It’s the primary number professors, advisors, administrators and admissions use to judge the student, but it’s a poor metric for measuring progress.
Easy-content classes are worth equal to hard-content classes.
Easy professors give out higher GPA’s than challenging professors
People are discouraged from working, because having more free time means higher GPA.
People are encouraged to take light course loads to get a higher GPA
A person can get a 3.8-4.0 simply by gaming the system and doing the bare minimum while someone who is actually demonstrating that they can work hard and effectively under limiting constraints may be getting less.
Withdrawal allows a person to drop a course (well into it) without a refund and recieve no credit for it. If they were going to fail that class due to irresponsibility, then they recieve no penalty. It’s a fine function on occasion, but if someone withdraws from classes regularly, their generous GPA does not signal their inability to handle adversity.
Number of credits are often not considered. If someone only studied for one semester, their GPA isn’t derived from a large enough sample, and could be much different the next semester.
Changes in cumulative GPA are slow to take effect. A student can coast on a great GPA for 2 semesters and then immediately sink into academic probation on the third, yet no intervened to help that person because advisors/parents/professors all saw that their GPA was perfectly fine.
My proposal to the GPA system:
A symbol should be next to the GPA if the student has under 30 credits
Taking 15+ credits adds 0.2 to your Semester GPA
A withdrawn class (without refund) should be considered a C
Departments should have meetings to ensure professors are as uniform in their difficulty as possible.
I think that this assumes that people are evaluating GPAs in a context-free way, but that’s not usually the case. For example, if you are applying to graduate school or a summer program, the graduate department/program gets your entire transcript - not simply a calculated GPA. They can easily see if you have less than 30 credits, for example, or if you took 15 credits in one semester. The evaluators can then decide themselves what weight they want to put on these characteristics.
I don’t think adding any number of quality points to your GPA based on number of credit hours makes sense. It’s up to each individual student to decide how much they can handle in a semester, and I think that would encourage students to overload on classes unnecessarily - or worse, when they’re not able to handle the classes. GPAs are not supposed to signal how well you can handle adversity; they’re supposed to signal your level of performance in a set of classes you’ve taken. Besides, by your own admission, classes vary in difficulty and intensity. One students’ 12-credit load may be more demanding than another student’s 15-credit load, depending on the quality and type of classes being taken. Should a student get a 0.2 bump in their GPA because they took an extra physical education course, for example?
Yes, that’s the point. It’s unfair to give students a C if they withdraw because you have no idea why a student may have withdrawn. For example, the student could be doing well, but they are not doing well in another class and are dropping an elective to focus on a major requirement. Or the student could withdraw because they have a medical or family issue that they need to leave school to handle even though they are currently doing well in the class. But even if the student is failing, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are behaving irresponsibly - it could be due to illness or hardship. Withdrawing, taking a W and trying again another semester is a fail-safe option to help students who are having an issue they need to resolve before trying again.
Again, I think you are assuming people are evaluating GPAs in a context-free environment, but that’s not true. A student with a high GPA but many withdrawals will not be viewed as favorably, either - more than a few withdrawals is definitely seen as a negative.
GPA can be viewed with context, but nonetheless it still fails to take into consideration many factors, and it’s just not feasible for a grad school (or an employer) to view it with an accurate level of scrutiny. These GPA inflaters that I mentioned are okay in moderation, but if it’s a sign of a larger pattern, that should be clearly noted.
Withdrawals - They’re fine in cases of medical emergencies and such. But if the student is withdrawing from a class every semester or the student withdrew from a large portion of their courses in general, that’s not good. Even if it’s not entirely their fault and things just pop up in their life, there’s no option at work to just withdraw from 1/5 of your duties and still get glowing reviews from management.
Course Loads - I do agree that 15 easy credits shouldn’t be inherently weighed over 12 challenging credits. However, the ability of a student to take 4 easy introductory liberal arts courses and make the Dean’s List is just absurd, when there are plenty of students both smarter and more hard working than they are.
The reality is, GPA is one metric. There are many other factors that go in to determine if someone is a good internship applicant, a good job applicant, a good graduate school applicant, or whatever. Other things you do such as research, jobs, extracurricular involvement, recommendations, all come into play.
If you have a GPA that you aren’t proud of, or Ws, or whatever, work with advisors or professors in your program to figure out how to mitigate your weaknesses.
Our opinions here aren’t going to change an old system that you are in now.
Yes, but as I stated in my original post, any employer or graduate school who saw a student withdrew from a class every semester, or from a huge chunk of classes pretty often,
Actually, there are. If you’ve never worked full-time you’d be forgiven for not knowing, but there are all kinds of arrangements that good employers enter into with employees to help reduce workload for a variety of reasons - bereavement, illness, injury, surgery, other higher competing priorities, childbirth/adoption, etc. Again, much like withdrawing from class it’s not something that you’ll be doing very often, of course, but things do happen.
Why is this absurd? The dean’s list is a measure of achievement in coursework. What you consider “easy” might be considered difficult or abstract to other students. Besides, life is full of choices. You could also choose to take a bunch of easy classes to try to maintain a 3.7, if you want to. Or you could try to do nothing else in college to aim for that 4.0. Most students choose a balance or they want to take more challenging classes to learn more.
Why are you so concerned about this to begin with? Just curious. Are you worried that GPAs (either yours or others’) may keep people out of opportunities unnecessarily? There are some colleges that have switched to subjective evaluations of students instead of grades.
A lot of times, programs will ask you to summarize your transcript in whatever way is relevant for them. For example, when I applied to math summer research programs, they required me to send a list of math courses I’ve taken along with the letter grades.