With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster | Hacker News Reader

With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

wsj.com

208 pointsss2003266 comments

My grandfather was CEO of an NYSE listed company and he preferred to hire people out of college whom had lower GPAs around 3.0 then perfect students because he thought these folks made for better team members and well rounded employees. Simply put he wanted to hire people who perused side passions and had a social life.

Personally after having been in entrepreneurial circles for years it seems the most financially successful people I know had mediocre college grades if they went at all. One friend who’s net worth is over $100m dropped out of high school to became a carpenter and is now a major real estate developer.Too many people spend way to much of thier youth focused on grades. What’s important is finding what you love, learning a bit and just doing enough to get your diploma. If you want to get a masters then focus on just getting in. It’s like passing the levels in a video game. No reading to get a perfect score if you don’t need to.

When you are 40 years old your college grades will likely have no bearing on your career prospects. Your social network will.

> What’s important is finding what you love

Actually, if financial success is your quality metric, then what matters is the ability to work with other people. In particular, the ability to motivate other people to work with and for you is probably the single most important skill a person can acquire (if the goal is to make money). Of course, academia not only fails to cultivate this skill, it actively tries to squash it. Convincing someone else to do your work for you is considered "cheating". In the real world, it's called "delegating."

Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, and definitely not everyone can be a successful one. Real estate is also a whole other ball game, and you are projecting from a group that has survivorship bias.

If you want to be highly compensated labor, the best grades at the best schools are the best entry point into the social network + early career opportunities to lead to long run success.

I think your grandfather was a wise man. I have frequently noticed the best employees I’ve hired are not the top students. They’re self starters, independent, and “street smart.” I actually never ask about education, simply because true intelligence doesn’t come from a classroom.

The valedictorian will frequently bother me for the next task or to sign off on something, the 3.0 gpa figures it out on her own. Obviously this isn’t always the case, but it’s what I’ve observed in my mere 28 years on this earth, and happens to match my beliefs.

If this is really the case, which I suspect it is, then university is a gigantic waste of time, and hiring practices are more like reading tea leaves rather than an "employee SLA".

that 30k i spent really wasnt worth it!!

You're getting downvoted, but this is reality and it's a poor reflection on HN to see your comment shunned.

The valedictorian is an 'executor', and likely very good at that crushing tasks to get the job done. The self-starter is creative and malleable and likely very good at complex problems with lots of unknowns.

Those people aren't interchangeable and it's preferable to have both to run smoothly. It sounds like you're speaking from a position of upper management, where you don't have the time to be managing an executor type person and you'd prefer more independent people directly under you.

Would you prefer a self starter with a 4.0 GPA or a 2.0 GPA?

The self starter with a 4.0 GPA is a highly paid lawyer, or something, and is not in your applicant pool.

In that case what makes you think any self starter will be in your applicant pool?

I've gotta learn how large software projects come together somewhere.

We hired someone like this, thinking their “street smarts” would give them an edge and make them a good employee.

What happened instead is that they struggled with discipline. They were late to client meetings, they missed important deadlines (rest of us had to pick up the slack), you name it. They were indeed street smart and stood out in terms of creativity, but their lack of what is typically called “work ethics” (which no doubt contributed to their average GPA) prevented them from meeting their obligations.

So yeah, GPA isn’t everything but it can be a really good signal for qualities necessary to succeed in professional work.

Sounds like this person was wrong for that role and would have done well in a position where they had more latitude to play to their strengths. Horses for courses.

I think 2.9-3.3 is the ideal range. I pass on anything less than a 2.5 or more than a 3.7 unless there is something else in their resume that makes up for it.

GPA signals a lot about a candidate.

If they graduate with a low GPA it means they are okay staying with a path of life they are not succeeding in. I'd prefer if they dropped out and did something nonacademic, because that signals they noticed something wasn't for them and searched for a better fit.

If they graduate with a very high GPA it signals they are a perfectionist, that they do well in highly structured settings, that they are obsessive about stats, and that they highly value authority.

A 3.0 with a good attitude and success in life outside of academia signals that they can identify important metrics of success and complete them, but are not obsessive about them. It signals that they do not take authority too seriously (parents are often the largest motivators for people with very high gpas). The goal is to determine how the 2.9-3.3 spent their extra time not chasing stats, and if those experiences will bring anything to the team. I look for things like internships, team sports, volunteer work, part time work, clubs, and awards.

As a former low GPA student, I thank you.

> I have frequently noticed the best employees I’ve hired are not the top students > I actually never ask about education

How do you know they are not the top students? Just from chatting over lunch, etc?

There's a significant tendency on HN to unduly discount good grades. I think this is a mistaken tendency due to univariate, linear thinking. Grades are not everything, but they are not nothing.

The fact is, determining a good hire requires multivariate, nonlinear thinking.

Good grades can be a proxy for metaskills like discipline, cognitive ability, etc. They don't always measure these things perfectly, but the correlation is not negligible.

Doesn't mean say, a 2.5 GPA isn't a good hire -- but in multivariate thinking, there has be other factors that compensate for the low GPA. Otherwise you'd be hiring a 2.5 GPA who is truly mediocre, and my experience is that the majority of 2.5 GPAs are that. Not everyone with a low GPA is pursuing other interests or passions. Also, doesn't mean that everyone with a high GPA isn't (at competitive schools, the best students tend to be active in many extra curricular activities unrelated to their majors)

In the engineering/academic world, grades do matter and are highly predictive of ability. People with poorer grades often struggle a lot, and the amount of time spent on remedial training may not always pay off. We have this ideal of a genius hacker who blew off school but is a 10x coder in real life... but in reality those people are comparatively rare.

I worked my way through college and still got a 3.75 in a double major of Math and CS. My girlfriend at the time got a 4.0 at her college but had a full tuition scholarship and did it by dropping any hard math course that wasn't absolutely required. We both later got PhDs in our respective fields. I used to help her with her homework a lot.

Who was more well-rounded? I challenged myself with some of the courses I took and was overloaded some of the time due to work obligations, etc. I got a "C" in one math class in my final semester. Grades tell a tiny fraction of a story about discipline and self-sacrifice.

Again, multivariate thinking is important. GPA alone doesn't predict everything, but it is one predictor in a complicated function and it may have varying sensitivities in different ranges as well as have interacting terms with other variables.

One needs to factor in all the other predictors, as you alluded to in your story.

The question is how do you reliably gather a rich dataset that encompasses those variables. It is an un-solved problem vs shortcuts like GPA and prestige of their attended institutions.

But a low gpa isn’t inherently meaningful at all. What do you mean “make up for” a low gpa when you shouldn’t be hiring around gpa in the first place? Like it’s not some debt to be paid; it just means they attended class sometime in the past. Just discount it entirely. What’s the worst that could happen?

> What’s the worst that could happen?

Having to confront the cognitive dissonance that their youth was spent chasing numbers that have little to no bearing on their present or future.

This is why I mentioned nonlinear thinking.

If you imagine a multivariate nonlinear function (I don't believe there exists a definitive function, this is just a framework to help us reason more rigorously) representing the performance of a hire, there will be ranges where the function is insensitive to the x (e.g. say GPAs between 1.0-2.0). If you discount x entirely, you're throwing out the baby with the bath water because the signal might be meaningful in other ranges.

This is basically what a strategic advisor (sic) for ETS told me was the official position of the corporation.

He said ETS does not recommend that schools and employers use test scores as a (edit: SOLE) way to decide whether or not to admit/hire someone. What I heard was ETS is aware that schools and employers do this and wants to cover its behind.

So what would you call the meaning of the low GPA? It is clearly meaningful to you. How would you describe the candidates you’re rejecting with this heuristic? It could mean anything from “i can’t read” to “i dropped out to form a business”.

I don’t see any value for the gpa beyond preparing students for performance reviews and identifying whether or not they give a shit about the material. And why would they? High Schools teach few real life skills and a lot of bad habits. Even in college, you’ll learn more (in some cases) by skipping class and building things.

Without context, gpa is not a meaningful metric

> In the engineering/academic world, grades do matter and are highly predictive of ability. People with poorer grades often struggle a lot.

This is a purely empirical question to which you seem to have simply assumed an answer. While there are difficulties to studying this question empirically there have been solid studies to this effect.

I've seen a few solid survey papers on personnel selection methods; a solid example is Schmidt and Hunter (1998). Schmidt and a couple of others published an updated version of the survey as a working paper in 2016[1], which has a clear section on GPA:

> The validity value for grade point average (GPA) in Table 1 is for college and graduate level grade point averages. No estimates are available for high school grade point average, which may have validity higher than the .34 in Table 1. Apparently most of the validity of GPA is captured by GMA, because the incremental validity of GPA is negligible (less than .01). GPA has not been studied in relation to training performance, where its validity might be expected to be higher than the .34 for job performance, because of the strong resemblance between training programs and classroom demands.

(GMA in this context is a "general mental ability test"—basically an IQ test.)

This observation does not lend much credence to the idea that grades are "highly predictive of ability" or that people with low grades "often struggle a lot".

[1]: https://home.ubalt.edu/tmitch/645/articles/2016-100%20Yrs%20...

Apparently most of the validity of GPA is captured by GMA, because the incremental validity of GPA is negligible (less than .01).

Just because GPA is basically a worse IQ test doesn’t mean that it’s useless. In fact, if you assume that IQ tests are useful in hiring, this actually makes GPA more useful, since US employers can freely use GPA in hiring, while use of IQ is significantly more complicated.

> In fact, if you assume that IQ tests are useful in hiring, this actually makes GPA more useful, since US employers can freely use GPA in hiring, while use of IQ is significantly more complicated.

Except that's not at all true of the underlying legal standard, and if GPA is essentially an IQ test, it is illegal in the exact same conditions as IQ tests, and any temporary advantage attend from the fact that plaintiff's lawyers haven't yet recognized that GPA is factually nearly identical to an IQ test, and some employer is going to get a big surprise when they first do realize that.

>it is illegal in the exact same conditions as IQ tests

And IQ tests are legal to give during hiring, in just about any form, if that result correlates to useful for that job. Since we're talking about jobs where IQ/GPA may well correlate to candidate quality for that position, this is not an issue.

You have to first show there is no correlation between GPA or IQ and job performance to claim it's not legal.

> And IQ tests are legal to give during hiring, in just about any form, if that result correlates to useful for that job

No, “correlates to useful” is not the standard; there also needs to not be a less discriminatory alternative available.

> You have to first show there is no correlation between GPA or IQ and job performance to claim it's not legal.

No, you don't: business necessity is an affirmative defense to disparate impact discrimination claims; once the unequal impact is proven, the challenged employer is required to prove the link to job performance. If they succeed, the challenging party has the burden of showing the existence of a less discriminatory alternative.

Cite a case. Griggs v. Duke Power is what most people claim makes IQ tests not legal, but that's not what the case was about. It was about discrimination against blacks, which is a legal protected class. Intelligence is not a legal protected class, so this ruling does not impact such tests for general intelligence.

>there also needs to not be a less discriminatory alternative available

This was to prevent discrimination against blacks (if you're using the case above), not for intelligence. It's perfectly legal to discriminate based on intelligence, however you want to measure it.

>once the unequal impact is proven

Only against protected classes. Intelligence is not a protected class. Here's [1] the EEOC list of allowed testing. Top of the list is general cognitive tests.

So, what case are you basing your claims on? Are you conflating discrimination against a protected class with discrimination against intelligence?

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/factemployment_procedures.h...

> Cite a case

I would do better, and point you to the EEOC page covering the applicable regulatory and statute law, which also includes citation to some relevant cases, and entirely supports my description of the disparate impact standards, but since you cited the exact source I would cite, I'll instead just note that our disagreement isn't about authority, it is about application.

> Griggs v. Duke Power is what most people claim makes IQ tests not legal, but that's not what the case was about.

Correct, it is instead the case that laid out the standards I articulated for disparate impact.

> Intelligence is not a protected class.

