Students eager to calculate their grade point average this semester don’t have to pull out their TI-84s, not since the introduction of the University’s new GPA calculator on the registrar’s Web site.
Last semester, the University announced that undergraduate instructors would have the option of adding plus and minus to letter grades. Graduate instructors were already using the plus-minus grading system.
The introduction of a GPA calculator is important because the new plus-minus grading makes it difficult for students to manually calculate their grades, said David Liu, chairman of the Curriculum Committee of the Senate of College Councils, which passed legislation recommending the tool to the University.
“Since knowledge about a student’s GPA is so important in general, we thought it would be useful for students to have a GPA calculator as a tool to increase that knowledge,” he said.
Liu said the Academic Counselors Association, which is made up of all academic advisors at UT, brought the idea of a GPA calculator to the Senate at the end of the spring semester.
The Senate introduced and passed legislation to create a University-wide GPA calculator during the organization’s first general assembly meeting this fall, Liu said.
“After the resolution was passed, the registrar actually initiated contact after learning about our initiative through The Daily Texan,” he said. “We then had a series of meetings with the registrar’s programming staff along with the Academic Counselors Association to provide feedback on what the registrar had done so far.”
After making more changes and debugging the program, the UT GPA calculator was released in time for spring semester advising and registration.
Associate registrar Michael Allen said the GPA calculator is something the student body has been asking for.
“There has been a desire for it for a long time,” Allen said. “The GPA calculator is, in the larger scheme of things, not as important as other things, so you make choices on how to allocate resources. This is an idea whose time finally came up.”
Pre-journalism sophomore Danielle Villasana, who transferred this semester from Austin Community College, said the new GPA calculator would be useful.
“I’m happy to know there’s an easy way to calculate my GPA,” she said.
Villasana said she was worried about UT’s new plus-minus grading system because ACC uses a grading system of only letter grades.
“I’m not excited [about the new grading system.] I’m usually a low-A student, so the sliding scale works against me,” she said.
