OPINION & EDITORIAL
GPA system: a poor judge
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Also by Cynthia Martens:
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- America maintains unhealthy obsession with body image (February 10, 2006)
- Genocide not limited to Holocaust (January 27, 2006)
- Undergraduate fears of commencement unjustified (February 3, 2006)
- Outbursts in class unacceptable (April 7, 2005)
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- Chancellor should invest in student advising (October 31, 2001)
by Cynthia Martens
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Need to pump up your sagging GPA? Register for Bands 41, a course in which 99.7 percent of the 323 students got an A in 2003.
Don’t worry, there’s no audition.
When I checked out the grade distributions of UW courses, I was amazed by the differences in grading not only among departments, but also within a single course. Make sure you get the right TA!
Unless certain sections attract all of the slackers, the charts clearly show there are harder and easier graders. And students taking easier-graded courses will on average have higher GPAs than students taking harder courses.
Examining the UW percentage distribution of grades for 2003-2004, it’s easy to see which courses and majors will get you on the Dean’s list.
Eighty percent of students in comparative literature courses got As or ABs, compared to only 35 percent of those taking engineering, mechanics and astronautics courses. Most of those students got between a B and a C.
Okay, so maybe I wasn’t really surprised by this.
How many of us have worked our asses off in one class and not done so well, but hardly made it to a single lecture for another course and gotten an A? I think of my roommate who slaved her way through Psychology 225, often reduced to tears, but who got an A in her French class, for which she tells me she did next to nothing.
It’s frustrating to think that a string of bad luck in courses could cost you admission to the journalism school, or whatever program you’re shooting for. Unless, of course, you scheme your way into easy As.
A glance at UW scholarship reports, which show average GPA by undergraduate school, confirms there are easy and hard departments when it comes to grading. The average GPA for Elementary Education majors is 3.794, while that of General Engineering majors is 2.927. Are these education majors just that much more serious about their studies than the engineering majors? It makes you wonder.
If GPAs are so dependent on how individual professors grade, and not necessarily an indication of how hard students have worked, why is GPA even a factor in, say, business school applications?
With this in mind, I called Don Hausch, the Associate Dean of the UW School of Business graduate program. The program application asks for a cumulative GPA converted to a four-point scale. I asked Mr. Hausch whether he thought GPA was a valid indicator of undergraduate performance or if it was really meaningless, since it assumes all schools and professors grade the same and all courses are equal in difficulty.
“It’s one piece of information, so it’s a nice starting point, a summary statistic,” he explained. “But our review of applications goes way, way beyond GPA.”
Mr. Hausch listed GMAT scores, undergraduate preparation, personal statements and references as other factors in the admissions process.
“[GPA] summarizes one important area, which is undergraduate performance,” he noted, adding, however, that he recognized there could be “different levels of grade inflation occurring.”
Frankly, I don’t see how GPA tells the business school or any other competitive admissions program anything. Maybe 50 years ago, when the course selections and majors were limited, it wasn’t bad. Today the UW College of Letters and Science offers 65 majors.
This spring UW is offering over 5,500 different courses. How can you average that? University administrators that insist on using GPA are creating an atmosphere in which students choose courses to game the system, not based on their interests.
This might come as a shock to some UW professors, but there are schools in the world that do just fine without GPAs. At my French high school, we were given grades out of 20 and there were no formal multiple-choice tests; all exams were full written responses graded subjectively. Convert that to GPA. French universities also don’t try to create an average grade.
Many students feel there is an unofficial minimum GPA students must have to be considered for UW programs. One of my roommates, a journalism major, estimated you need about a 3.5 GPA to apply to the UW journalism school. Though this is not stated explicitly in the application, she said it was widely known among students.
Qu’en pensez vous? What do you think? Has GPA screwed you over? Does the UW really need to keep it?
Cynthia Martens (cmartens@badgerherald.com) is a junior majoring in Italian and European Studies.
Anonymous (January 20, 2005 @ 12:53am):
I graduated from J School and never had a 3.5. I am in law school now and my GPA blows goats.
-Slacker
Anonymous (January 20, 2005 @ 2:31pm):
Perhaps they do not have GPA in foreign countries because they have other measures, and other educational systems. With law school, for example, my understanding is that in most foreign countries aspiring lawyers attend law school at the time we would all be undergrads. Also, testing procedures in at least some foreign countries divide the "haves" and "have nots" in a way that could be determined as much more unfair.
Obviously, GPA is not a perfect number. It is much harder to get a 3.5 in engineering than in history, which my degree is in. But what GPA does help show is trends: Did the student improve over his or her four years? Something like this would help show that a student either (a) improved as a student (b) did much better once they were in to their major and out of general education classes or both. The number is rarely taken at face value by grad schools these days, unless you have an extremely high GPA in a difficult major.
Anonymous (January 20, 2005 @ 4:07pm):
I am also in law school now and have a much better class standing in law than in engineering school, and I was in one of the "easier" engineering majors.
Everybody, including the admissions staff at graduate schools are aware of the grade inflation and lower quality of students in certain majors, so don't worry, you will get what you have coming for taking more difficult classes.
fyi, I forgot what my undergraduate gpa was before I went through the law school application process. that is how much you will think about gpa when this is all done.
Anonymous (January 20, 2005 @ 4:14pm):
Did you stop to think, while writing this article, that the School of Education is a program that requires seperate admission? It stands to reason that the GPAs of those in the School of Ed are higher than Engineering, the students with lower GPAs were denied access to the major.
Anonymous (January 20, 2005 @ 4:28pm):
The previous post is nonsense. Engineering students and education students take different classes from the start and so essentially enter their respective school never having competed against each other.
If you expect me to believe that the average education or journalism student is the equal of the average engineering or even business student, you are crazy.
Anonymous (January 20, 2005 @ 5:44pm):
Not to mention the fact that you need a hella high GPA to get into some engineering stuff like biomed.
Still, humility is a virtue for engineers (and everyone).
Jonathan Mandell (January 22, 2005 @ 4:17pm):
I thought the article was insightful. I disagree with people that posted who said that the differences between departments and schools are known and are taken into account. This just validates the author's point that GPAs are a confusing system that don't really mean much. Furthermore, the GPA doesn't take into account what the student has actually learned in the class. I have gotten the most out of some of my classes where my grade was the lowest. Does this tell a possible employer or grad school admissions officer what I have learned? I don't think it has.
Anonymous (October 11, 2005 @ 7:28pm):
This is a really great article. It is so true, I know so many people with certain majors who make time for everything and brag about it! Well hope my major isn't for dummies. How can someone see this report??
Great article,
Liz
Anonymous (May 15, 2006 @ 12:03am):
they need to fix it so GPA's are fair, it is irritating that I have taken some of the hardest classes here and some elementary ed person will get a better job than me for partying every night. I never go out I study too much and still have a 3.0 I HATE MADISON!
