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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

Just reinforces my belief that an ivy league degree is much more an indicator of socioeconomic class than it is intelligence or aptitude.

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As of 2013, the median grade at Harvard was an A-. The mode was an A. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...

Anecdotally, I have heard of places that refuse to hire Harvard grads for this reason.

Agree. Anecdotally, I had a sales manager who graduated from Harvard. He was literally no different from any corporate manager I've ever had and just parroted whatever unattainable goals trickled down from the top, providing no clear way to meet said goals

I have worked with people from MIT media lab. I didn't notice them being better than any other engineer. The VCs loved them though and talked pretty much only to them when they visited.

Try mit csail, or some other depts. Some undergrads in particular made me feel rather stupid :)

It's a bizarre situation. In grad school, at least where I went (no place elite), a 'C' was a failing grade, because we were supposed to be doing outstanding work by virtue of being in grad school. I suppose elite schools could argue analogously. "Being here means your work is top drawer". Personally I'd solve the problem by giving written evaluations, which is what my undergrad school did. Useful, nuanced information.

Similar situation for me, if you were getting anything lower than a B you probably couldn’t hack the coursework.

Grade inflation is a relic of the Vietnam war era where grades were systematically inflated to keep people from the draft. Also happened uniformly across top tier schools and its hard to do a rollback (especially at one institution only).

> As of 2013, the median grade at Harvard was an A-.

What do you conclude from this?

> Anecdotally, I have heard of places that refuse to hire Harvard grads for this reason.

That does sound anecdotal.

If everyone is receiving an A, that indicates that everyone receives As regardless of merit.

Or it means that everyone works their ass off.

Or that they went to high schools that prepared them well.

Wait is non calibrated scoring the norm now? When I was in school (a terribly long time ago) classes were judged by the people that took the classes. That is the % were based in the people that took the tests.

You mean curved? It depends on the class I think?

And what if like, you end up with a difference between A and B being 2%.

Then you had a bad time & you commiserate over drinks?

Basically every class I had in college was graded amongst your cohort. Is that odd?

> Then you had a bad time & you commiserate over drinks?

The dynamics are a lot more complicated than you make it seem.

> Basically every class I had in college was graded amongst your cohort. Is that odd?

I've also had classes that were graded on a curve. But that doesn't fully capture the dynamics.

Depends on how they grade. I went to Purdue and pretty much every math and CS class was bell curved around a C and D's aren't passing grades which was pretty brutal and a very effective form of weeding out people since a portion of each class is forced to retake it. Hence why Purdue frequently rates as one of the hardest grading colleges.

Much easier to get into then the ivy leagues though.

> a very effective form of weeding out people since a portion of each class is forced to retake it

This seems really pointless.

I don't know. Purdue is much easier to get into then IVY league schools and yet ranks better in CS than 3/8 of the IVY league, tied with one, and really isn't far below than the other 4 according to US News [0]. Based on my assumption that Purdue is highly rated because people who graduate were the top X% of students and others were weeded out or re-took classes to learn the material better, would you rather have the filtering/weeding_out for "better" students be done at the high_school->college choice level like the IVY leagues which are highly selective but grade inflate or the people who graduate from college learning the material you probably require for the job where grading is tough?

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

I wouldn't look at the school? A 10-minute convo tells you more than an average that you have no context for.

I'm not a recruiter so take this with a grain of salt, but I believe school/GPA is highly used for screening resumes for new grads. AFAIK, top companies get a ridiculous amount of resumes and they need some way to prioritize them without spending 10 minute conversations with each and every person that applies.

Can any recruiter comment here on school/GPA importance on resumes for newly grads?

This is a graduate school ranking based on a survey and fairly meaningless due to how it's done:

Specialty rankings of doctoral science programs are based solely on nominations by department heads and directors of graduate studies at peer schools. These respondents ranked up to 10 programs in each area. Those with the most votes appear in the rankings tables.

This biases the result towards top regional schools, whose peers rate them highly over well-known schools that are otherwise great, but have weaker CS programs than its best peers. Either way, this has no real relevance in terms of comparing the quality of those who complete their undergraduate programs. The selection effect dominates all other factors here and almost no school has separate admissions for computer science (not aware of any in fact other than CMU) which means to the extent most people rank them, it is roughly in order of the overall prestige of the undergraduate program in general. I mean University of Wisconsin - Madison is a great school, but on average, you won't find their graduates to be quite as good as Harvard or Yale grads.

it might indicate that the course is not designed well and fails to provide gradient among students.

If this is the case across the school, then perhaps the entire school curricula is not designed well.

If the median is A-, that means more than half the students are not getting an A. If we accept that Harvard does have some of the best students, well at least best at getting good grades, since that is at least partially how they get in, why shouldn't they have better grades on average? To do otherwise would seem unfair to the students, since people are often judged on grades by people who don't have any perspective as to what a given grade means at a given institution. It would not be surprising if getting an A at Harvard is still substantially harder on an absolute basis than getting an A at a much lesser school that has a much lower average.

Consequence of paid, for-profit education - they want their grads to get high paying jobs. C-grade alumni with a shit job doesn’t make a great donor.

Yes. You pay for the network, the education is free and optional.

However: I have worked with a handful of Harvard MBA graduates and . . . they were the smartest people I have ever worked with, and I have worked with a lot of people.

If we are doing anecdotes the job I had that was predominantly sourced from Harvard was full of bad employees. I work hard at not trying to extrapolate from that small sample size.

MBAs or just grads?

MBAs. Though to be fair there was nothing about that gig that made sense for a business degree. It was a cs research position. [edited]

The best engineer I ever worked with went to a tiny religious university that didn’t have an official CS Major. There are smart people everywhere. He is also a super cool dude, and TBQH a lot of Harvard grads I’ve worked with have been... hmmm... “less than cool”

The dim ones don't have to work.

The only cool Harvard kids dropped out

Of course.

Or drive.

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