the.com/gpa
one number pretending four years of chaos had a consistent personality.
means a weighted average of your grades that colleges and employers use as a lazy proxy for how hard you tried.
from grade point averaging emerged in american colleges in the early 1900s to standardize wildly inconsistent grading across schools and professors, turning letters into numbers so admissions offices could sort humans faster.
scale origin4.0 scale dates back to mount holyoke, 1897
weighted inflationsome schools allow gpas above 5.0 now
one bad semestercan haunt a transcript for years
employers rarely checkmost stop caring after your first job
for instance
harvard grade inflation — median gpa hit 3.8 by 2020, sparking faculty debate
valedictorian ties — some us high schools now have 10+ co-valedictorians from gpa inflation
phi beta kappa — requires roughly top 10 percent gpa for induction since 1776