<p>GPA is nearly worthless for this purpose. Most colleges in the top ~100 of one of the US News “national” lists report GPAs above 3.5 (if they report them at all). For example, Maryland (the #62 ranked national university) reports an average GPA of 4.07 in its Common Data Set. That must be a weighted GPA, but what is their weighting formula? Many of the most selective colleges do not report average GPAs at all in their CDS files.</p>
<p>In my opinion, for what you want, if you must use only one for a first-pass comparison, SAT scores are the best of these metrics. Ranked lists of SAT scores are easy to access in order to compare multiple colleges. They seem to correlate much better than GPA to other factors used to rank colleges, such as admit rates, 4 year graduation rates, average class sizes, PhD productivity, and levels of need-based financial aid. They probably correlate less well to indicators of faculty quality (average faculty salary, faculty publication and citation rates, institutional levels of research funding, etc.)</p>
<p>stateuniversity.com ranks colleges by 75th percentile SAT M+CR scores:
<a href=“Top 500 Ranked Colleges - Highest SAT 75th Percentile Scores”>USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings;
Most of the colleges in that list with scores of about 1500 or above also:
- claim to cover 100% of demonstrated financial need
- have 4 year graduation rates of 80% or higher
- have admission rates below 40%
- have no more than 15% of classes with 50 or more students, and 50% or more with less than 20 students
(these are just arbitrary cut-offs for comparison’s sake)</p>
<p>If a college performed very poorly on many of these other factors, it would have a hard time attracting very many of the highest-scoring students.</p>