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Grade point average: What's wrong and what's the alternative?

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DOI: 10.1080/1360080X.2011.537009

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Grade point average: what's wrong and what's the alternative?

Kay Cheng Soh

Online publication date: 06 January 2011

To cite this Article Soh, Kay Cheng(2011) 'Grade point average: what's wrong and what's the alternative?', Journal of
Higher Education Policy and Management, 33: 1, 27 — 36
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 Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management
Vol. 33, No. 1, February 2011, 27–36

Grade point average: what’s wrong and what’s the alternative?

1469-9508
1360-080X
CJHE
Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management
Management, Vol. 33, No. 1, Nov 2010: pp. 0–0

Kay Cheng Soh*

Journal
K.C. Sohof Higher Education Policy and Management

Singapore

Grade point average (GPA) has been around for more than two centuries. However, it
has created a lot of confusion, frustration, and anxiety to GPA-producers and users
alike, especially when used across-nation for different purposes. This paper looks into
the reasons for such a state of affairs from the perspective of educational measurement.
It goes on to suggest replacing the current multiple-regression approach with a multiple
cut-off approach which promises to simplify the job and yet do it better.
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Keywords: comparability of grades; educational measurement; GPA; international

students

If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of
numbers. (Postman, 1992, p. 12)

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 the modern-day theories and technologies of quantitative educational assess-
ment; in this sense, it is also historical.

A short history
The GPA system is attributed to William Farish (1759–1837), a British tutor in chemistry
and natural philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He was well-known for his devel-
opments of the method of isometric projection and the first written university examination
system. Isometrics and examinations have one thing in common: ‘metric’ or the standard
or method of measuring. When a tutor with expertise of complex isometrics handles a
simple educational assessment problem, most people, past and present, will agree that
nothing can go wrong. However, it definitely is a surprise that Farish borrowed this idea
from the shoe industry where workers were paid by the number of shoes they made graded
on acceptability (Hartman, Jaksa, & Pallandino, 2000).
The grading system Farish invented was first implemented in 1792. When an institu-
tion of Cambridge’s stature implemented the system, other lesser universities would
naturally follow. Against such an illustrious background, it is not a surprise that the
grading system attracted a lot of attention and got adopted by other professors in other
lesser universities and later by secondary school teachers. Its wide adaptation, and with
modifications, at the institutions of higher learning soon enshrined it with awe of a

*Email: sohkc@singnet.com.sg

ISSN 1360-080X print/ISSN 1469-9508 online © 2011 Association for Tertiary Education Management and the
L H Martin Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Management
DOI: 10.1080/1360080X.2011.537009
http://www.informaworld.com
 28 K.C. Soh

sacred cow. Thence, it perpetuated itself and took on various façades and became almost
religious. But,

William Farish probably had no idea what havoc would ultimately be wrought by his innova-
tion. Thus, I write this paper with immense trepidation, lest it prove to begin a similar descent
into one of the darker underworlds of Academe. (Betterly, 2003, ¶ 6)

In all fairness to Farish, he did not have a grand design to influence student assessment but
he tried to establish a way that enabled him to mark more papers and generate more
income. Perhaps because of this, he was dubbed the ‘world’s most famous lazy teacher’
(Hartman et al., 2000, post 6).
The havoc, if it indeed is, was caused by his legacy. Today, 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.
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A re-constructed scenario
Let’s imagine what might have happened. The 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: qual-
ities 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 cardi-
nal 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 grad-
ing) 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 judgment’ 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.

The danger of arithmetic operations

Because numbers used as ordinals look exactly the same like numbers used as cardinals,
the temptation to add and divide them was so great that it was inevitably done. (Murphy’s
Law: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.) Thus, a student who got A (Excellent)
for one paper, C (Fair) for a second, and B (Good) for a third got ordinal grades, 5, 3, and 4.
When the professor succumbed to the arithmetic temptation, this student got a GPA of
(5+3+4)/3 = 4.00. Imagine that we code the primary colours as Red = 5, Green = 4, and
Blue = 3 and there are three apples of these three different colours. We then say, the apples
have an average of (GPA = ) 4.00 and there are ‘on average, green’.
Such confusion has an advantage when there are many students each having accumulated
many subject grades over a period of a few semesters. To judge the qualities of individual
 Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 29

students using all the information is mind boggling and highly inconvenient, administra-
tively speaking. It is a much simpler matter to use a single number to summarise each stu-
dent’s intellectual quality and then make important decisions based on that number. If
decimals are added to them, the numbers look even more precise and they should be more
accurate and the professors must have been very meticulous and fair. That is what could
have happened when GPA gained popularity over a period of two centuries.

