Hot on Quora: What Was Barack Obama's GPA in College?

I met Barack Obama and got to know him while he was a student at Occidental College. My memories of young Obama have appeared in a number of historical books including David Garrow’s Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. This is a 1,460 page pre-presidential biography published by HarperCollins in May 2017.

At the time I met the young Obama, I was a graduate student at Cornell University, doing my first work as a teaching assistant in political science. My sense of him at the time is that he was of average intelligence. I don’t remember him making any particularly insightful comments when we spoke. I think it is safe to say that he was most likely a solid B student.

To be fair, the Barack Obama I met in 1980–1981 was more interested in parties, cocaine and radical politics than his academic record. I think it is only common sense to assert that the only reason his Occidental College GPA has not been released is that it would have been bad news for him.

I’m writing this to counter-act some of the extreme Barack Obama sycophantic comments suggesting he is some sort of genius. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no record of him being particularly talented at math, statistics, or any of the hard sciences. He served as the editor of the law review at Harvard, but didn’t bother to produce any articles of his own for it.


John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.