IQ is differently distributed with regard to a number of protected classes (race is most often noted, but gender also, and if using the same test rather than an age-normed test, also age; probably ethnicity, religion, and national origin, too, but statistics on that are harder to find), so virtually any use of IQ tests (or any criteria that very closely correlates with IQ) is almost certainly going to meet the adverse impact prong of disparate impact analysis, requiring the employer to prove business necessity. (This was exactly the issue in Duke Power, which founnd IQ testing unlawful in the particular circumstances because of the absence of proof of business necessity.)

> Here's the EEOC list of allowed testing.

You need to read more carefully, that's not a list of allowed testing, no such thing exists. That page contains a list of examples of forms of testing, none of which are categorically allowed or prohibited. It also lays out the standards for evaluating disparate impact which I outlined

>and entirely supports my description of the disparate impact standards

When it impacts protected classes.

>unlawful in the particular circumstances because of the absence of proof of business necessity

Yep, and we're discussing jobs where IQ correlates to performance, so once again, do you claim in such jobs IQ testing is not legal? All case law I've read supports using IQ or other cognitive testing in such cases. Do you have a case otherwise? If not, then this entire thread is moot.

We're going around in circles.

That’s the theory; in practice hardly anyone does IQ tests, while employers asking for GPA is an extremely common occurrence. What matters for them is not what is legal, but how likely something is going to cause you legal problems.

I was once asked to take an IQ test for a software developer job. I believe it was more of a formality, and they wouldn't tell us our score. I'm not sure it was legal or not, and I was glad to do it.

That being said, in my 20-year career I've never been asked for my GPA. Not once.

> This observation does not lend much credence to the idea that grades are "highly predictive of ability" or that people with low grades "often struggle a lot".

The paper does not seem to control for differences between colleges. It's unsurprising that the predictive value of, say, 3.8 GPA would massively differ between individual schools.

Yes. To go along with this, the other misstep I see frequently is the inability to differentiate between statistical distributions and the individual. Your friend dropped out of college to become a carpenter and is now worth $100m? That's incredible. I'd take fairly bad odds that the P(Salary>$!00k|Dropped out of college to become a carpenter) is lower than P(Salary>$100k|Graduated with 4.0 gpa). It would be harder to statistically analyze, but I'd take even worse odds that the fellow who dropped out of college would not be too much worse off if he had stayed and graduated with a 4.0. IMO, the cost of a high gpa is fairly low.

The GP explicitly reverses the conditional probability

> the most financially successful people I know had mediocre college grades

is saying something about p(mediocre grades|successful) i.e. among the people I know who are successful, a surprising number had bad grades.

where the interesting question, given the chronology of the two events is, as you point out, p(successful|mediocre grades)

Yeah, both the distribution of highly successful people and people with high academic performance are heavily skewed and the slightest decorrelation should result in the phenomenon of heuristically seeming independent.

In an ideally meritocratic world, we should see fewer Harvard grads and magnis cum laudibus occupying the top of the industries.

> the cost of a high gpa is fairly low

That's right. I started out nearly flunking out in college, and eventually graduated with honors. The difference was not busting my ass studying, but more effective time management. I had as much free time as before.

I learned that being able to sit down on your desk and focus on a topic or problem set and learn through trial and error with no distractions for hours is what will determine if you get good grades or not, and it's becoming extremely hard to do so. Most of my friends resort to drugs to focus but for me, that does not prefer drugs because it makes me feel artificial, it's been tough - it's like strengthening muscles in your brain in order to focus for long periods of time and those muscles for me are weak.

> Most of my friends resort to drugs to focus but for me, that does not prefer drugs because it makes me feel artificial, it's been tough - it's like strengthening muscles in your brain in order to focus for long periods of time and those muscles for me are weak.

This is desirable. People who use psychostimulants to focus are using it as a crutch.

You can train your mind to focus, it just requires a larger time investment than popping a stim.

Definitely! I should have started earlier in regard to training my mind to focus. Being in college, it seems I don't have the upper hand because so. It's all good though - I sort of argue that taking psycho-stimulants means you are entangled in that toxic cultural thinking of always going and being in the noise. I suppose then there's something sweet about failing a course without using psycho-stimulants.

Yeah, compensating factors are a must. If you have a screening function that correlates with both ability to do the job and GPA independently, though, then conditional on passing the screen, the better candidates have a lower GPA. You've essentially got a noisy test for the sum of ability + GPA, so if the sum is high and they have a low GPA, the source of passing the combined test has to come from higher ability.

This process comes up in other similar contexts. SAT scores are not generally correlated between Math and Verbal, but if you screen based off "incoming Freshman to a particular college", an inverse correlation comes up. This is because admittance is based off the sum of the scores - too high and they go to a better college, too low and they get rejected.

> SAT scores are not generally correlated between Math and Verbal, but if you screen based off "incoming Freshman to a particular college", an inverse correlation comes up. This is because admittance is based off the sum of the scores

Your second point is correct, but your background is wrong; SAT math and verbal scores in the general population are strongly positively correlated, not uncorrelated.

Right, lots of tests end up correlated with the general intelligence factor.

> in multivariate thinking, there has be other factors that compensate for the low GPA.

And the fact that it’s hard for a company to determine what those factors are is a problem in itself. Was the student immature at time of college (partied too much, disinterested in academics/chosen subjects are two problems that come to mind)? Did he work a full/part-time job while taking classes? Did he have a child? Did she care for someone else’s child or a younger sibling? Catch my drift?

Overall, I agree with most of what you are saying, but I also agree with the previous post. You seem eloquent and well-spoken, in fact it’s a bit off-putting.

> The fact is, determining a good hire requires multivariate, nonlinear thinking.

I understand your argument, but this colorful language only weakens your argument, unless you’re writing a paper for class. In conversation, you’d be better off rephrasing in a less formal manner.

> In the engineering/academic world, grades do matter and are highly predictive of ability.

Can you cite some research studies that conclusively show this to be the case?

I'd like to counter by saying that companies like Google have largely ignored GPA as a measure of aptitude. From the article (link below):

"Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of school, because they don't correlate at all with success at the company. Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found."

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-...

> I'd like to counter by saying that companies like Google have largely ignored GPA as a measure of aptitude.

I think you have misinterpreted the situation.

What it's actually showing is once you have restricted the pool of applicants to the top 10% of the field GPA does not matter within the restricted subset.

I can't think of anyone I know that could do well in the Google interview process but could not get good grades.

> I can't think of anyone I know that could do well in the Google interview process but could not get good grades.

In most of the Google offices the percentage of employees with PhDs is hirer than the percentage of employees with a bachelor's alone (Seattle and NYC look like the only office where BS holders are the majority). While Google might not be explicitly selecting for GPA alone, academic achievement seems correlated with employment at Google.

[1] https://hackerlife.co/company/google/san-francisco-bay-area-...

The article states that they don't even ask at all, so you cannot assume that the "restricted subset" has all high GPA candidates. Within that subset could be high school dropouts who are math and/or CS geniuses, for all we know.

> I can't think of anyone I know that could do well in the Google interview process but could not get good grades.

There's a lot of reasons people don't get good grades that has little correlation to their ability. People get bogged down by life, develop entrepreneurial interests outside of school, or have little interest in academics. I've met people who are brilliant software engineers and couldn't or wouldn't complete a semester of school.

>I can't think of anyone I know that could do well in the Google interview process but could not get good grades.

To get good grades, you must be able to do rote work on time. I did really poorly in high school, because if you don't do one thing, and you do brilliantly on the next thing? That averages to a failure. Doesn't matter how brilliant that next thing was. For me? This means I barely cleared 2.0 in high school, and didn't seriously pursue college. But in industry, I seem to do pretty okay. My experience is that if I finish between 2/3 and 3/4 of what I start? I get a positive performance review and a raise. They even talk about it; like "if you are accomplishing all of your goals, you probably aren't being ambitious enough when setting those goals."

(I mean, I've been in industry since 1997, and my impression is that breaking in was a lot easier then than it is now... and it did take me a long time to work up to the point where I could get a job at a top-tier tech company, and even now, I'm a SysAdmin and not a SWE, (I have worked SWE type jobs at less prestigious companies... but here? I'm a SysAdmin.) I would be a better employee, with better job prospects if I had the personality and follow through to get a degree, no question.)

My experience with those interviews (at least for a more senior position) is that they test knowledge of whatever specialty you are dealing with and to a lesser extent, intelligence and problem solving ability. The former, of course, can (and should be) studied for; the latter, less so.

I'm sure intelligence and problem solving ability also help (and to some extent, are required) in academia, but if you aren't the sort of person who does 'good enough' work every time on time, you aren't going to get good grades, as far as I can tell, even if you are brilliant. That sort of plodding follow-through is not tested at all in interviews, and while it's a positive attribute to have as an employee, from experience, it won't kill your career if you are lacking it.

You want him to cite a trial or study and you have a business insider article to counter him..?

Sample bias.

I have never asked or cared what grades anyone ever got. I don't think that there is any correlation between grades and real world performance. I am in the software engineering space though and I think that there is a lot of room for creativity. Having rigor in academic engineering isn't always useful and I've found actually prevents you from getting things to the good enough stage.

I totally agree that "determining a good hire requires multivariate". Maybe grades are a proxy for other meta skills, but I think evaluating those skills directly are a better indicator.

Other, more traditional careers place a bigger emphasis on grades as a matter of course. I don't think one just reduce it down to number of variables held in one's head whilst contemplating. All a high GPA should tell you is that the person successfully input things that the academic system accepted as an 'A', or whatever the score might be.

Good grades can be proxy for all those things you describe, and they can also be proxy for corner-cutting, systems-gaming, cheating, laziness, and other chicanery. I graduated sub-3.0 and, at least in my suburban, not-top-tier city environment, I seem to run circles around most of the technology-practicing clowns 'round here -- and it seems their muggle-ness transcends particular bands of GPA scores.

An "A" tells me you're either a cheater, a systems-gamer, or a schmuck.

Or you can just easily get an A, because you enjoy doing a few fun programming assignments and learn the things taught in class.

> We have this ideal of a genius hacker who blew off school but is a 10x coder in real life... but in reality those people are comparatively rare.

I had exactly one of these guys. The reason I hired him was because he demonstrated mid-flight during a code review interview an immense capability to apply newly learned knowledge. I gave him a few (code) classes despite his background up until that point being nothing more than infrastructure-scripting, let him know he could ask absolutely any questions he wished, and would be scored on findings after he confirms he's completed the review.

Killed it. He was a bit rough around the edges in terms of social skills but I'd hire him again given the opportunity and given what he'd produced for me. He got picked up by a rather large firm in the Austin area whose name fits the pattern "A _ _ _ e"

Other hires aside from him were of the good-grades, great-work variety, but he was the exception who produced great work without that background.

As an aerospace engineer, grades matter for your first job, maybe, then no one cares. After that, they are looking at your professional success/experience. Personal experience, having graduated with a ~ 2.5 GPA myself. Employers #2, 3 and 4 haven't asked about educational experience beyond formality, and are more interested in post-education body of work.

> In the engineering/academic world, grades do matter and are highly predictive of ability.

Or rather, they would matter if:

- Various different schools used the same standard for grading so that grades could be even compared across candidates

- There were companies that actually care about GPA when hiring, I've never encountered one

> he preferred to hire people out of college whom had lower GPAs around 3.0 then perfect students because he thought these folks made for better team members and well rounded employees. Simply put he wanted to hire people who perused side passions and had a social life.

But these things are not exclusive - you can't look at someone's impressive academic achievements and assume they don't have a social life or hobbies.

My dad was an accountant and eventually ended up having hiring responsibilities. Same deal: if you bought on someone who spent 3 years at university getting an A+ on everything, they probably didn’t spend a ton of time out meeting people and exploring the world, and thus typically less good in front of clients. Obviously lol everything, there will always be exceptions.

I don't think grades are important at all. But the effort and discipline that leads to good grades, especially if they're in a setting that requires self-motivation (such as college - you have mom and dad breathing down your neck in school).

