#1: Trends in High School GPAs
Project 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
This project is completed in your browser using Python!
Video Walkthrough
Note: The beginning of this walkthrough describes creating a new GitHub repository. If you are doing this project in the browser, you do not need to do this process.