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I have been tasked with making a grade equivalence table for a small list of US universities to translate to grades at a European university. To do this I thought it would be easiest just to look at the GPA distribution and try to map percentiles. However, I am having problems finding them. Can this data be found for

  • University of California
  • University of Maryland
  • University of Texas at Austin
  • University of Wisconsin

This is for students in their third year of university who will be spending one year in the US.

The subject of particular interest is computer science but any data would be better than none.

Simd
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  • Are you trying to figure out GPA conversion scheme (may be a duplicate of How to convert from one grading scheme to another? or GPA distribution (you may have a shopping question)? – Nobody Feb 18 '16 at 09:30
  • @scaaahu I would like to make the conversion scheme myself by using the GPA distribution. I am not sure what a shopping question is. My question is simply for data which I haven't managed to find. – Simd Feb 18 '16 at 09:33
  • "Shopping" questions, which seek recommendations or lists of individual universities, academic programs, publishers, journals, research topics or similar as an answer or seek an assessment or comparison of such, are off-topic here. (See this discussion for more information.) – Nobody Feb 18 '16 at 09:37
  • @scaaahu Thanks for the definition. I don't think it is one of those in that case. – Simd Feb 18 '16 at 10:08
  • http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/q/1736/546 – Nobody Feb 21 '16 at 08:01
  • I doubt universities are willing to disclose this information. No matter what the distribution is, it will look bad to some interested party. – Anonymous Physicist Feb 21 '16 at 08:41
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    @AnonymousPhysicist What about public universities? Don't they have some obligation under Freedom of Information laws? – Simd Feb 21 '16 at 10:02
  • @Lembik The asker could try that approach. I do not know how privacy rules and FOIA would balance in this case. The law is different in each state (and may be different depending on the status of the particular university). – Anonymous Physicist Feb 21 '16 at 10:40
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    @AnonymousPhysicist A FOIA-like request may work, I'm not sure if that information would necessarily be covered (but probably). There shouldn't be any FERPA concerns at all, though, since reporting an institution-wide aggregate wouldn't be releasing anything that is identifiable with any one student – user0721090601 Feb 21 '16 at 14:12
  • I would point out that you will be still comparing apples to oranges. You might be able to average out the weight differences but the taste won't be the same. – DRF May 22 '18 at 09:51

1 Answers1

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Stuart Rojstaczer maintains a web page with information about average GPA at many universities in the U.S. The data on that page was last updated in 2009, and is next scheduled to be updated in February 2016 (according to a note from the author on the page.)

At the end of that page, there are links to the historical GPA at each of the schools for which he has data. It also indicates the source of the data, so you can find out whether the school actually publishes the data, or whether the school simply made the data available to the author.

For example, if I click on his link for University of Wisconsin - Madison, I learn that this data was collected from the registrar's website. While the particular link he cites is no longer alive, searching the registrar's site yields this page that allows me to find out grade distributions from any course and term. Similarly, I found out through his page that UCSB publishes this data through its office of institutional research, which led me to this page of reports that include average GPA by major.

You can follow a similar procedure to find grade distribution information for other schools if available, but it may not be available for the schools you are interested in. Universities are not obligated to publish this information.

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