Four conceptual issues

Levels of measurement
When five term papers are assessed for their qualities and then ranked in descending order
of quality, labels (‘Excellent’, etc.), letter grades (‘A’, etc.), or numeric grades (‘5’, etc.)
can be assigned. The labels, letter grades, and numeric grades have a correspondence
among the three ways of indicating the quality, if their relations are defined such that
‘Excellent = A = 5’. We know that this forms an ordinal scale on which things are ordered
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on some common ground. From the measurement perspective, arithmetic operations per-
missible on such data include counting (e.g., there are four ‘A’ or ‘Excellence’ or ‘5’
among the 20 papers) and comparison (e.g., paper X has more interesting points than
paper Y, and therefore X is qualitatively better than Y, hence X gets grade 4 and Y gets
grade 3).
If the five papers were awarded numeric grades 5 to 1 and the grades are averaged by
adding and dividing, (5+4+3+2+1)/5 = 3, we conclude that the papers are, of a fair quality
(3). We know that is not true; there is only one such paper. If the five papers are for differ-
ent subjects written by the same student, s/he gets GPA = 3.00 and we conclude that s/he
is a student of a fair standard, we know again that this is not true also; the student is excel-
lent in a certain subject and a total failure in another. In short, adding and dividing
numeric grades to arrive at a GPA is misleading.
If the papers for the following semester carry the grades 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, the GPA is 3.6
and we conclude that he has improved by 0.6. Can we tell what does this 0.6 improvement
really mean substantively? If student X has GPA = 3.00 and student Y has GPA = 3.6, we
conclude that the latter is a better student. Better in what way? Yes, Y is better in that s/he
gets a decimally higher grade, but then we are tautological in our justification. Moreover,
doubtless, we may use the median 3 of the first set or the mode 4 (not rounded from 3.6) of
the second set to represent the student’s performance, but this is conceptually an entirely
different approach. (More later.)

Differences are not equal

When comparing numeric grades, a tendency is to equate differences which appear to be
the same as if they are in fact the same. For instance, three papers (or students) are graded
5, 4, and 3. The difference between the first two is 5–4 = 1 and that between the last two is
4-3 = 1, too. Since the first ‘1’ looks exactly like the second ‘1’, we deceive ourselves that
since 1 = 1 the first paper is better than the second as much as the second is better than the
third. Again, this is likely to be untrue, because the two differences are qualitatively differ-
ent. It is doubtful that a human mind is capable to detect the same amount of difference in
the two situations.
This, again, has to do with the level of measurement. On an ordinal scale, grades indic-
ate relative merit but distances between grades are unequal. Analogously, if we code
 30 K.C. Soh

BMW as 5, Honda as 4, and Toyota as 3, the grade difference of 1 between BMW and
Honda only says the former is one grade higher than the latter. Likewise, the grade differ-
ence of 1 between Honda and Toyota says the same thing. But, to conclude that the
BMW–Honda difference is the same as the Honda–Toyota difference needs a lot of imag-
ination and explanation.

Grades not compensatory

This is an even more fundamental issue than the two discussed above. When a GPA is
derived by summing and dividing a few grades, we make a basic assumption that grades
are mutually exchangeable and hence compensatory to one another. This may be argued
for if the term papers measure about the same kind of knowledge and skills of a subject.
The counter-argument is that, even within the same subject, different term papers are
likely to measure different knowledge and skills.
When working out a GPA numerically, what the grades encode are ignored (or the
difference is assumed to be not important) and the numbers are all that count. It does not
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take much thinking to realise that the same GPA = 3.54 can be arrived at for different
combinations of grades for different subjects for different students. Thus, a student highly
proficient in language but rather wanting in mathematics may get the same GPA as one
whose strength and weakness are just the opposite. Their GPAs look the same, they are
taken to be of the same calibre, but nothing can be more untrue. In short, strengths and
weaknesses in different disciplines may not be compensatory. In a sense, the GPA system
is analogous to a multiple-regression system with all grades un-weighted (or rather unity-
weighted) which assumes and hence allows compensation across disciplines.

