Remaking the Grade

Colleges Devise Formulas to Interpret Applicants' High-School GPAs

By Anne Marie Chaker
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

If you plan to go to college, you probably place a lot of weight on your grade-point average. But you may be interested to know that many colleges don't.

The problem is that GPAs-always somewhat unreliable because curricula differ so much across schools-have in some cases become almost meaningless as high schools experiment with ways to measure students. Some high schools, worried about putting their students at a disadvantage with college admissions offices, give extra weight to grades in more difficult or AP courses. Other schools, in a nod to political correctness, are either reluctant to measure students at all with traditional grades or have developed their own creative way of assessing them.

To try to cut through this hodgepodge, colleges around the country are coming up with their own formulas to recalculate each applicant's GPA. One strategy-used by Emory University and the University of California system, among others-is to drop the pluses and minuses alongside letter grades. (So a B-plus in trigonometry becomes a B.) Another approach is to disregard the applicant's entire freshman year of high school. Some schools, like Haverford College in Pennsylvania, now go a step further, throwing out the GPA altogether and relying instead on the student's class rank.

In short, many colleges are changing how they approach GPAs, and in a surprising variety of ways. The upshot is that it is now often impossible for students to assess the admissions power of their grades unless they know the system used by each college they are applying to. Colleges say that in most cases, GPAs wind up dropping after the recalculation. So for some high-school students, a 4.0 might be worth far less than they thought.

Pluses and Minuses

The high-school transcript of a student with lots of pluses next to his grades, for example, could mean more to Johns Hopkins, which takes those shades into account in its recalculation. At Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, by contrast, "an A is an A is an A," says Michael Steidel, CMU's director of admissions, regardless of whether there was a plus or a minus alongside it.

In addition, since colleges like Emory don't give credit in their formula for difficult courses, it may not make sense for a student already taking a decent dose of APs to overload on them and risk a low grade.

Of course, none of this in any way means that high-school grades don't matter. Even where colleges don't take course difficulty into account in the calculation itself, that doesn't mean they aren't checking how many honors classes a student is taking. Many colleges continue to look more favorably on applicants who take challenging classes, even if they don't factor that into their GPA formula.

In the past couple of years, Johns Hopkins began recalculating GPA by throwing out "non-academic" courses like art or music, unless such a course shows academic rigor, as in AP art history or AP studio art. (One recent applicant's transcript included an A in lacrosse-needless to say, that didn't make the cut.) Johns Hopkins, as well as the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Carnegie Mellon, also throws out all freshman-year marks.

Some colleges, including Georgetown University and Haverford, ignore GPA altogether, instead focusing on class rank. One hitch to this approach is that many high schools are abandoning the practice of ranking students; in a recent study, over half of high schools said they no longer do so.

But that doesn't stop college admissions officers from considering that measure. Rob Killion, director of admissions at Haverford, says that in the absence of a ranking, he may have to "guesstimate" how those students placed in the class. "Sometimes that hurts the applicants," he says, since his guess is usually conservative.

Just Ask

While colleges often don't publicize the details of these formulas, students should simply ask colleges whether and how they recalculate. In the case of courses such as art or religion, which may not be counted in the GPA formulas, students can ask their high-school counselors to write a letter vouching for its credibility as a rigorous course. It carries sway with some schools.

"When in doubt, we typically include [a course]," says Mr. Steidel at Carnegie Mellon.

In large part, the GPA policies are simply a response by colleges to the growing variance among high schools in how they grade. For example, Taft School, a boarding school in Watertown, Conn., favors a six-point scale for its GPA, rather than the traditional four-point scale. Other high schools, like St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., use descriptive phrasing to distinguish merit, such as "high honors" or "honors," instead of A's and B's. Governor Livingston High School, in Berkeley Heights, N.J., even uses an "E" grade to "soften the blow" of failing a course, says Jane Webber Runte, the guidance director there.

But as more colleges come up with new GPA formulas, some high schools are now following their lead. Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass., for instance, is now moving away from giving extra weight for harder courses. The school hopes that doing so will lead colleges to look more closely at the total transcripts of its students, says Peter Gow, the school's academic dean.

How will the recalculation trend affect your academic plans? Write to us.