It is that time of year again: Midterms. I just completed all of mine, and I am now going to classes with the dreaded knowledge that I will receive my test scores. All of them—the good, the bad, and the ugly. I sit in my seat in fear that my one midterm will wreck my current grade, that the new grade will destroy my GPA, that the terrible GPA will make it impossible to go to grad school, that not going to grad school will limit my career choices, and basically, by the time I sit down, I desperately want to crawl back into my dorm room, hide under the covers, watch Scandal, and just pretend I am already successful.
However, I stay glued to my chair, unprepared to see the grade put before me. What is it? An A-? NOOOOO! Unless I managed to excel the rest of the semester, bye bye 4.0. For some reason unbeknownst to students, a 92% is deemed the “eh kinda of an A.” With slightly slumped shoulders, I traipse off to my next class. Now, I worked really hard for this class, because everyone knows Professor X grades without mercy. I nervously peek at the paper in front of me. A 98%?! What more could a student want? I should be completely content to have an average of a 95%, right?
Except that my GPA is ruined. I have worked hard to maintain a 4.0 GPA. So have many of my fellow peers. Yet, this semester, all my classes grading scale include the dreaded A-. According to the University of North Florida, and many other colleges, an A- is worth 3.7, an A is worth 4. So now, if I don’t raise my A-, my GPA will slide down to below a 4.0 for the rest of my college career. Unfortunately, I know I am not alone.
I am not actually opposed to A- entirely. For example, the University of Alabama uses A-, without destroying GPAs. How so? Because they also award A+'s. For that A+, a student achieves above a 4.0. This allows students to balance out their classes, knowing that a 93% their sophomore year will not destroy their college undergraduate GPA. That is why for an A-, there should also be an A+.
In addition to destroying GPAs, A-'s are subjective. At UNF professors are not required to hand out A-'s, so some choose to give out only A’s. For introduction classes, where many professors teach the same course, two students could do the same amount of work, get the same percentage score, but different grades. If a school is going to allow the A-, they ought to make it mandatory. Otherwise, you have students who will attempt to only take classes without the A-, and honestly, can you blame them?
In a society where high school GPA dictates what colleges you get into, and undergrad grades decided what grad school, GPAs are crucial to a student’s academic identity. Debate that all you want and try to tell us we aren’t numbers. Until the system changes, it is a fact of life.
Many students require a certain GPA to keep scholarships. Anyone going to grad school will need a great GPA to get merit-based awards for their masters. According to a study published in the Journal of Labor Economics, for every point increase in your GPA there is 9-25% wage increase, with the discrepancy depending on field, demographics, and location. Recently, Google’s Senior Vice President for People Operations, Lazo Block, supposedly told the New York Times that GPA doesn’t matter anymore. Yet, if you read the entire quote, it does matter:
One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that GPA’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and GPA’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school.
So GPA doesn’t matter if you are 10 years out of college with work experience under your belt, but for those of currently attending college, and currently striving for a decent GPA, it does, in fact, matter a great deal.
The A’s matter. The A-, without the balance of an A+, steal a student’s ability to balance out a GPA. It creates a non-standard grading scale in schools that don’t require unity. It, above all, hurts the student who worked to get an A range grade by docking them .3 points on the grading scale. That student now will go up against 4.0 students who took easier classes and universities without the +/- grading scale. So do away with the A-, unless there is a way for a student to redeem themselves.