Extension to scale
Because letter grades form a rather short and rigid marking system, professors who like to
have some flexibility introduce their own modification, using such grades as A−, B+, etc.,
to allow some room for slight variation. No doubt, there are occasions when some papers
are of a quality falling between ‘Excellent’ and ‘Good’ and to assign either grade seems to
be unfair or not appreciating, so A− or B+ is recorded. When this is done, it may reflect the
assessor’s mind more than the quality of the paper. To accommodate this marker idiosyn-
crasy, some systems formalised the in-between grades by expanding the letter grade scale.
The opposite may also happen and in fact it does. Papers are assessed on a long scale
allowing scores to vary from, say, zero to 100 (or some other ranges). This is a theoretical
scale which is never fully used because our human minds are not made to discern such
fine degrees of differences as 100 different qualities.
When a system requires reporting both grades and scores, two things may happen. A
professor may begin by giving a score which he believes a paper deserves (say, 75) and
then converts this score to a corresponding grade specified by the grading system (B in
USA/Canada, B- in People’s Republic of China (PRC), or C+ in Korea). Another
professor marking the same kind of papers may start the other way round, deciding on a
grade first and then choose a score within the permitted range of a system. Now with the
computer, they may be required to enter only scores which are automatically converted to
grades. This looks like a magic show and it is, because we know what we see is not what it
is, but we are willing to be entertained.
Converting score ranges to letters can also generate problems. For example, in one
such system, let us assume that one student received two A scores and one B, while
 Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 31

another student scored one A and two Bs. Which of the two would be a more deserving
candidate for being placed on the Dean’s List? On the surface, it would be the student with
two A scores and one B. However, Grade A represents the range 90–100 and whereas
Grade B is 75–89. In this example, the corresponding total score for the first student might
be is 90+90+75 = 255, and that for second, is 90+89+89 = 268. Therefore, the tables are
turned. This may be an extreme case just to illustrate but the improbable is still possible,
although less so dramatic.
Thus, by expanding letter grades and incorporating numeric scores as part of the
system, we trade for flexibility by adding more confusion to confusion which is already
misleading enough. If the issues above are not convincing enough, let’s look at another
problem.

International incompatibility of grades

Different nations have developed their own grading systems or, more likely, borrowed and
then modified others’ to suit their own needs or beliefs. This should be fine during the past
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when the grades are not used beyond national boundaries. Nowadays, there is a tremen-
dous amount of cross-nation student traffic for different purposes, for inter-institution col-
laboration, self-selected enrolment and distance education. The capacity for problems,
confusion and anxiety to arise are many. The three cases below illustrate the agonies of
students seeking cross-nation admission to study programmes:

I did my undergrad at Queen’s University in electrical engineering. My cumulative average is

in the high 70s, and I ranked about 20 out of 100. My transcript only shows percentage grades,
not letter ones. I’m thinking of applying to both US and Canadian law schools. According to
LSDAS’s guideline, my percentage grade would convert only to a 2-point-something GPA,
which is horribly low by US standards. Queen’s Applied Science Faculty absolutely refuses to
convert my percentage grades to letter grades on my transcript. (Piika, 2005, ¶ 7)

Please help! I received a conditional offer from UCL via email in December and then got my
official letter last week. It looks great, except that the condition is that I graduate from my
American law school with a GPA of 3.3/4.0. This is mathematically impossible for me to do
at this point! Does anybody know how strict UCL is with their conditions? Mine has currently
been sent back to be ‘re-considered’ in light of the GPA problem. My GPA is 3.13 right now,
probably will be 3.16 upon graduation. (Ambarham, 2009, post 3)

I would like to know if there is any formula to convert DGPA score (scale of 10) to GPA
(scale of 4). I have done my undergraduation (sic) from IT-BHU, Varanasi and we receive
DGPA score on a scale of 10. However, most of the US universities ask to submit GPA score
on a scale of 4. (Arun_MBA, 2006, post 12)

