>Now that the most common grade at most four-year colleges is an A, the stakes for each individual course are much higher. A single negative outlier takes on ou

>Now that the most common grade at most four-year colleges is an A, the stakes for each individual course are much higher. A single negative outlier takes on outsize weight. To get a stellar GPA, a student doesn’t have to be exceptionally good at any one thing; they have to manage risk in every course they take over four years. One possible way to mitigate this slightly is to calculate grading averages as a root-mean-square, similar to finding the length of a vector where each course represents a different "dimension". This will tend to deëmphasize the occasional poor performance. Its utility is limited when practically everyone gets an A at everything, but it does help the student with one bad semester mount a comeback. I have previously argued for root-mean-square grading within courses, but the same principle applies when used to calculate averages among multiple courses.