What is GPA (Grade Point Average)?
A GPA or ‘Grade Point Average’ is a very common metric for assessing student attainment. Many countries have adopted some variation of the GPA system. In the USA, GPA is used at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It is calculated using the grades for each piece of coursework or assessment you complete. As such, it can fluctuate throughout the course of your programme.
This continuous method of assessment means you’ll need to achieve consistently high grades to maintain a strong GPA. This can be especially important for students who are receiving funding for their degree, as some scholarship programmes will not continue financial support for recipients who fall below a certain GPA.
How is your GPA calculated?
Calculating your GPA can be a fiddly process, and exact methods differ between countries. To make things easier, we’ll take the USA as an example.
Put simply, your GPA is the total sum of grades achieved throughout your course, divided by the total number of credits taken. In order to do this, each letter grade (from A-F) is assigned a numerical value or ‘quality point’:
- A - 4
- B - 3
- C - 2
- D - 1
- F - 0
The resulting figure will be a number between 0 and 4, which is your GPA.
Things can get a little more complicated when you consider the fact that not all letter grades will translate into nice round numbers (a grade of A- would be assigned a value of 3.67, for example).
Some programmes also take into account the difficulty of each module when calculating your average score. This is called a ‘weighted’ GPA, and uses a 5.0, rather than a 4.0 scale. This means you may be awarded up to 5 quality points if you achieve an A in a particularly taxing course. It’s possible for your overall GPA to be higher than 4 if calculated using a weighted system.
Many countries around the world use a GPA system, and a 4.0 grading scale is by far the most common. This can vary, however – some institutions in India use a 10-point GPA system, for example.
What is a 'good' GPA?
A 4.0 is the highest GPA a student can achieve (using an unweighted system), but it’s very difficult to maintain this throughout your course of study. So how high a GPA do you need to achieve for your final score to be considered ‘good’?
In the USA, universities will often award ‘honours’ to graduates at the end of their degree, which provide a useful framework for thinking about what is considered a ‘good’ GPA. The highest honour a student can achieve is summa cum laude, followed by magna cum laude and finally cum laude.
Honours are usually awarded either to a set percentage of the highest performing students, or according to predetermined GPA thresholds. Because of this, the GPA required to earn each honour can differ from institution to institution, and from year to year. To give you a general idea, the University of Pennsylvania uses the following cumulative GPA boundaries to award honours for undergraduate degrees:
- summa cum laude: 3.8 or higher
- magna cum laude: 3.6 - 3.8
- cum laude: 3.4 - 3.6
As we’ve said, these can vary considerably. At Michigan Law School, for example, only students with a GPA of 4.0 will graduate summa cum laude. Nonetheless, the above figures should give you a sense of how various GPA scores will be perceived by graduate school admissions departments, or by potential employers!
Not all graduate schools in the USA will set minimum GPA requirements for Masters programmes, but amongst those that do, 3.0 is a fairly common figure. For more competitive programmes, you’ll likely need a considerably higher score than this to be in with a shot of securing a place (at Harvard’s school of Engineering and Applied Sciences, for example, the average successful Masters applicant in 2021 had an undergraduate GPA of 3.8).
Minimum GPA requirements for PhD applicants in the USA are rare, but a GPA of lower than 3.0 in your Masters will likely be a disadvantage.
What should be obvious by now is that exactly what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ GPA score is fairly subjective. Remember that while you should, of course, strive for the best possible academic transcript during your time at university, GPA is far from the be-all and end-all of a good Masters application. Even with a lower than average score, you’ll have plenty of other opportunities to set yourself apart from the crowd, such as in your personal statement or CV.