But, specifically, how serious is the problem, really? Table 1 is an attempt to align the let-
ter grades and their corresponding scores or marks in seven nations’ grading systems.
Information therein was gleaned from Grade (Education) from Wikipedia (2010). The
incompatibility is obvious from the table, and requires no further explanation. Generally,
80 or more goes to Grade A (and its chromatic variants), but beyond this, there is much
variations. For instance, a score of 70 is represented by a B in USA and Canada, but by a
C in Russia, India, PRC, Japan and Korea. If the student reports only the letter grade C
when seeking admission to universities in the US or Canada, they may not be good enough
as they will be seen as scoring below B.
For another instance, a student who scores one grade each of A to D in a US or Canadian
university will have a total score of 283.5, if the mid-points of the grades are taken for the
 32 K.C. Soh

Table 1. Letter grades and corresponding scores in seven nations’ grading systems.
Grade USA, Canada Russia India PRC Japan Korea
A A+ 80–100 85–100 – – 90–100 95–100
A 81–100 85–100 80–90 90–95
A− – 80–84 – –
B B+ 70–79 75–84 61–80 – – 85–90
B 51–60 80–84 70–80 80–85
B− – 75–79 – –
C C+ 60–69 50–74 41–50 – – 75–80
C 0–40 70–74 60–70 70–75
C− – 65–69 – –
D D+ 50–59 26–49 – – – 65–70
D – 60–65 50–60 60–65
D− – – – –
F F 0–49 0–25 – 0–59 0–49 0–59
Source: Wikipedia (2010).
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respective ranges. The average of this is 70.9 and hence a grade of B. Using Table 1 as a ref-
erence for conversion, this US/Canadian grade will translate into Russia C, India B+, PRC
C, Japan B and Korea C. Thus, whether the student is advantaged or disadvantaged when
seeking admission across-nations depends on the nation to which he or she intends to go.
Table 2 demonstrates additional difficulties that can occur when attempting to align
letter grades to GPA scores across national borders. The situation is no better than the
situation shown in Table 1, when attempting to align letter grades and test scores. The
problem occurs because different countries used different GPA ranges. While the highest
GPA is 4.00 in USA, it is 4.5 in Korea, 10.0 in Vietnam and 13 in Denmark, indicating
that the same letter grades not only have different values in different nations but there are
also different scale lengths as well. And, more interestingly, Germany has the scale
reversed, with lower GPAs representing better performance.
Such conversion problems are not new. An example is illustrated by the case at the
American University at Beirut (AUB) which led to the conclusion:

Table 2. Letter grades and corresponding GPA in six nations’ grading systems.
Grade USA Denmark Germany Korea Indonesia Vietnam
A A+ – – 4.5 – –
A 3.50–4.00 11–13 1.0–1.3 4.0 4.00 8.0–10.0
A− – – – 3.67 –
B B+ – – 3.5 3.33 –
B 2.50–3.49 10 1.7–2.3 3.0 3.00 6.5–7.9
B− – – – 2.67 –
C C+ – – 2.5 2.33 –
C 1.50–2.49 8, 9 2.7–3.3 2.0 3.00 –
C− – – – 1.67 5.0–6.4
D D+ – – 1.5 1.33 –
D 1.00–1.49 7 3.7–4.0 1.0 – –
D− – – – –
E E – 6 – – –
Ex – 3–5 – – –
F F 0.00 0 4.3–5.0 0.0 – 0.0–4.9
Source: Wikipedia (2010).
 Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 33

AUB’s president is aware of this issue as well as all the students but the problem is that time
is very important and the more it is being delayed the more AUB’s students are being defa-
vorized (sic) when applying to graduate schools. This is why the concerned authorities must
do the transition the fastest and the smoothest possible in order to guarantee the welfare and
the bright future of their student. (GPA Calculation Report, n.d., ¶ 5)

Some admission offices provide conversion charts to facilitate re-coding score percent-
ages to GPA and many websites provide calculators of GPA as well. In spite of this, the
problem just refuses to go away, as illustrated by the case below:

I did my engineering at R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India. It is one of the top
ranked colleges in city and country. I was consistently in the top 5 of my class when it came to
academics. But percentage wise I got 74 per cent overall for the 4 years. Now according to the
conversion chart, my GPA is 2.3. With all due respect I am forced to say that the GPA 2.3 is
surely not fair in assessing my academic performance. The topper of the college had a percent-
age of 79.5. So even his GPA, according to the charts comes to 2.3. So it didn’t seem right to
me and felt I needed to clear this doubt with you. (Problem with GPA Chart, n.d., ¶ 2)
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In the past, students who seek admission across-nations are usually the academically
good ones in their original institutions. The conversion problem therefore might not have
bothered admission offices too much. Even if many of these difficulties are known, the
situation serves to cause confusion and frustration. Official figures about these matters are
rarely in the public domain. (For further information on these matters on GPA at the
school level, readers could refer to Grades, Grades, and More Grades!, 2008, ¶ 3)

