How researchers calculate students’ grade point average in other courses has minimal impact

Abstract

Grade point average in “other” courses (GPAO) is an increasingly common measure used to control for prior academic performance and to predict future academic performance. In previous work, there are two distinct approaches to calculating GPAO, one based on only courses taken concurrently (term GPAO) and one based on all previous courses taken (cumulative GPAO). To our knowledge, no one has studied whether these methods for calculating the GPAO result in equivalent analyses and conclusions. As researchers often use one definition or the other without comment on why that choice was made, if the two calculations of GPAO are different, researchers might be inducing systematic error into their results and publishing potentially inaccurate conclusions. We looked at more than 3,700 courses at a public, research-intensive university over a decade and found limited evidence that the choice of GPAO calculation affects the conclusions. At most, one in seven courses could be affected. Further analysis suggests that there may be situations where one form of GPAO may be preferred over the other when it comes to examining inequity in courses or predicting student grades. However, we did not find sufficient evidence to universally recommend one form of GPAO over the other.