An Alternative to the Use of GPA to Determine Class Rank

A student’s GPA is routinely used to determine eligibility for internships, academic awards, scholarships and fulltime employment. Unfortunately, GPA is a flawed measure of student achievement due to the variability in difficulty among college-level courses. Students who take classes with a grade distribution that is skewed towards higher grades will have a higher GPA than students who are primarily enrolled in courses that are skewed towards lower grades. Because of this discrepancy, many strong students have a lower GPA than they ought to when compared to their peers. To address this, we propose using the Elo rating system that is used to measure the strength of chess players in international tournaments to provide a more accurate measure. Chess player ratings are so accurate that they can be used very effectively to predict the outcome of games based solely on the difference between the ratings of two players. The Elo rating system has also been adopted in several other fields to great success. We have written computer simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of this system when applied to a college curriculum.