I am a member of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and I would encourage anyone who isn't already a member to become one. Not only do they offer support should you need it, but it is also a way to support other homeschoolers. They also have many wonderful articles and resources which are helpful for the busy homeschool mom. I recently received their article on the dreaded GPA. In my effort to help those to not be in the position where you have to quickly do a transcript, I have included some of their thoughts here. I have not included the entire article as it is rather long, but the nuts and bolts of what is a GPA, and how to compute it are included below . . . . I trust it will help you as you continue to work out that High School Transcript.
Definition
The wiktionary definition of grade point average is “a method of computing a numerical value for letter grades received in school by assigning each a numeric value and averaging the numbers.” You will notice from some of the transcript templates listed on our high school website, that there are often two sets of GPAs shown—yearly and cumulative. Each of these is calculated a bit differently so we’ll take a look at how to compute both types.
Yearly GPA
The first step to computing the yearly GPA is to convert each letter grade to points. For example, an A equals 4 points, a B equals 3 points, a C equals 2 points, and so forth. The grade points are then multiplied by the number of credits a course earned resulting in what is known as quality points. An example will clarify this operation. Let's say that a student received a letter grade of an “A” in Algebra I. The first step is to convert the letter grade of an A to 4 points and multiply by 1 credit for a total of 4 quality points. In addition, if a student takes a one semester health course earning one-half credit and receives a “B,” then calculate the quality points as follows: multiply .5 credits by 3 grade points for a total of 1.5 quality points. Continue this operation for each course your teen takes in a given school year.
The next step of the computation will be to total the quality points for all courses and divide by the total number of credits earned in a given year, rounding the answer to two decimal places. This results in the yearly GPA. You may find it helpful to review these steps on the GPA computation example we have listed in our in our transcript section of the website.
When calculating the yearly GPA, there are some factors to take into consideration. (Isn’t it always the case that as soon as you think something is cut and dry, someone throws you a curve?!) Well, here is one of those situations. If you give pass/fail grades for any of your courses, the credits for these courses will be included in the sum of credits shown on the high school transcript, but they will not be used in computing the GPA. When calculating the GPA, you will need to subtract the pass/fail credits out of the total number of credits for that year before dividing by the total number of quality points. An illustration may help.
Total credits for one year: 6.5 (including .5 credit for a course graded pass/fail)Total quality points: 21.5 Compute GPA: 21.5 divided by 6 (6.5 minus .5) equals 3.58
Another curve—if you plan to attach +’s and –’s to your letter grades, then your grade points will need to reflect that. For instance, an A+ will compute to 4.3 points rather than the usual 4 points. An A–, however, will be 3.7 points; a B+ (3.3 points); B– (2.7 points); and so on.
With this information in hand, you are now ready to calculate the GPA for each individual year of high school.
Next let’s turn our attention to computing the cumulative GPA over the course of all four years.
Cumulative GPA
Since you want to show an overall average of your child’s high school work and not an average of the averages, you should not simply add up all the yearly GPAs and divide by 4 (the number of years). Instead, to calculate a cumulative GPA, it will be necessary to add all the quality points from 9th through 12th grades and divide by the sum of all four years of credits (first subtracting out any pass/fail credits).
If you wish to include a running cumulative GPA for each year of high school, then you will need to do the above operation in steps. Obviously, the yearly and cumulative GPAs for the 9th grade will be the same. For 10th grade, you will add the quality points from both 9th and 10th and divide that sum by the total number of credits (minus any pass/fail credits) for both those years. Then in the 11th grade, you will again go back to 9th grade and add all the quality points through the 11th grade and divide by the sum of the credits for those three years. The 12th grade computations will be completed in the same fashion and the resulting GPA will be both the cumulative GPA for 12th grade as well as the grand cumulative GPA for all four years of high school.
