Why I'm Opposed to the "Enhanced Transcript"

I didn’t list my GPA on my resume until my sophomore or junior year of college. During the period this information wasn’t listed, an acquaintance who was interviewing me for a summer internship flat out asked me why I hadn’t included it. I was taken aback—did I seem like the kind of person who would be embarrassed about my GPA? Surely she assumed I was some sort of failure if I had chosen not to list it on my resume (I wasn’t!). I suppose at that as a sophomore, I just didn’t find it necessary to indicate this information so early into my college career—but sensing my interviewer’s curiosity, I told her what it was, and we resumed our conversation. 

While it’s common for a resume to reflect some elements of one’s transcript, such as a GPA or relevant coursework, I believe that a resume and a transcript are two different entities—and they should remain that way. Enhanced transcripts—which Elon University is looking into (Stanford is also experimenting with the idea)—are simply not necessary—they detract from the whole purpose of a resume. As indicated in a recent Chronicle article, “Making Transcripts More Than ‘a Record of Everything the Student Has Forgotten,’” these transcripts would list information such as a student’s study abroad, volunteer, and leadership experience.

I am constantly updating, revising, and trimming my resume to reflect the skills required for a certain position or to highlight my latest achievements. I’ve barely glanced at my transcript since college—I really only became familiar with it once again when I was applying to graduate school last fall. Even then, all of the programs I was applying to also required the submission of a resume—each form was just one part of the overall package and could therefore chronicle academic performance and extracurricular accomplishments in two separate documents. 

What could stand to be clarified is a school’s criteria for receiving Latin honors.A resume listing a Latin honor may stand out from a resume that does not, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its owner performed significantly better than a student whose resume does not list any type of distinction.  I’ve often seen distinctions such as “cum laude” listed on my peers’ transcripts and LinkedIn profiles only to conduct a Google search and find that the benchmark for receiving such an honor was entirely different at their institution than it was at mine. Some highly selective schools, such as Brown University, don’t even award this type of honor—the only Latin distinction students may receive is magna cum laude. Even eligibility to make the Dean’s List can vary—some colleges require that students achieve a particular GPA, while others only award this honor to a certain percentage of high-performing students. 

This relates somewhat to the idea of the UNC’s proposed “contextualized transcript,” which is described in the article and has received a lot of criticism from students. This transcript would demonstrate “how the students’ grades compared with others in the same section” to help address the issue of grade inflation. While this type of contextualization definitely may seem unfair, I suppose it’s no different than the contextualization that comes into play during undergraduate admissions, when the rigor of a high school’s curriculum is taken into account as applicants’ grades are evaluated. This would certainly be a complex system to develop on the college level and would not necessarily be something I would find appealing if I was still an undergraduate student, but it is definitely an interesting subject to consider.