Abstract:

Many of the universities around the world use a single metric to represent a student’s overall level of achievement, namely the Grade Point Average (GPA). This metric is calculated in Spain (Royal Decree 1125 / 2003 of 5 September) as the sum of the ECTS earned by the student multiplied by the value of the corresponding qualifications, divided by the number of total ECTS earned by the student. With this single metric students are acknowledged with Honors degrees and scholarships, and curricular internships, final projects, or Erasmus destination universities are allocated. As this metric has a such a potential impact, it is important that the used metric should only reward the outstanding achievers.

Paraphrasing the beginning of Prof. Raich (1992) paper on “Weighted Grades: Solution or Problem”, does it seem fair to you that a student that has completed all his/her degree courses in the first possible call and is applying for a specific final degree project, is left out because all the positions are granted to students having a better grade in just one course but took double time to complete?

Some Spanish universities, like Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Universidad de Valladolid or Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, are already using some type of penalisation to award Honours degrees (https://escuelapolitecnica.uah.es/escuela/documentos/normativa-premios-extraordinarios.pdf), to the selection of curricular internships (https://www.feyts.uva.es/sites/default/files/CRITERIOS%20CALCULO%20NOTA%20MEDIA-1.pdf), or for all internal procedures (https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/handle/10016/19428#preview). However those penalizations are not uniform and are not transferable between institutions.

Like these universities, the authors also believe some type of penalization should be applied to any student for not passing a course in the first possible call. Concretely, the authors propose to use a weighted GPA (w-GPA) instead of the commonly used GPA, to incorporate the peculiarity of Spanish universities were students are able to re-sit for a course up to seven times. This paper proposes that such a student’s w-GPA would be computed by multiplying the ECTS credits of each course by the grade points earned in each particular course and then dividing the total number of grade points by the total number of attempted ECTS. If a student had to retake a course, both the initial and all retake exam grades are recorded on the student’s permanent academic record, and all those grades are included in the calculation of the proposed w-GPA.

This paper presents an analysis of both grading systems (GPA vs. w-GPA) using anonymized official data provided by the Complutense University ́s Office of Academic Record for all the student cohorts who first enrolled in the bachelor’s degree in Business Administration at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), from the years 2009/10 through to 2018/19. The 2018/19 cohort is the last possible cohort that might have finished the Spanish four year degree in Business Administration.

First results show there is a grade inflation when using the GPA (non-penalized) versus the w-GPA. This easily avoidable phenomenon of grade inflation limits the ability of universities rewarding the outstanding achievers, or of employers distinguishing superior academic performers from the majority of their colleagues, since students can retake a course almost endlessly until they pass it.

Keywords:

Assessment, GPA, Higher education.