Calculating the GPA (again!)

kluge
Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:21:28 +0000

All right. Once again I find that I’m on the trail of the famous, yet elusive, “GPA.” Legend has it that there are just two types: “Unweighted” and “weighted”. Yet it’s soon apparent that it’s not that simple. Oh, no. Not that simple at all.

The unweighted GPA. The UW GPA is ostensibly quite simple: Assign a 4 for each A, a 3 for B’s, 2 for C’s etc. Add them up, divide by the number of classes, et voila: the UW GPA. (Oh, maybe there’s a quibble over +s and -s - but that rarely makes much of a difference.) But wait! Do all classes count for the UW GPA? The “full” GPA includes PE, health, etc. The “academic” or CP (college prep) GPA excludes some classes. But which ones? PE, certainly. Art and music? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. So the “CP UW GPA” can vary significantly, depending on that factor. But that’s still the easy one.

The weighted GPA. The (W)GPA shares the uncertainty regarding which courses are included in the calculation along with the UW GPA, and adds another level of uncertainty: Which classes are weighted, and how much? The University of California weights AP, IB, college level and selected “honors” courses with one extra point - 5 points for an A, etc. But UC caps the “weight” at 8 semesters. USC has no cap, but doesn’t weight any “honors” courses. Some high schools weight different weighted classes differently: 1 point for “honors”, 1.5 points for AP, etc. At some schools all classes are weighted. What does everyone else do? Who knows? Two years ago I calculated six discrete GPA’s for my son, ranging from 3.5 to 4.0. What did it all mean? I have no clue.

I thought at least I had one quantum of clarity when I asked in another thread if the freshmen class GPA’s reported in the various colleges’ common data sets were weighted or unweighted. It was explained to me that they were unweighted, because not every high school weights their grades, so to compare “apples to apples” the colleges all report unweighted GPAs for that purpose. Makes perfect sense: problem solved, question answered.
Except they don’t. At least, not all of them. Scripps reports an average enrolee GPA of 4.06. Weighted, obviously. Barnard reports an average enrolee GPA of 3.96 - but 31% of those students have GPAs below 3.75. So 3.96 has to be weighted. (Which I assume means that the 3.75 is, too.) Other schools? Hard to tell. My guess is, some do it one way, others the other (and others, the “other” other.)

It seems to me that since GPA has assumed a higher level of significance in admission than test scores (which are at least consistent, if nothing else) it would behoove some organization to take a stab at standardizing this method of measuring aggregate academic performance.