of that.
(3) The transcripts from an int'l school look extremely different from a typical US transcript. US transcripts are pretty standardized. But because we'd be receiving transcripts from schools all over the world, just making sure we understood how to interpret the transcript was not easy.
(4) There would often be jargon used to describe things that we didn't really comprehend. For example, the word "topper." I know what it means and it's kind of self-explanatory, but IMO, it's better just to be clear and say "#1 in my class" and avoid the jargon altogether.

Like I said...This topic is one (I feel) the adcoms really struggle with since the top MBA programs evaluate candds from all over the world. My advice is to try to break things down into terms that are as simple as possible to understand.

hope that's helpful
-james young

For those who might be interested, I've written a bit more about the advantages and pitfalls of international applicants here: https://www.thefirstread.com/internation ... -programs/

hope that's helpful,
-james young