I didn't have mom or dad breathing down my neck in school. In fact, my dad was basically absent for my last three years while the only thing my mom cared about was how soon I would be finished so that she could stop paying. By the end of it I was working two jobs with an 18-21 credit hour course load.

I wouldn't assume anything about anyone's source of motivation in college, at all.

>> When you are 40 years old your college grades will likely have no bearing on your career prospects. Your social network will.

True that.

I suspect that lower GPA students have higher variance but lower expectation outcomes than higher GPA students. Higher GPA students, at least when the coursework is serious, tend to be at least one of extremely bright and extremely conscientious (I would guess most are a little of the former and more of the latter).

The conscientious and prudent possibly have less tolerance for or interest in risk, so they're less likely to hit a home run, but their floor is pretty high.

At a more general level, I'm not fond of the common idea that people who are proficient in area x are probably deficient in area y (where area y is usually implied to be more important). It often seems to me like a face-saving technique for aficionados of area y.

The getting good grades system is very much a structured system as far as education goes. That's not necessarily wrong, but when you get out of school some folks when they get outside that system seem to struggle with knowing what to do. That's not to say they fail, but sometimes seem a bit off, waiting for the associated praise and looking for a similar system to fit into. Folks who weren't invested in such a system and maybe were more comfortable with the more nebulous world of life sometimes adapt a bit quicker.

One company I worked for loved to bring in recent MBA grads. These kids had little work experience (IMO MBAs should not be given without something like 10 years actual work experience) outside their internships or whatever. They showed up and loved to try to introduce rigid systems for success, random rules, and / or just had no initiative outside being told what exactly to do and what would get them a good "grade" (some seemed uncomfortable with anything but academic like measurements).

Granted some did just fine but it was very much the old FedEx commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gh9k9qzddA

Give me some people who have had to make some decisions, fail and start over please.

The majority of great employees don't have 4.0 GPAs, but the majority of 2.5 GPA graduates don't make great employees.

My advisor said if you were getting a 4.0, you were wasting your valuable research and development time on homework. Nobody cares much about GPA, when you could have built something amazing instead.

Of course, GPA didn't improve his tenure chance as much as our R&D so, take that into consideration.

>Nobody cares much about GPA, when you could have built something amazing instead.

That seems to imply you were 100% guaranteed to build something amazing just by not doing homework, which we all know is far from the truth.

A strong predictor for success I've noticed in others (and in myself) is: give a shit.

I.e. deeply care about what you are working on. Some individuals care so much about the field they are in that they disregard the proxy metrics that judge their level (grades, awards, titles...). For some, the strong academic path happens to perfectly match up to their pursuit of passion. Others see the academic part as a hindrance to their passion and end up equally successful.

On the flip side, following some proxy metric in order to achieve passionate success doesn't work. You can't aquire passion with good grades† and dropping out of education because that's the cool thing to do ALSO doesn't buy one passionate success.

Yes this reeks of survival bias, but every single successful person I know is really passionate about the field they are in. They are always thirsty to learn more and go deeper.

†: as with everything, there are exceptions: individuals who are highly motivated by peer recognition. Everyone is different and we can't generalize too broadly.

Grades are not ambition. They are not chutzpah.

When I was an employer what I looked for was the willingness and capacity to learn. Someone who is (book) smart isn't as important as someone who can think, see patterns, be willing to offer ideas, etc.

Sadly, many of the things that are of value aren't even mentioned in school, let alone taught. As a result I'm troubled by all the talk about free / cheaper higher edu for all. That's not the answer. It might just create more (expectation) troubles than it solves.

Even Fortune 500 companies with major R&D budgets will tell you point blank they would rather a handful of decent engineers from Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, etc. Than the top student from MIT or Harvard.

They are simply easier to manage in day to day operations. And perhaps more adept at handling the stress of juggling a dozen plus projects simultaneously.

The corollary is that for real innovation. Your probability of a breakthrough increases by having a few geniuses at the chalkboard. But most companies aren't seeking Manhattan Project or Xerox PARC levels of radical technological advancement.

No.

When in HS and college you have only one primary focus in life and that is to get good grades. Good grades show the world that you know how to study, how to work well with others, and how to put off the pleasures of today and work toward future goals. They may matter less when you're 40, but when you're 22 they count for everything and determine the opportunities tou have from the outset. And the experience you got knuckling down hard in school translates into valuable work skills right out of the starting gate.

The most solid career path I'm familiar with is to go straight from college into a software development role at a FAANG company, then mostly coast, optionally diverge to some other highly payed role else ware, and eventually come back to the FAANG company at a higher pay grade. You'll be able to live a lavish lifestyle, be a millionaire by 30, and really not have to work that hard.

To get this job you really have to have good grades. Why? Google etc. will ask for your transcripts coming out of college - anything short of a full degree and a 3.0 will likely disqualify you.

That's true in the average case, but it's not true in the literal sense. I know people who did not graduate college and whose first jobs were at Facebook/Google.

If you're talking about the average case then you might as well say 3.5 GPA rather than 3.0 GPA. I don't have access to any of the data so this is just speculation.

> "Academic researchers say that uptick is a sign of grade inflation, not of smarter students."

I don't think this is right. There is good evidence that the highest percentiles of students (the ones populating the competitive colleges mentioned) are indeed smarter, because they have standardized test scores to match.

First off, the bar for a PSAT score that gets National Merit recognition has risen significantly for most students in recent years. More graphically though, the number of students who get a 36 on the ACT goes back a while and is a good representation of the upper score band:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(test)#Highest_score

And indeed at the graduate level, GMAT scores at the top business schools are rising steadily:

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-b...

So instead of the positive, hopeful story "our best students are becoming even more capable, year after year," we get a story like this shaming colleges and universities for "grade inflation" instead. Disappointing.

It could also just as easily be that people are studying more for those tests ahead of time. I personally did maybe two hours of prep work before taking the ACT and SAT. I would guess that was on the high end of people I knew, many of whome I don't think even bothered to take the practice tests.

I attended a school that got questions about their average ACT scores. Other schools that you wouldn't expect had better scores.

Other schools provided ACT prep time for their students.

So did our school.

The difference was our school provided practice and prep for all students and everyone took the ACT.

The other schools also provided practice and prep tim, but the ACT was not required so many students didn't take it.

Education stats are always curious.

Sounds believable, until you consider that the standardize tests are all getting easier, too.

Right, score inflation alongside grade inflation. The administrators of the GMAT have an answer to that: https://www.gmac.com/why-gmac/gmac-news/gmnews/2017/july-201...

It says that it doesn't explain the "conundrum" of increased higher-end scores. But it definitely addresses that it's very unlikely the test has gotten easier, since average scores have remained stable, as they have for the PSAT and ACT.

If the top 20% of the population took the ACT in the 1980's and now its the top 60%, one could easily see how the test got easier and the average scores remained stable.

IQ scores are also increasing[0].

Are we actually smarter than our grandparents? Or has the education system trained us to be better test takers (one of the suggested contributing factors).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

No they're not[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

I guess it depends on the country and timescale you're looking at. But they are increasing.

You should read section 4 [1] of that page.

Somewhere around the mid 90s individuals in most developed countries started to end up with lower IQs than previous generations and there are ever more results corroborating this change, whose magnitude has been rather significant. IQ results are distributed to ensure a population distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of about 15 points. And of course 84% of all people fall within one standard deviation. We're seeing declines that already in the multiple points and they do not seem to be stopping.

One critical point here is that there are two 'convenient' ways to try to dismiss this. And they really amount to the same thing and suffer the same flaw. Those ways are to argue that humans have started to reach some sort of peak intelligence, or that environmental effects were driving former increases in IQ and as we reach a very healthy and wealthy society compared to past times, we're just seeing diminishing returns. The problem is both of those convenient hypothesis would lead us to expect to see an asymptotic decline in growth that would approach zero. We're not seeing that. We're seeing IQ literally decrease, not grow more slowly.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

I'm unsure whether this is exactly grade inflation, but both of those graphs can be explained by increased access to information.

Obviously people studied before, but our collective information about these standardized tests has become readily accessible.

Now, general test taking tips, test-specific guides, and even full courses on tests are available to everyone rather than those who could afford a book or a private tutor.

Those tests have gotten easier. In fact, the SAT folks specifically made it easier because they were losing market share. Too many people were taking the ACT instead, so the SAT went back to their old format and then made it easer.

https://www.fairtest.org/sat-losing-marketshare-act-testopti...

out of curiosity, with regards to rising GMAT scores, does that really reflect that 'our student are even more capable'? The scores supposedly correspond to a percentage of the test taking population one scored higher than, right? So, how is it that in 2005-2010, the reported avg HBS score was a 710, and now it is much higher? Because this goes for all the top 5 (if not top 10 or 20). If a 720 then corresponded to doing better than 96% of the test taking population, where did all these other top 4% of test takers world wide come from in the last 10 years?

There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. Students today are faced with an ever ballooning bulk of knowledge with which they are supposed to find the boundaries and gain control of enough interconnected parts to become a useful contributor to society. There's a lot of noise in the system, but the system is growing larger and larger. There's more footwork that could be done.

Is it so hard to believe that more students are performing at a close enough level to their forbears to deserve the honor?

Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.

Have school grades ever deflated? Or undergone some sort of correction? No citation needed, anecdotes are fine.

My grades underwent a correction or two back in the day :)

Yes. At my school we had a real curve. If we all got perfect scores, that's a C for everyone. (More often we all got 15s and they became C's). Teachers who gave too many A's would be benched. We laughed at Ivy League 4.0s which just require a phone call from a parent.

MIT?

My wife went there, and while most STEM grad schools understood that grades at MIT were not inflated, medical schools did not seem to care. One of her friends had to first get inflated grades doing a STEM masters degree before she could get into med school due to her uninflated MIT undergrad grades.

GT. I heard you all got to play with kittens freshman year. In response, GT professors replaced 20% more lectures with exams.

Almost no one at GT does true curves anymore. Just like stack ranking, trying to implement true curves with a non random distribution is a fool's errand and poor knowledge of statistics.

To hell with Georgia!

This is standard practice at a lot of universities. At my university results were scaled based on the class performance in that exam and the performance of everyone in other exams. So if you're all 4.0 students, but the exam is horrendous and everyone only gets 20%, you'll probably end up with a good grade still.

I studied physics. It was possible to game the system to a certain extent. If you took the (subjectively) hardest modules like gauge theory, you could get a high grade even if you only answered half the paper. So if you were smart, but not top of your class, you'd be better off taking the hard subjects because every mark you got was effectively worth more. If you took the easy and popular modules, every mark would count and it might even be normalised down.

Of course this only works until everyone becomes wise to it. Then you're worse off where you started.

That's true, but unlikely. These are not particularly large or popular courses (15/70 people was common). It's not a tactic that would work for everyone, but it would potentially useful if you're a good student, but at a borderline grade.

The reason I liked it was because I hated having to cram for easy subjects because the class average would be so high. I would rather put the same amount of effort in to learn concepts (and have to remember less in the exam) than rote facts.

One of the Cal Polys has an engineering program which curves the average grade to a C+ which automatically disqualifies the average from many engineering jobs.

That's similar to Georgia Tech. Undergrad Eng courses are curved to a C+. With the average GPA being a bit below a 3.0.

We used to joke at all the pre med students as to why they chose Georgia Tech as just about every other school had gpa inflation. And grad schools don't take Tech's lower grades into account.

Which was totally fair given how the HOPE scholarship works. Not that I am bitter.

Except now STEM courses are weighted as of 2017 in all GA university system schools:

Effective fall 2017, when calculating the HOPE and Zell Miller Scholarship postsecondary Grade Point Average (GPA), an additional weight of 0.5 will be added to grades of B, C, and D for approved degree level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses

I think it's good since it doesn't affect their Institute GPA but can help them keep the scholarship. I knew a lot of people who lost HOPE/Zell and the increased financial burden made keeping their grades up that much harder.

That's still stupid. The freshman writing courses at GT are harder than graduate CS at UGA or Valdosta.

