It IS the end of the world because it directly affects your job prospects after graduation. That's what it really comes down to. Most HR departments put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on GPA. When looking at two candidates from two equally popular schools, the candidate whose exams were easier will be preferred because, with the same amount/level of knowledge, he/she got higher grades.

It doesn't end there. The success of graduates in the job market ties directly back to the popularity of the school, which in turn determines how much funding the school can ask for in the state budget.

AFAIC, the way to do it is to go to a school that lets you get at least one internship/co-op under your belt, then use that to never tell anybody your GPA (if it is shit anyway, no harm telling people your GPA if it is good). Works best if you can get the people you interned with to make an offer to hire you straight out of school. After that first job I don't see GPA mattering much one way or the other, your last employer should carry far more weight.

My entire school career I never broke a 3.0 (for general courses) for more than a year, but everything has turned out pretty swell for me. I mean, I did get lucky getting accepted to the college that I did with my high-school GPA, but after that it was fairly merit-based I like to think.

Looking back, I don't have regrets. I didn't give myself a heart attack or turn myself into a nervous wreck but I still learned what I wanted from school and enjoyed the process.

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/03/27/i-interviewed-at-goo...

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-t...

That's why the recent announcement that they've found zero correlation between GPA and job success was such a big deal: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

So Google didn't have any minimum GPA requirement. I certainly was asked about the low GPA during my interviews, but it clearly didn't stop them from hiring me.

Google made the headlines of a fairly popular article (I think it was featured recently) with dropping that after empirically convincing themselves it was useless.

Also, take the advice of someone who's seen that crap work: never work for any company where HR can have the decisive call in hiring someone or not -- or any serious call in the hiring process of anyone who won't work in HR, for that matter.

Guess I have a reason not to work for Google after all.

Google asked me for my grades when I was fresh out of school; after that, they never have.

How many times did you quit and rejoin Google?

If you're trying to get into medical school, that's not really a fair question. Your college GPA directly affects your med school prospects, which greatly affects your residency prospects, and in turn your lifetime career earnings. If you're getting B's in level 1 & 2 physics and chemistry, you're not getting into Harvard.

I wouldn't call missing those things "the end of the world" unless you are really dead set on that route.

Getting poor (or even average) grades closes many doors, especially in these days of grade inflation (at many, but not all schools).

Matter of fact those are 3 skills that are always in demand because anyone who possesses them can avoid truly coming to grips with the question in this thread: The necessity of good grades in determining your career.

Bulk of medicine is how much you can remember. There is nothing like, let me work this out on a paper or fire up a REPL, in fact in their case- Something like putting a patient on pause while you refer a book is totally unacceptable. So remembering stuff all around.

I realized this pretty early and decided not to be a doctor. I just can't imagine my self memorizing things at such detail.

The person did so well on Step 2 that s/he was invited to transfer back to the US at a fist tier medical school, and is now the director of cardiology at a prestigious hospital.

Also, it used to be repeated quite often that most of the bigger tech companies (IBM, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc) were extremely difficult to get into if you didn't have a 3.7+ from a well known school. I don't know how true this was, but when I first started school, I was worried that if I didn't perform well enough, that it could potentially affect my chances of finding interesting work.

I personally don't give a shit about someone's GPA. When I was going through my technical training in the military, we had people who barely passed the written exams, who would then proceed to complete the practical exercises faster and more accurately than anyone else. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.

shrug, maybe I was luckier than I give myself credit for.

No but they care about the job you had before that job, which happens to depend on GPA and so on.

Not saying it is right, just it is not as simple.

I'm old enough, and grade inflation has been going on long enough, that my "pretty good" HS GPA at the time makes me look like I merely showed up for attendance compared to the recent grads. Now if they wanted a percentile instead of a GPA, then I'd have an excellent chance. But they very intentionally want a younger workforce by whatever borderline legal method necessary, so they ask for GPA...

