HISTORY OF GRADE POINT AVERAGE

Yale University historian George W. Pierson writes "According to tradition the first grades issued at Yale (and possibly the first in the country) were given out in the year 1785, when President Ezra Stiles, after examining 58 Seniors, recorded in his diary that there were 'Twenty Optimi, sixteen second Optimi, twelve Inferiores (Boni), ten Pejores.'Keith Hoskin argues that the concept of grading students' work quantitatively was developed by a tutor named William Farish and first implemented by the University of Cambridge in 1792. Hoskin's assertion has been questioned by Christopher Stray, who finds the evidence for Farish as the inventor of the numerical mark to be unpersuasive Stray's article elucidates the complex relationship between the mode of examination (testing), in this case oral or written, and the varying philosophies of education these modes imply, both to teacher and student. As a technology, grading both shapes and reflects many fundamental areas of educational theory and practice.

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

Today, however, 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.

Let's imagine what might have happened in the past. A 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: qualities 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 cardinal 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 grading) 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.

Even more fundamental is the issue of 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 the same kind of knowledge and skills, but 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.