Edit: Valdosta doesn't offer graduate CS. But imagine that it did.

A curve distorts grades: they tell you how the person performed relative to their peers not relative to their mastery of the material.

This really depends on how difficult the tests in the course are.

I don't think it is uncommon for tests to be written such that with a student a strong command of the material will not score 100%.

Well it tells you how well they did to the rest of the cohort grade inflation means you cant easily compare candidates across time.

At the high school I worked at some years ago we pushed the margins for letter grades up a little. For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100%. Whether or not that affected the overall GPA distribution I could not say.

> For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100%

That sounds something like an older system. I don't remember it entirely, but IIRC, very early in my school career, an A was 93-100% and an F was anything less than 70%.

Is it possible that grade inflation has grown in pace to the expanding web of knowledge?

Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.

So, it's possible there's an incidental correlation but there's no causation if the phenomena is real.

If you've seen how the average kid uses the internet, it's a rather laughable suggestion... there is little overlap between social media entertainment sites and the web of knowledge. The biggest contributor to higher grades are the book summary and answer-key sharing sites.

Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.

If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance.

If the institutions have to stay relevant, they'll have to make sure the grades are correlated to successful people in some way even if it means handing out grade A to any student!

>> Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.

> If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful business people then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance.

What you describe is grade inflation.

Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance. My understanding is that once upon a time, a "C" grade meant your work was average or typical, which was perfectly respectable. An "A" or "B" mean your academic work was above the norm or outstanding. People could get C's and go on to have successful, non-academic careers (such as in business) with little comment.

With grade inflation, when "average" is an A or B, it's much harder to distinguish the truly academically talented based on their grades, since they're grouped into the same category as average performers.

> Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance.

Isn't it both? If we had figured out the perfect academic program for all time, then it could be just a reflection of performance compared to all prior students in the program. Since we haven't, we update the programs and that might mean some aspects become easier and some harder. Or maybe overall easier, if career demands have generally gone down (which, imo, is a much more interesting discussion than whether an 'A' is really an 'A').

I don't see what being a successful business person would have to do with learning the material in a course, such as calculus or physics.

That's not what happens. If A meant success at X, like running a mile in X time meant you could outrun a bear, no matter the percentage of people, it would be great.

What's happened is parents pressured schools to get their kids A's to get into college, then colleges set the minimum bar at A+ instead of A, then at A+ and a random selection of thousands of students, all with A+'s. We are at the point where a single A- will drop you 50 slots in class rank. This is like judging the difference between Olympic sprinters instead of seeing the real spread among students.

That's why I think the universities should be holding high school exams. More generally, students/pupils should be judged by the institutions they're about to enter, rather than the ones they're leaving.

Grading guidelines differ. Where I went, C was considered a good grade - more or less defined as the average among the students who didn't fail. Even an E means you got at least 40% of the points on the test.

This is so ignorant to the advancements in pedagogy over the past several decades as to be insulting. Part of, if maybe not the biggest or only factor, the increase in grades is we are just hugely better at teaching than we were 30 or 40 years ago. Teaching for mastery, the idea of reversing the role of homework vs tests (in terms of relative difficulty and exposure to new information) to better facilitate self learning, formalized programs to act as tutoring and support systems, all of these are increasing student performance by design.

Not only that but as far as higher education goes how are you even trying to compare to "what used to be B or C knowledge"? What in the 70s was graduate level transistor research is basic undergrad course studies, for example. Introduction to programming would have been on punch cards in the 80s, today's students are using python. Are you surprised that they do better given the advances in tooling?

The "kids these days" argument is so, so tired and honestly every time I see it Im not surprised so many of the old guard (rich off of just being in the industry during the dot com boom) think they're being targeted for "age discrimination".

I used that argument back in 4th grade to my parents: “Math is harder for me since there have been more advancements since you were kids”.

I can only speak for electrical engineering, but the basics have not changed in 100 years. Crack open a text book from 100 years ago and you’ll find the same control theory, circuit analysis, electromagnetics, etc. The difference may be vacuum tubes vs. transistors, but the analysis is them same. Many things are a lot easier to do now with computers, and I’ll wager a student of 100 years ago had better analytical skills.

It’s not just grade inflation either, but degree inflation. The PhD is the new MS, etc down the line.

That's patently false, and your example is a straw man. Sure your grade school arithmetic hasn't increased much, but I'd assure you university maths have.

As far as EE goes, I mean sure macro-electronic theory is pretty much the same, but micro-electronics didn't even exist 100 years ago. This is now a standard required class. Digital signal processing again, didn't even exist 100 years ago, now we teach it to sophomores. The foundations that were the same have persisted and the field has done nothing but expand; this trend is replicated across most disciplines.

The data doesn't support your assessment of declining analytical skills. The ability for abstract thought has been monotonically increasing for the past 100 years.[0] I understand the appeal, oh kids these days aren't disrupting anything, my job is safe. The issue is, there's not much data to support the platitude. Globalization means you're competing with billions more people, education achievement has to increase to match; or be left behind.

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_...

I think maths is relatively unique in that it is a really old subject that mostly doesn't depend on hardware. Sure computers have moved maths forward, but there's a lot you can do without.

High school maths is pretty much Antiquity level, though much more formal. First couple of uni years are mostly 17-18th centuries maths. Last 2 undergraduate years is 19th and early 20th centuries.

A few areas have changed though, particularly statistics I think, also computer science if you consider it part of mathematics, but have a look at a textbook from a 100 year ago, and you'll feel right at home except for the style.

Thank you for saving me from needing to write the exact same thing!

Interestingly enough, IQs are now decreasing in the western world and have been since around the mid 90s. There were numerous studies showing this quite clearly in 2013 (when that talk was given) but now it seems every study is corroborating it. Perhaps we can assume he simply felt it required more research as an explanation for why he would give such an ostensibly misleading talk.

Linking to another comment chain here [1] on this topic as this is something multiple people have also brought up as an argument against grade inflation. Unfortunately, it makes the inflation look even more absurd.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17447692

I think you're assuming those advances in theory are universally available in practice.

They are not. My experience as a public school student was far worse than when my parents went to school - double or worse class sizes, no teaching assistants, and occasionally the same textbooks my parents used. "Experienced" teachers were the worst - it often seemed like the only thing they changed over the years was to stop corporal punishment.

My parents required unreasonable numbers of As, so I regularly got undeserved grades just by acting like I'd make a big deal about it... teachers were too overwhelmed to pay attention even if they cared. Some of my peers had helicopter parents that called in arguing their kid deserved an A simply for studying all night, even though that "sudying" was often was just online RPGs.

The trend followed in college for non-major classes. Professors simply didn't care unless a student would be advancing to another class in their department - then they cared enough to fail students, but the grade curve was still logistic. Not the expected "C = passing knowledge".

Even then, I still never saw pedagogical advances outside of brand new assistant professors in liberal arts classes.

I mean YMMV applies, instruction quality is certainly going to be dependent on the institution; but that's certainly the opposite of my experience at a public (though well ranked) public university.

Is it possible (wink wink) that our ability to distribute and search information has far surpassed the pace of the expanding web of knowledge?

Grade inflation is also related to money pressure; more students getting diplomas means more money, so there is a perverse incentive to lower the levels.

I don't think the point is how their performance compares to their forebears so much as how do they compare to their peers. If you compare today's students to those of 50 or 100 years ago of course they have more information and advanced skills to master. It's apples and oranges. These honors really only have meaning when comparing within the same cohort.

I spent several years out of the school system after finishing high school, and while I had a lot of great offers from schools, I wanted to go into a trade.

Several years later I began work as a developer because I had always programmed, and had come to the conclusion that it was something I really loved and wanted to spend my life doing.

Fast-forward, I'm a mid-20's senior in Computer Science, and you're absolutely correct about the VAST amount of information that is required to learn to be successful.

So here is my take:

1) There is a lot of sink or swim, at least in the program I'm in. And if you learn to swim, then your GPA balloons because you learn how to handle this vast amount of information thrown on you -- useful or not, it is the professors discretion -- which I think is one of the points of school to begin with.

2) Those who sink, end up going to departments with maybe less expectations, where they end up succeeding after having to deal with the previously higher expectations.

It's interesting.

With that said -- I grew up with a lot of GPA chasers, who I wouldn't trust with anything I personally needed done. But what they've done throughout their lives is signal that they can get whatever task you give them done, not necessarily come up with what task should be done, or how to interconnect subjects outside of an exam, or what was previously derived for them.

Learning how to bridge the gap between subjects is also another point of school. It's interesting because those lines everyday seem to be blurred more and more, especially with advancement of computing, so it's kind of hard I think for a lot of students to make that jump, to bridge. And also the stigma of Liberal Arts -- that many STEM kids subscribe to -- has lessened the ability of many students to be life-long students.

I have a few friends in grad school, who really, really struggle with that particular advancement. For example, one is in a neuro-lab and while they did have experience in FMRIs, they had never really invested in either math or computing. Now they're completely lost doing FICA and the like with MATLAB, and absolutely hate the work. They've called me to ask me about everything from what is an eigenvalue, to how to split a 3D Matrix into 4 based upon a fix set of indices. It's a shame because they are really smart, and passionate about the subject.

Sorry that was a bit of a ramble.

>There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed.

I'm not so sure you are talking about the same thing as grade inflation. For a particular course, in most fields, the content has not changed in 20-30 years.

Most of my undergrad engineering classes have not changed in 20-30 years (with the exception of the software ones). I'm pretty sure if I look at the curriculum of, say, a circuits/EM/communications course today it will be the same as it was 2 decades ago. Math courses definitely have not changed much.

I agree with you about the ballooning bulk of knowledge to be successful, but not to get a better grade for a given course.

>There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed.

As someone who has been in academia for several decades I can tell you, without a doubt, the opposite is true. Academic standards are vastly lower than they were just a couple of decades ago. Many incoming freshman lack even basic literacy skills. Much of the "core" curriculum is now comprised of remedial work that should have been mastered in high school (or middle school!). Basic reading comprehension, the ability to write papers and express complex thoughts coherently and the capability to think critically and engage in substantive debate are all severely lacking - virtually across the board. Society may be growing more complex, but the educational system in this country, on every level, is decaying rapidly.

While my statement will be rejected by many young people who view it as an attack on their intelligence, it is beyond dispute. I welcome anyone interested in disputing my assertions to look at the reading list and curriculum of any college class offered before 1990, and compare that to the reading list and curriculum of the same class today. I challenge you to read papers written by students from 30 years ago (before they had easy access to information from the internet, no less), and compare them to the papers written by students of the same year today. There is no comparison - none.

I spent so much time and energy stressing over my very mediocre GPA. I had undiagnosed adhd at the time and struggled immensely with turning things in on time. I usually did above average on tests, but when there are only a few homework assignments in a semester and no-late work policy, one zero really hurts. I was able to work it back up from a 2.2 in sophomore year to a 3.0 by graduation, but that was only because they very generously allowed me to sign a matriculation contract to stay in my major despite the lousy GPA. Also my 300 and 400 level CS courses were far more interesting and engaging, with fewer tiny assignments to miss.

I was kinda depressed because I knew the likes of Google would have no interest in me with that GPA, but my part time intern experience turned out to be worth so much more. I got a great entry level job from it, and from there got my foot in the door at Amazon where I thrived (who didn't ask about grades once) and ever since then, Google and everyone else has been reaching out to me. So while I have nothing against people with good GPAs, I'm never going to hire based on them.

All the more reason to not hire based on schooling background as well.

I mean, in fairness have you gotten into Google yet? Everyone and their grandparents can get into Amazon these days. They need warm bodies, not smart people.

There's a reason why I get treated like some sort of moron whenever my company comes up in social situations (I hang out with a lot of people who work in HFT and Google/FB).

This is encouraging to read. Right now I'm at what feels like the nadir of a similar situation, and am trying to figure out the right steps forward.