I graduated with a 2.8 and an Art degree from a state school (albeit a good one). I thought most of my assignments were bullshit and didn't do some of them - who wants to design another fucking brochure for a fake client. I spent my senior year learning how to program and launching an app (Red Cup on the App Store for those interested).

Not doing the schoolwork and instead focusing on actual career development got me a job when I graduated. I've never put my GPA on my résumé, and I never will. It doesn't matter for the things I want to do in life.

Imagine you didn't do this, but instead got a job that did utilise the degree…would your gpa matter then?

I use Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop just as much as I use Xcode in my professional life - and that's quite a bit.

Very often, things that are hard & fast requirements aren't actually. According to the media, Google was in a hiring freeze when I was hired and wasn't hiring anyone. According to the blogosphere, they only hire people with 3.7+ GPAs, yet I had a 3.0.

Our entire educational system is geared around "Produce excellence or die trying, there is no place for mediocrity." Predictably, this causes students to look for ways to easy apparent excellence.

The fact that actual excellence comes from a philosophy that's more like "Do the impossible, see the invisible" than "successfully regurgitate 100% of what you were told" doesn't even show up in the educational system until the grad-school level.

Highlights of my college experience (probably 1/3 of the science courses I took might have had some kind of issue like these):

1. Exams filled with complex and abstract trick problems that differed substantially from assigned homework.

2. Professor who, when asked a minor question about something spent 30 minutes lecturing the class on 'RTFT,' as derived from 'RTFM.' Ironically, the confused student was likely the only one who had actually RTFT'd.

3. Lots of confusing, poorly described assignments. Sometimes assignments were so bad even the TAs had no idea what was going on.

4. Horrible textbooks, often written by departments to raise money rather than for quality or readability.

There's really a lot of room for improved instructional quality in my opinion.

Of course this was often compounded by the relatively poor quality of pre-college math and science education in K-12 public schools.

Students being overconfident and unprepared for anything but 'success' and mental transitions from 70-80-90/A-B-C traditional grading to schemes that are based on std deviations or content mastery can be uncomfortable, but I don't think that they're the root of most student's problems, though I do think some professors use such schemes to try and cover for their poor teaching.

Some professors love to teach and everyone remembers them fondly. I had one professor who'd taught about 2/3rds of the courses at my university over the years. You could always tell he'd taught a course in the past because subsequent professors always retained the assignments he'd created -- they were just too good to replace.

I was lucky to have him as my honours supervisor.

I went to see him again in the late noughties and he was haggard (not surprising, given he was around approaching 60 and always working heavily). He said he'd lost his spark to teach, and that current day students just weren't interested in doing the work - it's hard to be passionate when you're teaching uninterested people.

He said that my group's era was a great one for teaching. I accused him of blowing smoke up my arse and how bad could it be? These things are hard to make metrics of, but he gave the example - out of a course of 60 people in my final year, there were two applications for 'special consideration', one of whom was an eight-month-pregnant woman who didn't want to risk disturbing exams in case she went into labour. 'special consideration' was used for serious issues - close relative died, that kind of thing. By comparison, the current year had around half the students asking for special consideration.

He had other stories of change as well. I started a PhD under him (quit it early when I realised I would be relegated to academia) and we were treated as cattle by the department, mere cash-cows to bring in money. He mentioned that when he did his PhD in the 70s, doctoral students were considered gold and pretty much equivalent to a member of faculty. Now (late 90s) they're packed into an uncomfortable broom closet and their resources are, quite literally, commandeered by admin. As a literal example, we saw one doctoral student have her work stalled because the number crunching machine she had incoming was redirected to an admin temp.

These days it doesn't quite work like that; lots of kids are there to punch their ticket. Ticket-punchers aren't motivated to do any more than the minimum. So yes, perhaps I've overlooked the other half of the equation.

A friend of mine is a teacher and I moonlight as an Olympic-style weightlifting coach. I once enthused to him that I could see the allure of teaching. He sighed heavily, then pointed out that my trainees want to learn. Of course I enjoyed it.

Many of my coworkers (in higher ed) would rather be teaching. But it just doesn't pay.

