College is not about class; it’s about the time in between. A college student’s GPA is merely a filtered snapshot of a student’s past, and not a reliable predictor of any form of future success. But that doesn’t keep a handful of organizations from still using it as the basis for various reasons.
Studies on the GPA and its ability to predict future success rarely agree. There are as many studies that say GPA is the best predictor of future success (as a 2003 James Madison University study found) as there are ones that say GPA predicts nothing and is dependent on other factors like income and race (as Dutch researchers found in a 2005 study).
Some studies say that a freshman admit’s high school GPA is the best predictor of their future college GPA, while others say the ACT is the best predictor. Still another says that GPA only predicts success reliably for nonminority students. It’s safe to say that GPA’s predictive quality is questionable at best.
So what does a GPA do? It gives students a good idea of where they stand at that particular moment in time. Since the GPA is simply an average of the grades a student has amassed thus far, it is an accurate representation of her academic success to that point. Students should understand where they are — but that point should not limit their future.
The future potential of a student is not limited by her GPA in a real way. If this potential is limited, it is because someone — be it the student, an administrator or a committee — has superficially taken GPA to be more than a picture of the past, putting significance on this average that is neither measurable nor logical.
This realization causes a fundamental problem for evaluators of all types, whether they be employers or administrators: How do we evaluate someone based on his GPA?
In an ideal world, the best answer might be not at all. Decisions about potential employees or applicants would be made by people with the resources and time to evaluate candidates based on attitude, ambition, fit with the program, etc. These qualities are arguably better aimed at predicting future success within a given framework.
But due to the sheer mass of applicants, these decision makers need a way to judge someone’s potential quickly. “”Since the GPA already exists, why not use that? Why not make a cut off at 3.0, and not consider anyone below that? Look at all the time that we could save!”” And that is exactly what most employers and several academic programs do. The cost of this time gained is efficiency lost.
On Nov. 8 of last year, the Guardian published an article saying that employers favor social skills over GPA. In fact, the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook 2006 report ranked GPA as 15th on a list of 20 desirable qualities. At the same time, the report cautioned, most employers will not even conduct an interview with someone who has below a 3.0 GPA. Again, this is not because companies are stupid, it’s because they want to save time.
For the 40 percent of you who will be heading off to graduate school after UCSD, these GPA cutoffs will be even higher than 3.0. Law schools, medical schools and other graduate programs have a whole religion based on the GPA. All the ranking systems of these colleges invariably consider average GPA of admitted students. Again, the reason these schools consider GPA is as a time saver, not as an accurate predictor of future success.
Admittedly, for a program or company that regularly accepts 2 percent of its applicants, these time-saving evaluative methods become necessary. Though unfortunate, it is just impractical to devote the hours necessary to do a better review of all the applicants.
But less heavily bombarded programs can take advantage of their position and weigh GPA much less in their decision making. They can make decisions based on writing samples, intentions and specific measurable abilities. They don’t need the GPA — but they still use it.
Consider the Committee on Educational Policy’s 3.0 floor on applicants for the Instructional Assistant program. A good IA should be good at communicating, very good at the subject material covered by the particular class and in good standing with the professor. GPA measures none of these qualities.
Engineering companies constantly complain to UCSD that the engineering graduates they hire with high GPAs cannot communicate at a proficient level.
GPA takes into account all classes equally. This equality dulls the stellar work of a student in one particular area. So if a student wants to be an IA for a math class he aced, looking at his GPA to consider his ability in that specific class will provide a negatively skewed evaluation (unless he has straight A’s).
And GPA is not a code for a professor’s level of contentment with her student. If it did, the whole system would be considered corrupt.
In other words, with the 3.0 floor in place for IAs, a student who aced a class covering material she is knowledgeable about and taught by a professor who respects her could be rejected, while someone who has a 3.2, failed the class in question, and only commands enough respect from the professor to get her signature on his IA application would be accepted.
GPA will, unfortunately, continue to be used by organizations that must save time. But a student should see his or her own GPA as a challenge to succeed, not a destiny to fail, and the organizations that can afford to eliminate GPA from their evaluations should.