I attended Caltech for CS, struggled with chronic late submissions, cratering self worth and other issues over about three years, took several short leaves ending with a medical leave and was diagnosed with ADHD. Got on medication, got a development job for about a year at UT Southwestern and enjoyed it immensely. Decided to come back and try again, but coming back to junior and senior level classes after a break was very hard, and even being back in the environment that I associated with such failure was hugely draining. I decided to withdraw indefinitely.

I'd already finished all but one or two of my CS requirements, most of the rest were going to be maybe 4-5 non-CS math/engineering/science classes, several humanities and a biology. About a year and a trimester's worth. As far as GPA, I left with about a 2.7.

I'm still not sure if that was the right decision. Part of me says I'm living in LA and I have a year of work on my resume, a bunch of knowledge from the tech CS program, a couple of mildly interesting personal projects on my GitHub, and I should be ok; I just need to put myself out there.

Another part of me says I'm a piece of shit that can't complete the only thing worth completing related to my career, I'm going to have to explain why I don't have a degree to everyone I ever interview with, and why would anyone ever pick me over a graduate.

All this made more painful by the fact that if I had graduated, the Caltech degree would have been an amazing asset - and if I had gone anywhere else (well, anywhere a bit less high powered) I believe I would have at least graduated, if not done very well. Source: the two sophomore CS classes I took at UT Arlington in half a summer and got A+s in both.

This thread is hard to read. Thanks for your story; I need to remember people like you exist while I'm job hunting.

Hey, I'm a fellow non-college-grad with a ~1.7 GPA who's worked at 2 of FANG and got an offer from a third.

The best actionable advice I can give you is: put Caltech on your resume with your years of attendance, leave off your GPA entirely, and indicate in text under that that it's incomplete. You'll need a compelling narrative around why it's incomplete (which is admittedly difficult and usually circumstance-specific) or why it doesn't matter too much given that you've done X. X is something impressive, uncommon, and shows intelligence and initiative. As an example, my Xs were getting press in lifehacker for a side project and doing well in a FANG hackathon while in school.

For jobs, I think a common myth is that your credentials/resume is hugely important. From what I've seen, this is both true and false. The _specifics_ of your resume don't really matter 99% of the time, only that they're interesting. Also, keep in mind most resumes are screened by a real, live human - being authentic and passionate can help out as a break from the BS a recruiter sees day-to-day (but do think about what a recruiter would be looking for at a glance). After you clear the resume filter, you're on a similar playing field vs. every other candidate. And then it's up to you and your ability to pass interviews - that's a whole other topic which I won't cover here =P

If it helps, feel free to reach out through linkedin or email in my profile. Stay focused and keep your chin up!

>I'm still not sure if that was the right decision. Part of me says I'm living in LA and I have a year of work on my resume, a bunch of knowledge from the tech CS program, a couple of mildly interesting personal projects on my GitHub, and I should be ok; I just need to put myself out there.

Your GitHub projects are extremely valuable, some of the more interesting companies have scripts that automatically search for open source contributors to widely used projects on GitHub . I didn't even go to college and am paid at a competitive level for my experience with recruiters contacting me daily on LinkedIn, though I'm not a pure software developer (DevOps). Keep working on those GitHub projects, solve algorithm questions on LeetCode/Hackerrank/ any of the competitive programming sites, always be learning something new. The debt and stress with a college degree isn't worth it when no sane project owner on GH will reject a PR due to college credentials, thereby continuing to increase the value of your own resume in addition to your work experience.

For college students, I absolutely recommend transferring up if your GPA is above 3.8 and you're attending a lower-tier school.

Your alma mater will resonate throughout your career. Your GPA will disappear after your first or second job.

Better to get a C at MIT than an A at RPI.

As someone who went to both top tier and mid tier schools, I have not found that neither have ever really come up in job interviews or my career The vast majority of people around me don't particularly know which schools are actually top tier, nor do they care what I did there or my GPA. What matters is your output, especially in science, where the question is much more about what you published/what grant funding you got than which institution you're at.

As someone who went to a "lower-tier" school. I hate how true this feels sometimes. My colleagues who went to big name schools all seem to be in some sort of "club" together. At least, they have shared experiences that I have no such ability to relate to. They've been "elite" tech people since before they were in the job force.

That being said, the only time I feel this is in social settings and it's usually minor. People ask where I went to school and then I usually get an "oh?" back, as they've never heard of it. But it's never really impacted my professional life to my knowledge. Maybe I didn't get the same opportunities as these people as quickly, but I've worked at and enjoyed success at a few of the big names and am enjoying my time at a well known "start up" now.

Kids, go to school where you can afford. Bust your ass, make connections, move on and move up. School doesn't matter once you're out of it.

> They've been "elite" tech people since before they were in the job force.

By what standard? What does that life look like? It seems so foreign to me. It seems like a lot of HN is comprised of this sort of folk or people who know them.

I don't work in the Bay Area, I work in Phoenix. I imagine it's a different world out there: instead of saving 90% of my income and living in a van, I own a home and save 75%. Instead of talking to people who work at Apple and went to MIT, I talk to people who were self-taught, or attended some other institution I'm not familiar with.

Even the people that I do know who went off to work at Amazon, Apple, or Google aren't even that great of engineers. In fact, they're probably worse engineers than the ones I know at Fortune 500s which aren't even tech companies.

I've seen people who had 25+ years of experience lose a job position to someone who didn't know what `setInterval` was.

To me, an "elite" tech person would be someone who wrote software that people actually cared about and had a strong amount of domain knowledge in a particular area, or prototyped hardware and sold a product that people bought. Even then, these people are flawed just like everyone else. Not too long ago, the author of Redis posted an article about shortcomings of Lua here on HN, and a deep inspection of his post simply yielded the finding that he wrote a Lua binding with a glaring exploit in it, and his entire article revolved around trying to justify his own flaws.

To me having parents that have money doesn't make you elite; it's just something to think is rather nice and want to work toward as well.

It seems to me that there exists a demographic of people in tech that seem impressive to others, but haven't actually contributed anything significant or tangible to the industry. They probably exist in senior positions of companies that I've never heard of that serve a niche that I'm not a part of. I don't know, but they aren't "elite" to me.

Kids, do and make things people care about. School doesn't matter at all. Learning matters. Spending a small fortune to maybe associate with people who will get you a job is trying to play the lottery, but with a far more expensive ticket.

When you're denied a job at a startup after receiving multiple degrees ask yourself if it was worth it. It takes 30 minutes to invalidate 4-8 years of your hard work. People want people who can do the job.

>By what standard? What does that life look like? It seems so foreign to me. It seems like a lot of HN is comprised of this sort of folk or people who know them.

That life looks like living in Seattle or the Bay or New York, making somewhere between $180-$230k a year first year out of undergrad, being able to travel for concerts and live in luxe Airbnbs with your similarly elite and pedigreed friends.

>Even the people that I do know who went off to work at Amazon, Apple, or Google aren't even that great of engineers. In fact, they're probably worse engineers than the ones I know at Fortune 500s which aren't even tech companies.

I think this is a reasonable viewpoint if you believe society (or even people) cares about how skilled you are in your craft. Unfortunately, society doesn't, and rather only cares about how much you make.

As such, society will always consider a jet-setting Facebook or Google new grad making $250k her first year because of a signing bonus or negotiation skills superior to someone who graduated from ASU working at Amazon/Cisco/HP/etc companies making $150k or god forbid, even less. There's a lifestyle difference that I'll never be able to match.

Thanks for sharing. Still curious how sustainable the lifestyle is if you're married, or if it's possible at all. Any thoughts? The folks in Phoenix out here can't make that type of money unless they're a Principle Software Engineer/Architect/VP or higher if they can manage to negotiate it otherwise it's reserved to management. Anecdotally, I've seen the CEO of Recruiting.com underpay his seniors heavily.

Most people don't get married in their early/mid 20's anymore. At least if they work at FB/Google and are native-born Americans. And if they do, their partner makes about as much at a similar company.

> The folks in Phoenix out here can't make that type of money unless they're a Principle Software Engineer/Architect/VP or higher

If they work at Amazon they can as an L6 or above.

In all fairness... the bug you are referring about Lua scripting was added by external contributors via a PR, and I'm not even the one who merged the PR (long story...). Yet I believe that the API made it much simpler to add such a bug, so this is why I talking about Lua API. However your main point, that is, everybody is very fallible, is one that I totally agree with.

> As someone who went to a "lower-tier" school. I hate how true this feels sometimes.

So much so that I often feel like I would have been better off never having gone to college in the first place than having gone somewhere not in the top 50 (or even in the top 10). Presenting yourself with no degree at all as a "tenacious, self-taught fighter" feels better than "I went to the University of Bubba because MIT said you're not smart enough" (plus MIT is really far from where I grew up and really expensive). On the other hand, I've worked with plenty of really smart programmers who don't have a degree who've felt that not having one has held them back - although I've always wondered why they don't just go back and get one.

>That being said, the only time I feel this is in social settings and it's usually minor. People ask where I went to school and then I usually get an "oh?" back, as they've never heard of it. But it's never really impacted my professional life to my knowledge.

I work at a top tech firm, and while we hire across the board, at the micro level I have seen strong biases by some managers for the top tech schools. As an example, I once forwarded the resume of an undergrad whose GPA was decent (not stellar), but whose resume indicated strong initiative and interests related to software (Lisp, etc - material not taught in that school). He made lots of excuses not to even interview this person. And later hired someone with a really low GPA (low 2.x), but he was from Berkeley! This person did well in the interview, but the candidate from a lower ranked school never even got an interview.

The absolute best engineer I've ever had the pleasure of working with went to the most no-name of all no-name schools. He now works on cool stuff at a big name company and is very famous within his domain. It really doesn't matter.

> But it's never really impacted my professional life to my knowledge.

Depends on the level of attainment you are hoping to achieve. If you want to become a major player in your company or industry, it most definitely has affected your professional career. Social settings are everything when it comes to business and tech when the higher up the ladder you go. If your aspirations are just a 9-5 programmer or at most a tech lead for your team, then your alma mater and your relationships and common bonding experience doesn't matter much. But if you have higher aspirations, then your connections, relationships and how you play within social settings matter.

One of the easiest ways to bond is with share experiences. And shared college experience is one of the easiest avenues to shared experience.

> Kids, go to school where you can afford. Bust your ass, make connections, move on and move up.

Unless it's an ivy league, stanford, MIT, etc. Then do whatever you can to attend because these names and the connections you make in top tier colleges will serve you forever. You get an opportunity to hang around with the children of the leaders of major world nations. The children of top business, tech, political, etc elites.

> School doesn't matter once you're out of it.

GPA doesn't matter. Your school does matter if ( a big if ) it is top tier. And it matters even more internationally. Go anywhere in the world and tell people you are from harvard or yale or stanford. Trust me on this. There are doors only open to these people.

The only time you should mortgage your future on college is for one of the top elite colleges. Anything else, just go to the one that makes the most business sense to you.

> Better to get a C at MIT than an A at RPI.

That is a poor example. RPI is an excellent institution. After you get past the top-50 or so schools, reputation matters far less. If you are truly attending a 'low-tier' school then MIT might matter, but for most jobs the vast majority of institutions are only small differences.

For my first job post PhD I was told I was selected over folks from Stanford and Princeton: my doctorate was 'only' from UT Austin.

I've also sat on admissions and fellowship committees for doctoral programs and students. GPA matters more, at least among the 'good' schools. And even then, I've never seen a 2.0 student beat a decent GPA (3.5+).

Now after about 3.3-onward, I agree that GPA does not matter a bit. In fact, I'm adverse to hiring or selecting students with a 4.0. This typically indicates a poor optimization heuristic (GPA over learning/challenges/interests).

I graduated from RPI summa cum laude, with a dual major, in two honor societies, and went straight to a tech giant, working as a software engineer.

So I have standing to say that RPI has been mismanaged as an institution. Besides my personal experience, RPI's political troubles are well-documented and well-known [1][2][3]. With failed leadership and failed policies, this university has come to sit below CMU which itself is just below MIT.

UT Austin is a fine school from what I heard, and does not seem to have the toxicity of the RPI brand. That is, a second-rate school for second-rate students.