YMMV

I left knowing absolutely fuck all other than how to pass a test through cramming yet got a 1st. I didn't deserve it.

I spent 5 years the moment I hit industry relearning everything and fudging what I could with my then HP48 calculator which had a solver and equation library. It basically saved my arse.

My first job was to design and construct a prototype design for an instrumentation amplifier but we'd never even been taught how to lay shit out on a PCB.

Now I know what I'm doing but have bailed out into software as there is more demand, but I get the feeling my story is quite common.

"My first job was to design and construct a prototype design for an instrumentation amplifier but we'd never even been taught how to lay shit out on a PCB."

University is mostly a pissing context between "PhD" that couldn't survive in the real world. And the tests are to assert their dominance (mostly)

I have an EE degree. The hobbyist magazine has taught me more about how to build a simple radio than said degree.

Not to mention mathematical models for some things are, let's say, weird.

That's what I believed at first. Then I realized how concerned authorities are with grades. If you're looking to do work with some research group, people want to know your grades. If you want to get into certain graduate schools, you'll most likely end up competing with people with high grades. Grades aren't a super important determining factor but, of course, they are considered and they can be treated as a negative indicator if poor.

Nobody really cares that you decided to challenge yourself. If you don't at least try to optimize for grades, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. If you don't optimize for grades, you'll be competing with people who do.

i would disagree with this. they are THE determining factor in 9 out of 10 things you want to do post-college, and grades follow you for LIFE.

the reason i started a company is because i didn't have the grades to do anything else except be a bottom-rung coder (not even at a "good" company), which I did for a few years after school. i graduated a very good UC with a 2.01 C average (i BARELY graduated, i was put on academic probation 3x, and took an entire quarter off at one point). i'm not kidding around when i say "i'm a terrible student" like some people do - i actually had D's and F's and plenty of W's on my transcript.

even with 5+ years of owning a successful business, if i were to apply to b-school or masters/phd program, they'd probably reject my ass. when was the last time you heard of a C student getting into a worthwhile grad school?

1. Your first professional job after graduation 2. Your grad school application

Nobody else cares.

for example, if i had good grades, i'd probably have gone to work for a google-esque company, or gone to grad school, and i would NOT have started a tech business.

my life would have been completely different if i had good grades.

GPA is maybe a useful indicator of work ethic, but there are so many factors it's hard to be sure of that.

I wouldn't discount the importance of your GPA.

They matter a lot for grad school, though.

A referral from an employee who knows that you are competent and reliable is worth more in the hiring process than anything you could list on your CV.

As a counter-point to this, to anyone reading who might be discouraged, the research groups I personally know mostly care about sufficient grades (i.e. that you're smart, hard-working, not stupid). The ability to get outstanding grades doesn't correlate that well with research ability; it just correlates well with your ability to do exams.

Given sufficient grades, it's infinitely more important that, say, an addition to your research group is able to work well with the other people in it than what specific grades they got, and the people making the hiring choices are keenly aware of this.

And when you get beyond your PhD, it's your publication record that people are really going to care about anyway. If you get good papers into good journals, no one gives a crap about your grades.

The problem is that the vast majority of HR departments do not have the time to look at those other signals. Resumes are filtered based on GPA and other measurable numbers first.

And likely, if it's a large zombie-automated HR department, I wouldn't want to work there anyways.

I do put it, because I can say that with that score (not GPA, but 94/100 score) I was the best of my class/generation.

The Resume is an advertisement, you don't see Coca-Cola advertising that their sugary drinks can make people fat.

Are you going to try to talk with the professors personally? How and when are you going to do that?

edit: furthermore, how do you know the professor can single-handedly have any impact on who gets admitted into the program?

Sure, that's a pretty good idea.

> How and when are you going to do that?

Figure it out. If you want a cookbook solution, the answer is probably to just play the GPA game.

Even if you don't get the position, there's still a lot of value to be had from a conversation (for both parties).

My perspective may be too cynical though.

