With all the data available online, I am surprised I have not been able to find anywhere that collects and compares the average GPA’s of students at different colleges. With all the topics referencing grade deflation (and inflation), it seems comparing the average GPA by school is a fairly objective barometer of how hard they grade. But I can’t find any such source. I see people reference average GPA’s in school forum topics often but with no cited source. Some schools seem to have the data publicly on their websites (like Middlebury) but others do not. I am particularly interested in comparing LAC’s.
Thanks.
US News paid subscription to get them all on one page. Otherwise look up the common data set of each individual school or just google “Average GPA insert name of school”.
http://www.gradeinflation.com/ (list of colleges at the bottom)
However, this may not reflect variations in grade inflation and deflation between various departments or courses. In addition, the strength of students in each school or course may vary (e.g. the students in honors physics for physics majors are not the same as the ones in physics for biology majors and pre-meds).
Some schools have more detailed grade distribution information.
https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/
https://registrar.wisc.edu/course_grade_distributions.htm
http://www.ourumd.com/
Thanks for the links! I had stumbled across the gradeinflation site in my Googling and it’s a great resource but hasn’t been updated so most of the data is not current.
When you Google “Average GPA [insert school]” you mostly get pages and pages of data about the average GPA of admitted students, not current students. I tried a lot of search variants and it was virtually impossible to find one that didn’t still pul data on the high school GPA’s of admitted students to the colleges. I had more luck just doing to some of the colleges themselves and searching, but most don’t seem to transparently supply the data.
The exception was Middlebury which had a ton of data – good for them… Here’s an example. They even break it down by area of study and there are additional reports for each semester and previous running 10 year averages.
http://www.middlebury.edu/system/files/media/10-yr%20history.pdf
So to clarify, if you subscribe to the U.S. News data they give you currently admitted college-level GPA data, not incoming Freshman high school GPA data?
BTW, another thing that can impact GPA is not necessarily how difficult the grading is within classes, but what the school’s policies are for when you can add/drop classes, when you can re-take classes and whether re-takes wipe out previous grades or not. I recall comparing my great public school policy to a friend’s elite private school years ago and the policies were night-and-day. At my school you had 3 weeks to drop. After that the class was on your transcript no matter what happened and could not be changed to pass/fail. If you failed a course you could re-take it but the original course stayed on the transcript and the failing grade stayed in your GPA calc. At the friend’s school you should drop a course up-until the final (so if you had already blown it you could remove it from your transcript and GPA), then if you got lower than a C after the final you could re-take it and the new grade would supersede the original which would be wiped from your transcript (it would note the re-take but not the original grade which wasn’t calculated in your GPA). Obviously the two policies had a meaningful impact on GPA. The friend’s course may have been as hard but the ability to hold maintain a GPA wasn’t even close.