GPA calculation browser app for Academic Advisors to help students with academic goal-setting
I designed this simple app for use by student support staff at the university where I worked. Learning specialists often need to help probation students with goal-setting to improve their grades, but the calculation to help students identify their target GPA is somewhat error-prone; staff often struggled to remember the steps if they didn't make the calculations very often. A simple tool was needed which could run in the browser and which would ensure accurate calculations.
The single-page app collects 4 data points:
- Student's prior attempted credit hours (from their transcript)
- Student's total 'quality points' (from their transcript)
- Credit hours being taken in the current semester
- Overall target GPA (e.g. if they are on Probation, they may need a particular GPA)
With this data, the app outputs a term GPA result that the student needs to achieve in the current semester to reach their overall target GPA. It also allows for grade replacement of D and F grades if a student is trying to replace a low grade in a prior semester.
Note on rounding: Currently, the GPA results are rounded DOWN to the 2nd decimal digit (e.g. 2.679 would round down to 2.67 GPA). This is in line with the current practice at one institution. However, this policy should be checked when transfering this tool to any other context.
Although this was made with a particular advising context in mind, there are many schools that calculate GPA in a similar manner, so small changes to the Javascript code should allow for it to be used in other university advising contexts.
It should be noted that I designed this as an outside project at the same time that I was taking a Web Development at Oregon State University. My motivation was to practice my skills at directly manipulating DOM elements and event-driven programming. I was happy to be able to make something that would be useful to my colleagues while strengthing my front-end development skills.
This project was created with:
- Javascript (file name: script.js)
- HTML (file name: index.html)
- CSS (file name: style.css)
To run this project, download the files listed above and locate them in the same directory. Open index.html in a browser.
For suggestions or questions related to use or adaptation of this app, please contact: joel.swenddal@gmail.com