Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider

Teaching Professor, Computer Science

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Trends in High School GPAs among Incoming Freshman Classes of Big Ten Schools

By: Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider and Louisa Zhang (Illinois '27)
Published: January 21, 2025

Overview

In Fall 2023, the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported a record 83.8% of their incoming, first-semester freshman class reported an unweighted high school GPA of at least 3.75. Among those students, nearly half (47.8%) of the incoming freshman class reported a perfect 4.00 GPA.

Several research papers have studied the multi-decade trend of GPAs increasing over time, but we found no widely available data exploring the impact of the Big Ten. This work explores the first-semester freshman demographics published by all sixteen Big Ten schools.

Specifically, this work primarily focused on the percentage of students in each freshman class that have a high school GPA of at least 3.75. For example, visually representing the high school GPAs of the incoming Fall 2023 class of freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

- Perfect 4.00 GPA
- 3.75 - 3.99 GPA
- 3.50 - 3.74 GPA
- 3.25 - 3.49 GPA
- 3.00 - 3.24 GPA
- Less than 3.00 GPA
Interact: Tap/hover over any graphical element to view the raw data.

Freshman Class Demographics Over Time by University

Among all Big Ten Universities, ten schools have consistently reported GPA cohorts of their freshman classes. Below, you can select and view each of the Universities individually:

University:

[1]: Beginning in Fall 2019, universities began reporting 4.00 GPAs separately from the students with above 3.75 high school GPAs.

Freshman Class Incoming GPA Across the Big Ten

After nerding out with each University individually, the plot below graphs the percentage of each University's freshman class that had a high school GPA of 3.75 or higher. Additionally, the average of all schools with data for a given year is plotted as the "B1G Average":

Average High School GPA

In addition to reporting the percentage of students with GPAs above 3.75, the freshman class average high school GPA (among all incoming freshman at each University) is reported for reach University:

Analysis

Despite the wide geographical area of the Big Ten system, with each school pulling a large portion of their students from in-state high schools with diverse state standards and state educational boards, the trend of the freshman class high school GPA has increased with very few exceptions.


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Data Set

The data presented in this work was gathered by Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider and Louisa Zhang (Illinois '27) in January 2025 by analyzing 286 reports to source Questions C11 and C12 in the Common Data Sets. The reports accessed in this work are published publicly by each University:

Rutgers, Ohio State, Northwestern, Minnesota, and Illinois reported no data for Questions C11 and C12 in any available Common Data Sets. Ohio State's links to Common Data Sets before 2022 were broken and reports were inaccessible. The University of Maryland did not provide unweighted GPAs and was excluded for not having comparable data (in Fall 2023, Maryland reported 93.64% of students had at least a 4.00 GPA and their average freshman class GPA had an average high school GPA of 4.45). Finally, Penn State reported data for Question C11 in only Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 and was excluded for having too few data points.