Over a 4.0 GPA? Man, are grades that badly inflated now that they have to add extra points to the GPA to make people seem better? No knock on you at all, but just curious what the scale is.
The problem is, without knowing the cap on "bonus points," I can't know how far under 4.0 your GPA might have been without the bonus. Maybe your GPA was "only" a 3.7 before adding 1 bonus point? It's ambiguous at best, deceptive at worst.
On the other hand, if a school doesn't give extra points for more advanced classes, someone who took the hardest curriculum possible and did pretty well might have a lower GPA than someone who took the easiest curriculum possible.
At my uni (University of Montreal), A was worth 4.0 and A+ was worth 4.3. I don't think it comes from grade inflation, though. Just a different convention.
Well, an A+ is worth 4.3, so if you're some kind of superhuman I suppose you could get a 4.3 overall, though it's not really practical when you're taking 3 classes a quarter and being a TA or RA. I managed to get three of those, and honestly I think I earned them - I worked extremely hard throughout my MS and that occasionally resulted in very strong results. There are some classes with inflation-compatible grading schemes (Pat Hanrahan's 148 comes to mind, in which, when I took it, 7/8 projects offered 25% extra credit each, and each project was 10% of one's grade, meaning the maximum grade for the course was 117.5%...though I didn't get an A+ in that course, since I didn't do well on the exams), but they're the minority.