[1]https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-One-Leader-Set-a-Toxic...

[2]https://news.vice.com/article/americas-highest-paid-college-...

[3] https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Troubled-alumni-sto...

Man, does this list goes on.

My brother graduated from RPI early because stuff with Shirley was so bad, she is a crazy dictator of a leader and I heard horror stories from both Professors who were under immense pressure to publish and students who were paying 65k a year for an education from professors who were under too much pressure to publish to be effective teachers.

Exactly. My professor who taught one of my Communication courses was so underpaid that the Times Union covered her.

https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Campus-Notebook-RPI...

RPI is a neverending horror story.

I'm not sure how strong a counterexample UT Austin is, since it's currently at number 10 in US News rankings [1]. Particularly when it comes to academic jobs, there's a huge disparity in where people did their PhD [2]. But I see this as more an indictment of the academic hiring process than a reflection of quality. For hiring where I am, I don't see any explicit bias against people from particular schools, but I do see a bias of where to look for potential candidates. And I have definitely sat at tables and realized I was the only person not from a top-15 CS grad program.

I do agree with everything else.

[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/02/univers...

>In fact, I'm adverse to hiring or selecting students with a 4.0. This typically indicates a poor optimization heuristic (GPA over learning/challenges/interests).

That’s a great way to phrase it.

s/adverse/averse/ would make it even greater.

True, that is a bit better phrasing. I mentally inserted that interpretation when I read it. Personally I wouldn't hold it against someone if they carried a 4.0, however, I would inquire more as to whether they pursued their studies out of interest, what trade-offs they may have made, and so on as to understand their work mentality.

> Better to get a C at MIT than an A at RPI.

Better to be a top student in an average school than to be an average student in top school. More opportunities are offered to the better students. More chances to grow come about too.

A big problem though is that a college is such a big institution with an array of faculties in it and every single course credit can piggy back that reputation.

The government of Sweden does routine quality checks on the university program (we don’t do the whole major/minor thing, we have focused programs) and my computer engineering program in a small university was ranked second while KTH and Chalmers were tied for last and were ordered to change their programs to keep giving out engineering degrees in that field. In case you’re not Swedish, those two are the most renowned schools.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.

- William Shakespeare

Unfortunately, if you have "only" a 3.8 good luck transferring. I looked into it my freshman year (I had a 3.89 :/) but getting into any of the top-tier schools is even more difficult as a transfer than out of high school, especially since I hadn't started a company or done cutting edge research yet.

Unfortunately, my school is going to resonate (poorly) throughout my career now.

Well, it's not really as bad as some of these folks might be making it seem - the ones who say that what matters is what you can do more than where you went to school are more right than wrong. If anything, you'll worry more about your own "lower tier" education than anybody you actually work with. There'll be a few snobs, but their opinions won't matter enough to hurt you. I started taking classes in community college while I was still in high school (they had a special program for kids with an aptitude for math and science), and had completed an associates degree from a "junior college" before I finished high school. Only thing was, my two-year degree GPA was nothing to brag about at that point. Maybe if I was smarter, I would have just started back over as a freshman at a four-year university, but I wasn't either that smart or that motivated, so I transferred to a four-year college that would accept me with the academic transcript I had. (Also one close to home). Although I managed to bring my GPA up before I graduated, I still went to a college that doesn't even show up on the "US News and World Report" list of the "smart people" colleges. I don't think it's really hurt me; it might have slowed me down just a bit and cost me some opportunities that I'll never know I would actually have had, but I'm very comfortable where I am - don't sweat it, study hard, learn a lot, and enjoy being young.

> I started taking classes in community college while I was still in high school (they had a special program for kids with an aptitude for math and science), and had completed an associates degree from a "junior college" before I finished high school.

I did this too, so I can definitely relate there. Went to undergrad 15 miles from home and commuted my last year.

> and enjoy being young.

I'm afraid only the elites get to enjoy themselves when they're young. The rest of us aren't so lucky.

I'm not a hiring manager but id pick A RPI student for engineering work.

"Everyone can be super! And when everyone's super...

[laughs maniacally]

...no one will be." - Syndrome, The Incredibles

When I was in high school in the late 80's, our school would give an award at the end of each school year to the student with the highest grade in each subject. My geometry class ended up with 8 people who had a 100 average. Rather than break tradition and give out multiple awards they opted to give each of us a harder test to determine the winner.

At my daughter's high school award ceremony they just gave the awards to everyone. Times change I guess.

Except that Syndrome's plan was to use technology to actually make everyone better, which in a way is admirable.

What we have here is that we leave everyone mediocre but tell them all that they are super. Now we are left with no way to measure the people who really have put in the work to become better.

Yeah, this is more like "when nobody's super, everyone is."

I do a lot of interviews and I am pretty sure that quite a few students are cheating to get high grades.

There is no way that I get a student who has a A average in computer science and then I ask them to do some simple coding and they outright fail.

The some people cheap right in the interview, I step out of the office and then quick come back and I see they have their cell phone out to copy from.

I am sure cheating is partially responsible for grade inflation.

I had a 3.98 GPA for my MSc computer science but honestly it took me a long time to be able to learn how to demonstrate that ability face to face. Some people just crumple under other people, brain shorts out, whatever you want to call it. That doesn't make us bad developers or computer scientists, just makes us humans who prefer figuring stuff out at a computer, and gradually growing trust with how to solve problems with others in a face to face setting. When you run through so many interviews it can feel like, a double bind dilemma. Give away information that might be the perfect solution to a company's code problem, rinse and repeat, all for free, and what you are supposed to take away is gaining experience dealing with bosses, managers, hierarchies of organizations. But some people just suck at having social skills, like myself.

I wouldn't want to be in the position of an interviewer. Prefer open source, developers talking to other developers. When you hire someone you want to do all your thinking up front about your expectations of who you are hiring. But developers and computer scientists know, real world code and real world problem solving doesn't always get done that way.

I've seen some companies have job listings that state "you don't need to know all these technologies, but having an eagerness to learn and an interest is ideal" and that takes a lot of the pressure off, because it shows a company is willing to work with you instead of just drain you until you burn out with your most precious resource, your mind, completely depleted. That statement also comes across to me as "we expect you to work 80 hours / week and have no life besides your job" but honestly, that's fine to me as long as everyone around me is aware that we're all in this together. I'm gonna forget some stuff, so will you. That's just what happens when you have to program so much stuff. Load new problem, new program into memory, and forget what you were last doing. This happens over and over to coders. Does it happen to hiring managers?

Load new problem, new program into memory, and forget what you were last doing.

I used to say that being a great programmer was being a professional forgetter -- in that you had to know how to forget vital details without getting yourself hurt. So, like a professional tumbler, or a stunt-person specializing in falls. It isn't about the falling. Anyone can fall. It's the expert who can fall without getting hurt.

If you structure code correctly, you can forget about all the details you need to know to keep from getting hurt, but rediscover those things quickly when you need them. This is a great way to talk about program design in a nutshell, but it's also a terrible way, since it's prone to make people with short attention spans think you're nuts!

I agree with this. I wouldn't call it people with short attention spans though. People have to arrive at their own understanding independently in order to be able to know that understanding is their own. But that's also a problem, because once you get there, how do you check it's the right understanding? Check with other people, check with code. And then, it loops - argue with people to prove distinction - code distinctly, come to awareness independently - 'perfect' program, check with other people, check with code...

Code & computer science, etc. It is all insanity. Structured insanity, but insanity nevertheless.

People have to arrive at their own understanding independently in order to be able to know that understanding is their own.

Far too many managers in the 90's and early 2000's simply thought they needed to hire super-memorizers who just knew everything, like they're characters out of a movie. I'm not so sure this has changed in 2018.

Work smarter, not harder.

> It's the expert who can fall without getting hurt.

This is great, I'm definitely using this analogy in the future.

What if this was due to the fact that a big portion of their grades are based on the assignments they complete at home (with whatever aid) rather than exams?

Edit: which is the flip side of what s-shellfish is saying

Definitely. When I was taking 6.001 there was a person in my dorm who wanted to “work together” which ended up meaning “copy my work” because they couldn’t handle fizzbuzz-level problems much less tricky recursion and other material of the class. I don’t know who they attached themself to after me but they did well in the class and they went on to a very swanky job after graduation. I feel bad for the companies being defrauded out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by people like this. Whenever people say “fire fast” I think of that person.

Other techniques in use by these people: go to recitation sections and harass TAs for homework answers week after week. Trying to litigate every point marked off on an exam. Erasing incorrect answers before requesting a regrade. Etc.

I ocassionally get in the mood to go back for a masters degree. And then I remember how much fake bullshit is going on in university settings because the credentialist incentives are so perverse. I’d rather just read some books and tinker than deal with all that.

As someone who has interviewed and been rejected several times, I don't think cheating is why someone with good grades would do poorly at a coding interview.

Some people are good test takers on paper. Ask me to whiteboard some code, and I genuinely get stuck on trivial problems because whiteboarding coding questions is not what I am great at.

I've worked at Amazon and now I am at Google - after alot if stress, anxiety, and prep, I was able to get through and get hired. Microsoft outright rejected me.

One other thing - CS degrees don't teach people to code. They reach computer science. It just so happens that labs and assignments may require coding, but spending half a day or a day to do a project and getting an A has very little relationship with being forced to quickly hash out code in a 45 min interview.

IMO, at both companies I have been at, the majority of new hires are fresh grads. The barrier to entry whose been out of school is extremely high... but I digress.

I agree. I did decently in my algorithms class - got an A, but I feel like my intuition is still lacking even though I have the pre-requisite knowledge. The class also wasn't inordinately tough like it would be at UWash/UT/UM/HYPSM, so its possible my fundamentals aren't as good as I would have hoped.

> whiteboarding coding questions

Ah, you haven't figured out the trick. When somebody asks you to whiteboard something, write down all the nouns they said, draw boxes around each noun, and draw lines randomly between the boxes. Keep talking and pointing at the boxes and the lines, and then draw circles around some of the boxes (but keep talking - this is important). Point emphatically at some of the boxes, underline some of the words, and redraw some of the lines - bonus points if you can use different colored markers. As long as you keep talking, the interviewer will get bored, assume you drew something smart, and offer you a six figure salary.

You jest, but this is exactly the feeling I got when I was reading up on how to do better at system design questions: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer

Wow, that's an amazing resource - thank you!

>As someone who has interviewed and been rejected several times, I don't think cheating is why someone with good grades would do poorly at a coding interview.

As someone who has interviewed and been a TA at a top school, I would not be so quick to dismiss - especially for a broader definition of cheating.

In the school I went to (and I've anecdotally heard this is common for many top schools): Most professors don't change their homework sets and often don't change their exams either. The place was loaded with students who would get the assignments from older students and just memorize. As a TA, I remember one student who consistently only got the answers correct for questions that came from previous semesters, and got all the more original questions wrong - even trivial ones.

He was an extreme case, but the sentiment was strong in the student population, and is just as another commenter out there described: People who got to top schools tend to optimize for GPA, and not for learning. Most of my fellow students would refuse to learn anything beyond what was needed to get an A.

I get what you're saying: Live coding is not for everyone. But I also get what the GP is saying.

Sometimes you just have to admit that if you're a 4.0 student at a top school you might have bigger opportunities than learning extra material for enrichment. You might not, but you also might. Imo

Not all universities! Simon Fraser University uses a 4.33 point scale (A = 4.00, A+ = 4.33) and its average GPA in 2017 (2.83) is only slightly above the average GPA in 1992 (2.80). Over that 25 year period, the university-wide average grade awarded has varied between a low of 2.77 and a high of 2.85.

Students complain. They complain a lot. We know that we're losing pre-med students to UBC -- which awards much higher grades on average -- because when we ask them why they decided to not accept SFU's admission offer, they reply "I'm planning on becoming a doctor and UBC will give me the higher grades I need". This also happens to a lesser extent with pre-law students. Over the past few years we've started displaying course average grades on transcripts and sending letters to graduate schools saying "so, there's something you should know about SFU's grades...".

