Academic Core GPA

Calculating a Student's Academic Core GPA

Purdue is proud to provide merit scholarships to several hundred freshmen each year who come to us with outstanding academic credentials.  However, our pool of funds is limited and it is important that students from all educational backgrounds have an equal opportunity to be considered for the Trustee and Presidential Scholarships.

Each year Purdue receives applications from high school students across the United States and around the world.  Each applicant’s school makes decisions about how it calculates grades for students, what scale is used, and whether some grades are reported as weighted or unweighted.  Some schools give greater weight to honors, Advanced Placement, or International Baccalaureate courses; some have a sliding scale; and some give no extra weight at all.  Some schools are able to offer dozens of AP or IB course options to their students; some offer only a few such choices; and some are not able to offer any.  Some schools use a standard 4-point grading scale; some use a 5-, 6-, 10-, 11-, 12-, or 100-point scale.  Whatever choices each applicant’s school has made about how to report the academic preparedness of its students, it’s important to note that no one way is more correct than any other. But the result is that there often are dozens of different grade reporting processes represented in Purdue’s applicant pool.

We do not use weighted grades for scholarship consideration for two reasons: 

1. The variance in weighting scales described above;
2. Because scholarship funding is limited, the use of the transcript-weighted GPA's would force us to raise the minimum criterion, which could limit access to these scholarships among students attending less advantaged schools, where honors and AP courses are limited or unavailable. We want to ensure that excellent students who do not have access to advanced-level coursework at their high schools still can qualify for these scholarships. 

To bring some uniformity to high merit scholarship selection, Purdue calculates a core GPA for each applicant, rather than using the “transcript” high school GPA.  This core is calculated using unweighted grades from only the academic coursework reported on the applicant’s official high school transcript from the freshman through the junior year in high school.  Grades in senior year courses are not considered for the merit scholarships.  Academic core courses considered are those in English, college preparatory math, lab science, social studies, and foreign language.  For the recalculation, we use the same grading scale that is used for Purdue students.

The following scale indicates the values used for each letter grade in core academic courses to calculate core GPA:

Although we do not use weighted GPA's for high merit scholarship consideration, Purdue encourages all students to pursue a rigorous high school curriculum and to take advantage of any advanced coursework their school offers that will challenge them academically and intellectually.  The more preparation a student has in high school for the rigors of college-level coursework, the more successful they are likely to be during their college career, and the more likely they will be to graduate.