An alternative
Change paradigm
Solving a knotty problem calls for a paradigm shift. The current GPA system is an off-
shoot of a clever innovation which pre-dated modern knowledge and technology of educa-
tional assessment by two centuries. It is so prevalent the world over that it is difficult to
imagine the day when GPA did not exist. Its popularity has been propelled by its assumed
efficacy (or rather its administrative convenience) and institutional inertia built up through
common practice of years and reinforced by the time, energy and emotion invested in it.
The assumptions underlying the paradigm have seldom, if ever, been questioned.
As discussed above, the basic problem of GPA lies with mistaking ordinal numbers as
cardinal numbers and applying arithmetic operations to the grades. Because of this, the
basic principles of measuring at the ordinal level are consequently violated. This problem
is then aggravated by its expansion and the modifications that have been made in many
nations and over a long period of practice. The end result is that GPA takes on a range of
meanings that make it meaningless and hence difficult and confusing to use.
It is a truism that the best way to solve a problem is not to create it. This means we
need to shift to a different paradigm and cease the current practice of doing simple arith-
metic on grades which looks like numbers but are in fact labels. To do this, initial incon-
venience needs be tolerated for the good in the future.

Meeting the needs

However, there are omnipresent administrative and academic needs which cannot be
ignored. Institutions of higher learning constantly need to evaluate, channel and select
 34 K.C. Soh

students for various purposes. Although such exercises are met by using information
other than just academic performance, grades still play a key role with the tacit
assumption that it is a good predictor of future performance. Indeed, as ample research
has shown, the single best predictor of academic performance is past achievement (Sue
& Abe, 1988). This question is not being raised here, but rather the way the informa-
tion is used.
The same information about grades can be used differently in the changed paradigm of
a multiple cut-off model. This model does not change the basic assumption that past
performance is the single best predictor of future performance, a belief borne out by
research. It suggests a different way of using the information in contrast with the multiple-
regression model implied by the GPA system. With this changed paradigm, grades would
be treated as what they are (i.e. ordinal grades) without subjecting them to arithmetic oper-
ations which violate the principle of handling ordinal level measures. In short, there will
still be grades, but these will not be grades>points>average (i.e., GPA) transforming.
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Grade profile (GP)

In the multiple cut-off model, grades are taken to be discrete ordinals, not to be added or
divided; the non-equivalence of units of grades and the lack of a ratio relation among
grade differences are given due recognition. In short, grades are to be used in their original
format with their original meanings. Labels (‘Excellent’, ‘Good’, etc.), letter grades, (A,
B, etc.), and numeric grades (5, 4, etc.) will still be used, and used interchangeably but
there will be no attempt to go to the next step of mistaking the differences between ordinal
and cardinal numbers. A student’s achievement will be looked at collectively as a ‘grade
profile’ (GP) comprising all the relevant grades obtained for a normal programme or a
specific purpose (e.g., scholarship).
The advantage of so doing is to maintain the integrity of grades as grades and of the
avoidance of confusion arising from conversion. The disadvantage of doing this is admin-
istrative inconvenience, since there will be no single-number GPA to guide decisions. But,
then, the question is why a student’s academic performance should be based on a single
number while s/he is more often than not assessed multi-dimensionally.

Grade index (GI)

There may be occasions when a student’s performance needs be summarised into a single
number indicator. For this, a grade index (GI) can be obtained simply. Basically, this is
looking for grade among her/his grades as a representation of their central tendency. Basic
statistics says that the arithmetic average (or the mean which yields the GPA) may not be
a good indicator for such a purpose. The alternatives are the mode (the most common
value) and the median (the value that occurs at the mid-point of the number of cases being
examined). Between them, the mode seems to be a better indicator in that, normally, a stu-
dent usually gets about the same grades for different papers. Thus, a student who gets
three Bs out of five or six grades can be referred to as a ‘B student’. In addition, an indica-
tion of the range of her/his grades can be useful to show consistency. For example, if her/
his five or six grades vary from C+ to A−, s/he can then be described as a ‘B (A−/C+)’,
compared with another student whose grades vary from B– to A+ as ‘B (A+/B–)’. Such a
grade index provides information not only of global performance level but also fluctuation
and is more consistent with the statistical practice of indicating the central tendency
together with variability.
 Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 35