I don't know how long SFU will be able to hold the line against grade inflation, but we're trying. It's not fair to students who worked hard to get a GPA of 3.7 (currently around 2% of students manage this) if next year's students can get that just by showing up.

In the mean time, if you see a student with a 4.00 GPA from Simon Fraser University... believe it.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, I pulled some statistics from the class graduating from SFU at the end of the 2017/18 year:

   First Class Honours with Distinction (Honours program, 4.00+ GPA) 6
   Honours with Distinction (Honours program, 3.50+ GPA)            61
   Honours                                                          61
   First Class with Distinction (Major program, 4.00+ GPA)          24
   With Distinction (Major program, 3.50+ GPA)                     265
   Bachelors                                                      1769

Across the university, 1.37% of students graduate with a 4.00+ GPA and 16.29% graduate with a 3.50+ GPA.

Yikes, that is really depressing that admissions committees aren't able to distinguish between what is effectively the "DOGEcoin is more valuable than x because everyone gets billions of coins!"

Ultimately I think everyone should be judged on merit, like an audition, or based on a portfolio. But many businesses with deep pockets still award these types of positions based on nepotism and personal connections

I think part of the problem that SFU undergraduate students have with graduate admissions is that most of the students in question will be applying to medical or law programs at UBC. It's one thing for admissions committees to recognize that some universities have inflated grades; it's quite another for them to recognize that an "A" from their own institution is worth less than an "A" from another.

Reporting the GPA of Medians (GPAM) alongside GPA would make GPAs more meaningful. The Washington Post recently reported on this idea: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/06/1...

It's time to do away with grades entirely. Do what many Indian schools do -- report your score as a class percentile. At end of term, you don't get a grade, only a percentile. No curve. No score inflation. No bias.

What's more, each school should report your score only relative to those of your peers. You should be compared only to other engineers, to other history majors, to other biology majors, etc. Because performance in physics is incomparable to english, education, or art, it's absurd to contrive a relative metric of comparison (AKA grades) to conflate them when none can possibly be meaningful or fair. Grades do an injustice to everyone.

As for comparing students from one school to the next, entrenched standardized tests like GREs have become a nightmare. Especially in terms of STEM curricula, schools often differ radically in how much they challenge the students and how far their skills develop by graduation. There simply is no way a three hour multiple choice test like a GRE can accurately reveal the difference between someone who attended Columbia vs Lehigh, for example. But a big difference there is. (I know since I attended both.) To pretend that some quick A/B/C/D/E test, which explores none of the practical skills learned in labs or projects, can accurately AND reliably reveal a meaningful difference among 'peers' -- this does a disservice to everyone.

Finally, there's no better illustration of disparity in the academic ranks than the rise of for-profit degree mills during the past couple of decades. The pretense that millions are not being cheated by these 'schools' is simply an abomination. I blame unchecked grade inflation and academic elitism for the tolerance for slap dash scholarship assessment that the sorry state of these 'schools' has revealed. As long as we avoid a precise and accurate accounting of the scholarly performance of the individual and the academic product of the university, we will continue to confuse student merit and invite charlatan schools to victimize their customers.

Somehow all these forms of false credentialism must end, and soon, or 'college' really will become the stinking albatross that Mark Cuban and others claim they are.

One of the smartest guys I knew from high school went to a top college for CS and went from being an valedictorian A student to getting Bs and Cs for the first time in his life. It greatly affected his perception of himself and he dropped out of the industry after getting his degree in CS. But he's actually a more capable programmer than lots of top graduates, so I agree that there should be some way of comparing students from one school to the next.

Poisonously, kids have become commoditized and all that distinguishes them are 'Schools and Grades'. 'Schools and Grades' are really the product here. Kids are the sellers. Companies are the buyers.

Until companies stop valuing kids solely by their 'School and Grade', this cycle will continue.

To make this an interesting conversation, how DO companies hire great people without relying on their 'School and Grades'? Are 'Schools and Grades' really the best indicator for worker performance?

In essence what is happening here is that rich parents/kids (or just very heavily indebted ones) are buying their degrees now, which have basically become shitcoins.

X% of employers are still believing the high worth of these shitcoin degrees, and for some reason, the bubble has yet to explode.

It's like, there's no difference in skill between buying bitcoin early vs a valueless coin. But, there is a massive difference in perceived wealth.

Agree. However, the difference is, once these 'shitcoins' get "bought" initially by the Goldman Sachs, Googles, and Mckinseys, the college grads then become truly valuable. So, now, we have this reinforcement problem, where the college grads get to work at the top firms for a few years because of their degree, and now, they are hot on the job market. And then, we further propagate the correlation between good degrees and good jobs.

I totally have seen this happen first hand as well. I would say there is a proportion of "shitcoin degree-holders who turn out to be valuable workers" and "shitcoin degree-holders who turn out to be costly but we keep them around anyway".

I think the real problem here is that investment capital (i.e money) is still so centralized in the hands of the fortune 500 and some investment banks. Most "run-of-the-mill" startups won't be differentiated by uniqueness of idea or ability to execute-- they'll just be differentiated by how much money they're given and how many rich dudes are in their network.

I really dream of the day that 10 high school graduates from Detroit can form a company and bootstrap their way to 100,000 users with a net profit of $1,000,000 a year.

I'm not sure such an example exists.

Do grades even matter anymore?

Unless you're applying to a gov't job, you're connections, friends, professors that like you, github accounts, art or MBA portfolio are the tools that move you "up" in the world. And in that order.

Online education dilutes GPA too. As well as more tech skill degrees (devops certs), aka those were called trade/vocational schools in my day.

I've never seen a GPA on an intern application/resume in the last 3yrs. Unless and (unfortunately) its from a visa student. Hmmm.

GPA, in my experience, seems to map exactly onto your ability to wrangle a good GPA. That set of skills is largely orthogonal to solving hard problems or making useful contributions to a team.

To me, that just sounds like your teachers and professors were piss poor at their job and had no idea how to grade properly.

I was referring to my experiences with hiring engineers. Throwing shade about people's education isn't cool.

yeah in software this might make some sense, but say you want to become a doctor... I don't imagine a github profile is going to move you "up" in the world :p

> Unless you're applying to a gov't job, you're connections, friends, professors that like you, github accounts, art or MBA portfolio are the tools that move you "up" in the world. And in that order.

Letting high-grade overachieves who don't have connections, or well-placed friends, advance into the ranks of the elite is how the elite keep themselves relevant.

What industry do you work in? In my experience most out-of-college jobs require your GPA, with some jobs (e.g. management consulting) GPA being a major differentiator amongst applicants.

I actually don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to know an applicant’s GPA. Surely if they got a 2.1 that communicates something about their work ethic, ceteris paribus.

It matters as a filter.

Relevant Mitchell and Webb sketch, Everyone gets an A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGA11A340Ck

I don't like these comparisons of statistics to justify that academic honors have lost their luster.

The students who go to these schools tend to be overachievers. Achieve honors at all costs kind of mentality. So just because too many students are actually achieving, do you try to bring them down? Or make coursework unreasonably hard?

I once talked to a professor from my university long after graduation, and I told him that I as I saw the students become better at the coursework (I was helping them so) the exams became harder and harder, to the point where the only way you could truly get the questions right and on time is by having a year of so experience doing those problems. He responded with the bell curve. That a few students should get A's, some should get B's, and majority should get C's.

Seriously? There are careers at stake here!

Lots of people trying to justify their college experience in here. Reality is, none of it matters. What matters is how you were raised 20 years earlier and how you choose to live your life every day. Is every day a new puzzle to solve? Are you motivated to learn and solve challenges placed in front of you regardless of banality or difficulty? Guess what, you're the elusive employee everyone wants. Rarely are jobs too difficult for grades/degrees to matter in hiring process -- the job itself is the screener. Yeah,sure, some jobs are incredibly difficult and require elite skill and knowledge but we aren't talking about those jobs, we are generalizing. And guess what, attitude and outlook on life are all that matter.

“A 4.0 does signal something significant, that that student is good,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor who has studied grade inflation for years. “ A 3.7, however, doesn’t. That’s just a run-of-the-mill student at any of these schools.”

I disagree with this statement, at Carnegie Melllon I noticed that a lot of 4.0's were engineered. Students avoid taking hard classes, avoid difficult requirement classes by taking at an easier university, avoid challenging themselves outside of their major.

I can attest to this. I deliberately chose the easiest classes and even studied abroad twice because I knew specific professors leading the program abroad were giving out free As.

Fortunately for me, I got my degree without too much torture that many others go through. Unfortunately for me, nobody looks at my nice 3.7 GPA!!!

I've got to say, I think this is parallel to the issue that faaaaaaar too many people are getting bachelor's degrees. Generic sales jobs require them at this point, which is nuts. One should absolutely be able to get a sales job with a 6-digit income potential with mere experience in lower-powered positions, but for some reason we're forcing these people to study humanities for four years before we let them sell a CRM tool.

Shit, there's no reason most low-level programming positions need a CS bachelors. We really, really need good associates degrees that teach functional coding (logic structures, two common languages, git, agile). There is no reason to expect someone to be in school for four years to be able to code.

Grades must be inflated to accommodate the horde passing through universities. The masters degree is the new bachelors degree.

It seems there is a moral hazard involved here- administrators pressuring professors to pass more students, which leads to grade inflation. All this to retain students and keep the tuition money flowing.

I'd love to hear from front-line profs about this issue- does grade inflation need to be addressed?

I teach. I can say that I have never had direct pressure to pass students or raise grades, but there are two issues that I run into related to grades.

First is the ever-growing methods of academic dishonesty. I do not have enough hours in my life to create and design new homework that prevents cheating. It's possible for some assignments, but not all. I don't give up on cheating detection, but this leaves tests and participation (be it simply turning in work or in-person) as the primary grade-changing events for many students.

Second is the issue of student "litigation". It is not unusual to find a student that will fight to get their 4.0 by attrition, and that requires very good record keeping on the professor's part, taking away from time for other tasks.

My situation is at an extension of a very large university. We focus on teaching and student connection, not research. I know that these experiences change drastically when professors have graders and a research program taking their time away from teaching duties.

Can you explain more about this “litigation”? Your students actually sue over their grades?? That’s nuts!

No, that's why I put it in quotes. They will often keep in incessant contact and try to escalate matters within the department or school. This is still somewhat rare, but happens often enough to complain about.

I'm at a large research school teaching computer science. Anecdotally, I have not received pressure from administrators. I have gotten pointers about the expected number of As and Bs from senior faculty though. And, the curves do go both ways.

I taught for one semester at a big ten university, many years ago. And I live in a college town, so I have a lot of friends and relatives who are teachers.

It's widely held that student evaluations are proportional to the grades that the students expect to get. My office mate, and a professor, were co-teaching a course, and they got into shouting matches about grades, because the professor was up for tenure, and wanted better evaluations from his students.

In addition, students will badger their teachers for better grades, and dealing with it adds to the workload and stress of teaching. After each exam, I had a line of students at my door, asking me to review the grader's marks.

My view is that it's always marginally easier to give out higher grades, even if there's no overt pressure from above.

As a former professor, there is some correlation between grade and evaluation, but there is a much higher correlation with workload. The less work in the course the higher the grade. I needed to maintain a teaching evaluation over 3.5 / 5, but I cared that my students actually learnt something so I would aim for a score of around 3.6 - 3.7 and then loaded up my students as much work as I could and achieve this.

The sad thing with teaching evaluation is they are collected while the student was doing the subject. I can't tell you how many of my students complained like crazy about the subject while doing (what you expect me to work), who a year later told me the subject was the best one they had taken in their whole degree because they had learnt so much.

I occasionally interview people and review resumes. There are two things I don't even bother looking at: where you went to school and what your GPA was.

then you're one of the only ones

I honestly don't even care if they went to college. "Top tier" is meaningless outside of snobbery. I honestly don't care where you graduated from 2 years ago or ten years ago. It simply doesn't impress me.

