We old folk call them "grade points." Take the number of "quality points," divide by the number of units attempted and you have the GPA. My guess is that the reason for the change is similar to why school districts often don't assign letter grades until third grade, and for citizenship, behavior, etc. use euphemisms such as "needs improvement" instead of the classic "E is for excellent, S is for satisfactory and U is for unsatisfactory." Of course, that assumes parents these days know what a word as long as "unsatisfactory" means... after all, it has more than four letters.
(What's a quality point?) 