Evaluation and placement

Concurrent use of GP and GI makes the information much richer than the single number
GPA for guidance and feedback purposes. It also provides the teacher as well as the
student with better understanding of where s/he should go and how s/ he can get there. In
recent years, this function has become more fully recognised under the rubric ‘assessment
for learning’ in contrast with the traditional ‘assessment of learning’.
It is assumed to be more convenient to use a single number GPA for selection and
placement purposes. However, such convenience is obtained at the cost of non-equivalence,
as alluded to earlier. We do not realise that the multiple cut-off approach is equally if not
more effective. First, if it is assumed that a single number GPA indicates a student’s glo-
bal ability to do well academically, it must not be forgotten that the same GPA can be
achieved by different combinations of grades (for different disciplines) with the identities
of the disciplines lost in the process of arithmetic operation. Thus, it is possible that some
students have the ‘wrong’ combinations of disciplines, only to be discovered when it was
too late.
Different departments do require students of different relevant capabilities. By using
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GP and GI based on the multiple cut-off approach, the numbers of preferred grades (say,
at least two A’s and one B) can be maintained with the added advantage of having the
relevant disciplines specified (say, at least two A’s in the sciences and one B in
languages). The usefulness of a global indicator such as the GPA as a predictor is doubt-
ful; more specific information is needed about a student’s past achievement and future
potential in relevant disciplines.

Computer-assisted grouping
One convenience of GPA is that it provides a single number indicator. This is an adminis-
trative advantage especially when the number of students is very large and sorting stu-
dents by their profiles (using GP and GI) is perceivably cumbersome and time-consuming
(and, time is always something admission officers and busy academics lack). However,
with the computer, sorting students into specified groups based on grades is not a problem
at all. All that is required is a few lines of instruction in the computer programme. When
such a facility is readily available, it makes sense to use it to enable better processing and
use of student data.

Standards
There is still the question of standards. It is an issue irrespective of whether the current
GPA system (the multiple-regression model) or the multiple cut-off model suggested here
is used. In concrete terms, the question is whether a grade of (say) B+ is coded to represent
the same quality at two different universities. In other words, can B+ from one university
be taken as equivalent to B+ from another? Of course, the answer depends on the aca-
demic standings of the two institutions concerned. If university rankings are to be taken
seriously, the answer is obviously no. If so, how then is the B+ of a student to be treated
by the university to which s/he seeks admission or transfer?
This is a problem even deeper than the problem of GPA or GP+GI. This validity issue is
definitely beyond the scope of this paper and deserves serious consideration, discussion and
exploration to resolve. However, a qualitative approach to it may help, though inconvenient.
Since the same label, letter grade, or numeric grade does not necessarily encode the
same performance quality, when in doubt, the relevant paper could be called for, for
 36 K.C. Soh

purposes of verification or even re-grading. This has nothing to do with trust or mistrust.
Nor has it anything to do with institutional pride and fame. It is just to ensure fairness to
both existing and in-coming students in evaluations which influence subsequent deci-
sions on placement and admission, since one university may be more demanding than
another in awarding the same grade. With electronic devices readily available, this
should be convenient.

Conclusion
It is not easy to accept that what we have been so used to can be wrong. This is just one
aspect of our human nature. A more positive aspect is the courage to change when change
is desired. The GPA system is a case in point. If we realise that it is less than adequate, we
need to have the courage and will to change it.
This paper discussed the short-comings of the GPA system with reference to knowledge
and technology of educational measurement which was not available when the system was
first introduced and later popularised. The information needs may be the same today as
Downloaded By: [Dobson, Ian R.] At: 03:58 31 January 2011

they were two centuries ago, the practice has been passed down and ‘refined’ over the past
two centuries, the system may have served us well up till now, but there is always a day
when change is necessary to do a better job when we know we can do it better – better in
that we do not have to continue making dubious assumptions and applying improper oper-
ations so as to minimise confusion and frustration.

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