I think that's ready to say, but getting into MIT, CMU or Stanford requires pretty heavy academic achievement.

I myself went to a Canadian University (so fairly unknown to people in the US), so I'm not trying to defend my honor it something by saying that

I am also one of the only ones.

Yeah, same here - as much as it pains me to admit it, I'm pretty impressed when I see that somebody graduated from MIT or CMU. And, honestly, when I've worked with people who did graduate from "top" schools, they were smarter than I was/am (but on the plus side, I got to learn a lot from them). On the plus side, there aren't that many of them, and there are lots of jobs for the rest of us.

I couldn't care less about your GPA or what school you went to, some of the best people I know never attended school at all.

Yep. Some of the best people I know either didn't graduate, or graduated in fields more or less entirely unrelated to what they do.

Well, unless you're leaving something out, you just said that the less education a person has, the more capable they are - so, reductio ad absurdum, the most capable people in the world are middle-school drop-outs. But I suspect you're trying to suggest that education and competence are completely uncorrelated (which is a claim that would be hard to back up, incidentally) and that "something else" is an indicator of competence/intelligence/capability, but you're not specifying what you think that is.

Another one of the only ones here.

Yes. The projects someone has done is more useful, but only as a source of topics to ask questions about. I keep on running into recent grads from prestigious University of California system schools with 3.75+ GPAs who don't know basic things about pointers, who can't concretely specify a design for even a small subsystem, and who seem to have only ever glued libraries together with a high level language, nothing more.

I introduce a 2 element cycle in a dataset, and ask how we can detect such things, and have repeatedly gotten an if-clause that would only detect the 2 elements. Then I ask about a 3 element cycle, and I've even gotten another if-clause to detect the 3 elements as an answer multiple times.

What in the world!?

I'm a college dropout who's been in a position where I've had to interview people and make hiring decisions. I always hire based on who I'd most like to work with. Sometimes that candidate has a degree from a very prestigious university, other times they don't, but I always hire the person who I think I'll learn the most from or whom I think will add the most value to the company. Grades and the school you went to never tell me those things, it's your interview and personal projects that tell me that.

If something like the Flynn Effect[0] is real and persistent, it could make sense that grade inflation is natural, and that fewer truly qualified students would be able to get university placements, scholarships, and so on, just because there are far greater numbers of deserving, materially higher-achieving students now, but the number of available “prestigious” outcomes has not grown as fast.

[0]: < https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect >

I read about some years ago, that due to grade inflation, kids in high school are pressured to distinguish themselves further through more extracurriculars, volunteer work, even internships.

And you are right, the population is growing, but the number of prestigious universities has not, furthering the competitiveness. There aren't opening new Harvards.

I think there's a very simple explanation for this.

In past times universities were very elite educational institutions that few attended. Today college is seen as basically high school 2.0. There's a lot of numbers in this [1] report from the census. [1] Today 33% of Americans have a bachelor's or higher degree, and 12% have a masters or doctorate. Those numbers also continue to skyrocket. In 1970 only about 10% of people had any degree and advanced degrees were a rare sight indeed. In other words we have more people with masters or better than had any degree in the 70s.

The explosive normalization of post-secondary school education has turned into a massive industry. College is now a half a trillion dollar industry per year, and rapidly growing. This has shifted students from being trialing and exceptional aspirants to... customers. And there is immense pressure to keep these customers happy. For instance many universities rely on student evaluations to measure teachers, yet those evaluations often work as a strong proxy to difficulty which works as a strong proxy to grades. You can see this connection in crystal clear fashion on any of the countless 'rate my professor' type sites.

[1] - https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

Especially since in some graduate schools, you can’t graduate with less than a 3.0.....

The question seems to be, in which cases could a high GPA be a negative signal?

The answer depends on the qualities the employer is optimizing for in its employees. It’s easy to imagine how a high GPA could be a positive signal or a low GPA could be a negative signal. However, it’s also possible to imagine some circumstances where a high GPA may be a negative signal and a low GPA a high signal.

For example, perhaps a high GPA at a hard school implies a tendency for isolation, a preference for conformity over risk, and quality of work that depends solely on the specificity of instructions given. Depending on the stage of the company hiring, and/or the role it’s hiring for, these traits may be undesirable and therefore useful as a negative hiring signal.

That said, the question of GPA as a signal is too focused in scope. Any such consideration of a signal metric like GPA should be balanced with its inverse: the likelihood of a low metric (e.g., GPA) being a negative signal.

A holistic approach would include creating a matrix of (x) traits the company wants to select or filter, and (y) input signals like GPA. That is, a mapping of signals to traits.

For each signal and trait the company should strive to estimate the probability function of the following cases:

- High metric (GPA) is a negative signal for trait

- High metric (GPA) is a positive signal for trait

- Low metric (GPA) is a positive signal for trait

- Low metric (GPA) is a negative signal for trait

The company should consider the importance of the trait(s) it is selecting for, and the relative risks (downsides) of misinterpreting any signal used as an input for selecting those traits. Only then does it have the information necessary to create a useful hiring strategy and rubric for candidates.

When showing up and saying "I'm here" results in a 4.0?

When everyone is special. No one is special.

A single grade serves at least three purposes:

- To give students feedback about their progress

- To competitively rank students knowledge

- To competitively rank students organizational/bureaucratic hoop jumping skills

To conflate these three things is incompetence to the highest degree. Whoever invented this system, and everyone who has ever gone along with it should be deeply ashamed.

Of course, this is an oversimplification - there are many more confounding variables packed into a single stupid grade than just these three. I really can't overstate how stupid this system is. It's not even a system.

To any young person worrying about the importance of their grades for eventually getting a good job, don't. Most everyone starts out with an entry level job and then other factors are immediately more important. Hiring considerations are more like: relevant job experience > total experience > references > whether they went to school > whether they finished school > what they went to school for > where they went to school > ... > GPA.

A major benefit of attending elite schools is the increased opportunity to network. Google used to filter candidates by GPA but "quickly" learned this was a mistake.

Some companies do still look at GPAs. Others specifically indicate they're looking for people from "top-tier" schools. Out of context, this means you'll have more opportunities if you have a higher GPA and if you attended a top-tier school.

I've found that GPA is completely irrelevant in the private sector but the school you attended still makes a big difference, particularly if it's in the very top tier.

Some companies will not even consider engineering candidates who did not come from a narrow list of schools (Ivies and similarly prestigious institutions). I know for a fact that Oracle has such a list along with several major finance companies.

I just graduated with a "First Class Honours" degree (70%+) from a UK university. I'm really curious how companies in the UK view these grades (and how US companies convert these grades to a GPA, assuming that they do perform such a conversion), can anyone share their experiences?

GPA is a totally useless metric, if for no other reason, then because it's a well documented fact that while some schools give out high grades for just showing up and applying some minute effort, others require an ass-busting amount of work just to register around average grades.

Since it is much harder to get into the top universities and most classes scale their grades based on the history of the class, perhaps that relationship is the issue

Grade Inflation has been an issue for decades. I think we all know to look up how rigorous a school or program actually is and adjust. Also, um, students cheat a lot.

Still only matters for first job and then if you have nothing else to show. As a hiring manager, its a minus for me to see unless its for intern. But surprising how often i see on cvs. (Speaking as former top of ChE class and frequent outlier to be removed on grading curves.)

How can good grades ever be a minus?

I think he's saying that if you are applying to a job and have more than 0 experience, you shouldn't be relying on your GPA as a selling point.

And I agree - GPA is pretty irrelevant to anything in the business world. All it proves is that you can play by the rules in the school system - not a real indication of your experience, skills, or relevant knowledge.

Success in much of the business world requires you to play by the rules of the business system, which may be as capricious, arbitrary, pointless, stupid, and orthogonal to relevant knowledge [1], as success in the school system.

For every hiring manager who takes the approach that anyone putting their GPA on their resume is an asshole or an idiot, there's three others who think that there's something wrong with a junior applicant who doesn't put their GPA on their resume.

Unless you tell the applicant what you want to see, they have no idea which of these two hiring managers you might be. Instead of downmarking people for having the audacity to present this information to you, perhaps you could just ignore it?

[1] Which the hiring manager in this thread has unironically demonstrated.

Without any evidence to back up your claim I could just as easily claim that for every hiring manager who cares about seeing a GPA on a resume there are three others who think there's something wrong with an applicant with any experience who does put their GPA on their resume.

If you have to use it as a selling point, it means you don't have more compelling things to show.

Including 7 ASCII characters on your resume does not imply that you don't have more compelling things to show.

Yes, I have seen a 4.0 taken as a negative sign for people that are overly focused on following the rules. Less common is some people have a GPA limit and will not higher people over it. That limit can be as low as 3.2 in one case.

This more for undergrad as most people are expected to pull a ~3.8-4.0 in grad school making the number meaningless.

PS: On average I suspect it's a net gain for your first job, but adding a GPA after that is likely a larger risk than you might think.

They're not a minus in and of themselves. But more than a few hiring managers will prefer someone who obviously worked hard and has a transcript that moves from a B/B+ average to A's the last several years than someone who has an A in every class they're ever taken. If you're not going into academia or research it's much less important that you be a genius and much more important that you're willing and able to put in work over months or years to achieve an objective.

Getting 100% on a math quiz in elementary school is also not a minus, but approaching employers with that information as a means to sell yourself leaves them thinking that you have nothing to offer the workplace.

Dumb people prefer the company of other dumb people.

Your GPA is just about around 5 characters or so on your CV, why not put it there?

It seems odd to leave it out, but it definitely doesn’t need to be the focus of your CV.

Because it's an arbitrary number that's increasingly becoming meaningless.

For me when I was reviewing CVs, if it wasn’t there, I would wonder what they are trying to hide. If it was there, as long as it wasn’t especially low (for the school in question), then I would ignore it. There is no difference between a high and normal GPA, but a low GPA is probably some kind of flag.

I really hate the catch-22 that this sort of thinking puts applicants into - just like the "I would never hire anybody who had a degree or who had a certification" assertion you see on here so often. Since you're just as likely (if not more likely) to find somebody who's going to pass over you or weight you negatively for NOT including your GPA (on the assumption that you're not including it because you have something to hide), applicants are in a difficult position of trying to gauge whether or not they're facing somebody who weighs certain accomplishments _negatively_. Ignoring a credential is one thing, but counting it against somebody strikes me more as sour grapes.

I haven't read the whole article (paywalled), but I wonder if the honors losing their luster is more about a low correlation between high GPA and professional success (at least in STEM careers). I've been involved in hiring and for recent grads we will look at transcripts, but GPA as a factor isn't weighted very highly. I'm much more interested in hearing a candidate talk about their senior project or personal projects and other areas of interest.

Does anybody even look at transcripts or care about GPA beyond your first job?

You're lucky if they even look at GPA or transcripts for your first job.

College is the new high school.

I've taught in college. Freshmen and sophomores aren't that distinguishable from high schoolers by knowledge, ability, and maturity.

(Paywalled so I can't read the whole article) This is mainly due to society's (I'm in the US) mentality that if a kid get's low grade, s/he are lazy and a failure. We really need a reform to gauge aptitude better and accept the fact that some people are better at blue collar jobs than white collar jobs (and vice versa). Our current standardized test system does not reflect this.

article without paywall: https://outline.com/HeY8AN

Oooooh, these distinctions are given by absolute GPA and not by class ranking ? That's a shame...

Giving out academic distinction based on class ranking is no different than giving out professional distinctions based on stack ranking.

Welcome to Purdue then

For each course on a transcript, the average grade earned should be shown, so that the reader can adjust grades earned for easy or harsh grading. It would be nice to see the average SAT or ACT score in the class too, to see if the "harsh" or "easy" grading is just a reflection of the quality of the students. Put this data in a csv file that employers could download, and I think smart employers would use it.

Capitalism has resulted in such fierce competition that now even its feeder system for employees is being compromised. There are few marks of distinction that matter anymore, resulting in ever greater precarity for even the middle classes that thought they were immune.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com