Grade Point Average: A Need for Change

Kay Cheng Soh
Grade point average (GPA) is a historical mistake in two senses. First, it has had an impact on student assessment the world over from elementary school through to university, and in this sense it is historic. Second, it has a very long history, appearing two centuries before the birth of modern-day theories and technologies of quantitative educational assessment; in this sense, it is also historical.
Today, however, we know so much more about educational assessment than the academics of the 18th century, and that there is no reason for continued acceptance of the GPA.
Let's imagine what might have happened in the past. A professor had a pile of students' term papers to assess. He studied them one by one and labelled them as 'Excellent', 'Good', 'Fair', 'Borderline' or 'Poor' according to his expectations based on his academic experience.
From 'Excellent' to 'Poor' there was a decrease in quality, and it was more convenient to label them as grades A, B, C, D and F. These were not convenient either, and were coded as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th classes to indicate the order of quality. As writing 'st', 'nd', 'rd', and 'th' was clumsy to a busy professor, they were now written as 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Here we see several things taking place in the professor's mind in a short time: qualities were coded in labels; labels were replaced by grades; grades were translated into ordinals; and ordinals were, for convenience, written in shorthand and appeared as cardinal numbers.
In this process of quality>labels>grades>ordinals>cardinals transformation, the first four stages are fine and right; re-coding does not change the meanings or the nature of assessment. But the last stage of equating 'ordinals' (numeric used for ranking and grading) with 'cardinals' (numeric used for enumerating or counting) changes the meaning and nature of measurement.
This is where GPA went wrong. Because ordinals 5(th), 4(th), 3(rd), 2(nd) and 1(st) denoting ranks based on 'subjective qualitative judgement' look exactly like cardinals 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 based on 'objective quantitative enumeration', they were mistaken as equivalents. In short, ranking on quality became counting of quantity.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0162, 13 March 2011