When a professor writes that on his/her personal/research website, it means "I already have grad students coming out of my ears, and I don't have enough grant money to support even half of them." This is useful information, because you (should) pick a grad school based on who you want to work with. You need to look elsewhere if all the professors you want to work with at a particular school are over-subscribed. Some professors also become jaded by the sheer number of unqualified candidates who can't hack it: None of the string theory groups in my school will talk to you until after you've been admitted, gotten good grades for a couple semesters and the passed department's second-year screening exam with a good score.

Let me part with this: I got into grad school (probably) mostly because I sent an email to the professor who ended up being my research advisor. I described what I did in the past (which was sorta-kinda tangentially in the same field), omitted any mention of my (not very good) grades, and asked a non-time-waste-y question about the research group. The thing about grad school (at least in the hard sciences) is that one of the criteria for admission is "doesn't anybody want this candidate in his/her research group??" When you have someone pulling for you on the inside, getting in is a whole lot easier.

1) Much more challenging exams

2) The realization that "getting everything right" is not really how any part of the real world works.

I think this variance is fine, depending on the course. It is reasonable for a foreign language course to expect a 100% on an exam, if they are testing and teaching to some particular guideline, for instance. It is also reasonable to push the limits in something like a physics course, to test both "can you regurgitate", "did you understand", and "no, really, did you really really understand"?

Most people are there for credentials, and one of those key credentials is the GPA. If taking a certain course set at one school gets you a degree considered equivalent at another, but the other school has a department head who likes "50% is average" then you end up with one student with a 3.5 and one with a 4.0 when both are equally qualified.

The one who went to the stringent school doesn't get the job. And there is very little information on what classes what what schools (and in particular, what professors) are going to give you A's for effort or D's for genius.

So, for example, a 98-100% might mean "top student in the class that year", a 55% might mean "lowest scoring student who deserved to pass the class", and 75% might mean "right on the average that year". (YMMV, these numbers are illustrative and different colleges and programs will have their own conventions).

The "actual" or unadjusted scores might be quite different with no curve - for example, in the freshman calculus class I took, correctly answering 4 problems out of 10 on the exam was enough to earn a grade among the top few students of the year and a curved grade in the 90s, even if the "raw" score might be something like 35-37%.

So there we go.

To me, this completely negates the point of having 100 marks to choose from.

If I'm out to be a doctor or an astronaut or an engineer, I'm likely going to question my ability to accomplish these if I'm made to feel that I've missed a bunch of knowledge on the tests. Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?). Perhaps it's an American thing, but the fear of failure made me double check and re-study things for the better. I might've been more lazy if I had grown up with the rationale that "oh well, you can't get everything right", but perhaps there's more culture that plays into that.

When I get 90% or above on a test, I like the validation that I'm successfully learning near to the pace and complexity challenges set out by the instructor. I really don't like the idea of someone aiming to keep those results lower for exclusivity or other reasons.

I'd also be curious where the increased challenge comes from.

- Are the questions longer and require more steps?

- Do they require a leap in logic to 'discover' something while you're contemplating the question?

- Is it a huge amount of recollection?

- Any combination of the above?

Having an understanding that you don't know everything is a pretty important thing to learn.

And that's the best thing you can do, and learn to do!

> Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences

You don't get everything right by believing that you "ought to" and rigging the game so that it looks like you do. You get everything right by always assuming the worst, double-checking everything and analyzing mistakes with the goal of making them impossible in the future, rather than finding someone to blame.

> (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?)

Because it cannot be taught too early.

Indeed; that's the bias I was referring to in my comment above (I'm from the UK and I think, in this particular aspect at least, our system works better).

Getting a D in "British Civil Wars and Revolutions, 1639-1651" won't haunt you for the rest of college. A mastery of lower level European history courses might help you do well in that class, but you aren't in a position where forgetting old material means you don't even know how to start a single exam question.

And yet having that level of understanding won't do you much good in a class about the American civil rights movement. But if you can't remember the product rule or how to do integration by parts, it'll keep coming back to screw you for years.

