#1: Trends in High School GPAs

MicroProject Overview

The Common Data Set (CDS) is an annual report published by nearly every major college and university in the United States with the goal to achieve the "development of clear, standard data items and definitions in order to determine a specific cohort relevant to each item".

As part of the Common Data Set, universities report the "percentage of all enrolled, degree-seeking, first-time, first-year students [...] high school grade-point averages" in the following GPA ranges:

• Percentage of incoming freshman with a high school GPA of 4.00
• Percentage of incoming freshman with a high school GPA of 3.75 or greater
• Percentage of incoming freshman with a high school GPA of 3.50 or greater
• ...and so on...

For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's UW-Madison 2024 CDS reports that a record 83.8% of their incoming, first-semester freshman class reported an unweighted high school GPA of at least 3.75.

In January 2025, we compiled all of high school GPAs from the Common Data Sets provided by all Big Ten Universities and provide them as a dataset cds-high-school-gpas.csv. In this MicroProject, you will nerd out with this data and explore if there are any trends in the high school GPAs of freshman at Big Ten schools. Let's nerd out! 🎉

Getting Started

There are two ways to work on this MicroProject:

• You can get started right now on Google Colab: MicroProject #1: Trends in High School GPA

• Alteratively, and our preferred setup since you also learn to use real data science tools, is to program on your own by fetching this MicroProject from our GitHub!

  • The setup takes a minute but, once you set up your computer for any MicroProject, doing another one is as easy as running one git command! 🎉
  • By using GitHub, you also earn this MicroProject's collectable card!
  • To get started, continue scrolling to find the "First Time Doing a MicroProject?" and "Fetch the Initial Files".

Video Walkthrough

MicroProject Preview

MicroProject Introduction, in Visual Studio Code

MicroProject Part 2.2, where you'll find subset of rows from The University of Wisconsin-Madison

MicroProject Part 3, where you'll create data visualization of three Big Ten School's freshman class GPAs

Fetch the Initial Files

In your terminal, navigate to your GitHub repository and merge the initial files by running the following commands:

git fetch microprojects
git merge microprojects/microproject-01-trends-in-high-school-gpas --allow-unrelated-histories -m "Merging initial files"

Complete the Notebook

If the commands above were successful, you have merged in the initial files to start on the MicroProject.

• Find the new microproject-01-trends-in-high-school-gpas folder.
• Open microproject-01-trends-in-high-school-gpas.ipynb and complete the MicroProject!

Commit and Grade Your Notebook

Once you have finished your notebook, you must use the built-in GitHub Action to preform automated grading of your MicroProject notebook! You will need to commit your work and then manually run the GitHub Action.

Commit Your Work

To commit your notebook, run the standard git commands in your terminal:

git add -u
git commit -m "microproject completed"
git push

Grade Your Notebook

To grade your notebook, you will need to visit your GitHub repository in your browser.

• Visit your GitHub repository in your browser
• Click on the "Actions" tab
• Under "Workflows", find the workflow for this microproject
• Click the "Run Workflow" in the blue box, and then the green "Run Workflow"
• After about 10 seconds, you should see a new job that has started running
  • You can click on the job to watch it run in real-time
  • It will take ~1 minute to run and grade
• Once the running is complete, the autograding summary will be available!