Hi,
I saw the following reported in UMD’s common dataset for the year 2020.
it seems like 93% of freshman has a GPA of 4.0, how is that possible? Or they report the weighted GPA.
So is the GPA report from Univ. Mass-Amherst, 78% is 4.0.
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It’s likely they take GPAs off the transcript, many of which are weighted. Only way to know exactly how they calculate this GPA is to ask institutional reporting as they are responsible for completing the CDSs (although I don’t know about MD specifically, staffers in these departments often answer email questions!).
Another important point is that the institutional reporting department does not always calculate GPA in the same way AOs do for admission purposes.
Resources:
Since the average GPA is 4.36, those are almost certainly weighted GPAs. The most common weighting systems add 0.5-0.75 points to the GPA, so the UW GPA is likely around 3.7-3.8.
Otherwise, the applicants are coming from high schools where the entire top 10% and a substantial number of those in the top 25% are getting 4.0 UW GPAs.
Also, UMD is admitting around 40% of their applicants, and there is no way that 40% of their applicants have 4.0 GPAs.
College calculus/use HS GPA differently. Many use some form of weighted HS GPA, but weighting systems are all over the place, so you cannot know what a weighted HS GPA means unless you know the weighting system.
Yes, but the most important take away is that the GPAs on UMDs CDS are weighted GPAs, not UW GPAs. A student with rigorous course set and a GPA of 3.85, for example, is highly competitive for UMD. I’m pretty sure that, if a students at any decent high school would look at their Naviance, they would see that the large majority of the students that UMD is accepting have UW GPAs which are not 4.0.
Unfortunately, there are many data points that show that the CDS GPA is not standard/consistent. Between weighted/unweighted and different weighting schemes, it’s basically unusable.
Sounds about right