They are, quite rightly, taking cues from the rest of the world. There is a difference in how we treat straight a students and everyone else.

As the professor, you've either got tenure and you don't need to care toooo much about those evaluations, or you are pre-tenure at a research U and you've got to keep 'em reasonable while you crank out papers, or you're pre-tenure at a teaching college and you've got to keep them GOOD. Those evaluations have got to stay above a certain level, though, especially in this job climate. Why go to the trouble of resetting students' expectations by broaching those subjects students will struggle with? So keep things easy.

But then you're to a point in math or physics at which you can't continue avoiding the topics that are taxing intellectually. So you go into it and your students are sophomores with 13 years of straight As behind them and your star student starts to have a slightly tough time with multivariable Taylor series and she gets a 78% on the second midterm. She's totally mortified and gets her grade back up to an A- or B+, but at the end of the semester visits you in your office to apologize and tell you she's changing her major to sociology. She realizes that a B+ tells her that she just can't succeed in mathematics even though she likes it.

And maybe your end-of-semester evaluations for that class are overall pretty good, recovering from the mid-term evaluations that were so stressed out, and you've dealt with the seven requests to take the final late to accommodate vacation or extra study time. Pretty good means you can breathe a sigh of relief in that respect... but you keep thinking about that student who left math because she got one 78% on a midterm. You tell her you got a year of straight Cs in real analysis and still got into graduate school and maybe she wavers for a moment.

Only a moment. "But you're different. You're good at math."

Students conclude they "don't have a talent" for math/science. They don't understand that "talent" is bullshit. Stubbornness, on the other hand, means something.

Should test scores be curved? Or does that defeat the whole point of tests (ie, to verify proficiency)? What even denotes proficiency? Getting the answer right once? Ten times in a row? 100 times separated by other different questions?

I guess it ultimately comes down to measuring what you care about, but I think that tests and teaching in general could use a lot more discussion and analysis, and at least to me it's fascinating, from many angles (eg, as you mention, student attitudes and the best way to motivate people to truly learn).

Curving the grades is an awful idea, but how it is usually applied it is rarely harmful. Professors mostly use it defensively in favor of the student, to fudge the grades up when the test turns out to be harder on the students than the professor anticipated. I am sure an occasional professor does the opposite, but one can never be truly safe from terrible instructors (other than avoid them).

You're right, but so many times when this is brought up, the result is one of those "express your feelings on this topic" type assignments. A few of those bad apples ruin it for everyone.

Apparently we weren't incredibly smart.

With two weeks to go, the class was getting a bit restless and a few people where mucking up throwing paper air planes.

Unfortunately one stray plane smashed into the blackboard nearly hit the prof in the back of the head.

The lecture theatre went deadly silent. The prof turned around, collected his notes, wished us all good luck in the upcoming end of year exam and walk out of the lecture.

He also went M.I.A. for the remaining four lectures in the two weeks that followed.

But he got his revenge, by setting one of the hardest first year maths exams, which ended up having an average mark well below 50%.

So many people failed the faculty had to lower the pass mark.

Also the paper planes had started to appear in earlier lectures and the prof did pretty much ignore them.

I think it in this instance it was the plane crashing into the blackboard (and making a pretty loud thud) only inches from his left ear that finally made him snap.

- your professor

Just because something is hard doesn't make it any easier on you, as a student, to have to remember and reconcile that a failing grade on an exam is expected and is more likely to cause serious panic about a curve.

EDIT: To be clear, the fact that below a 70% generally means "forced to retake" due to how GPA is handled in the US really isn't helping matters.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-science-foundation...

Grade inflation has gone too far when kids that get straight C's are hardly trying, and getting "straight A's" is only a minor achievement in moderately ambitious circles. You could have the most brilliant person - given she also had no problem utilizing that brilliance in a typical school setting - go through the entire system and on paper she would be indistinguishable from an average kid with solid work ethic.

Personally I went to university and studied computer science courses as well as more soft courses, and I have better grades than I did in high school. Of course a part of that is because I enjoy at least parts of all the courses I've had to take.