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Comment by pretendscholar | Hacker News Reader

Maybe im just mediocre but it doesnt seem like a big deal. Sometimes you get a shit teacher and check out. The kind of ass kissing and begging that I saw among my peers that got all A's is real alarming

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The kind of ass kissing and begging that I saw among my peers that got all A's is real alarming

I see the same from some new graduates, begging their managers to sign off on something, they don’t seem to understand the difference between an academic grade and work being of a standard to show a customer.

> The kind of ass kissing and begging that I saw among my peers that got all A's

My technique was to learn the material :-)

I just saw a lot of premed folks that weren't too bright or too dumb that put in a lot of time but would end up close to the grade line and would do anything they could to get up over the top even though they probably deserved a b or a c based on their understanding of the material.

If it was like the other students I knew who got 4.0s, the time it took them to go from 3.6 to 4.0 was at the expense of other much more enriching opportunities in life. There's hugely diminishing returns in perfecting ones report card, with regard to actual personal educational growth.

I decided early on that my goal was to graduate with honors. I knew how much work that entailed, did that, got the grades, and graduated with honors.

I made the right decision, it worked for me. I didn't do any begging or ass kissing, and still had time to enjoy the other pursuits being in college afforded.

That probably works better at Caltech than at most schools.

The grade may or may not be a "big deal" as you mention, but it is certainly and with total absolution, a reasonable thing to ask about. Do you agree?

I don't agree. Interview time is limited and valuable. Sure, you could ask the candidate about anything thats not illegal to ask. But why waste time on irrelevancies? Asking about a single low grade when the candidate has an otherwise respectable GPA is just wasting a chance to ask a better question. If I saw a junior interviewer do it, I would be tempted to share some ideas of stronger questions to ask in the future. Experience: hundreds of interviews.

If it were something worth asking to figure out who is a good hire, maybe - however, it's viewed as irrelevant at most jobs, so why waste precious interviewing time asking about irrelevant grades?

It's a waste of time, and thus unreasonable thing to ask about, wasting a candidate's time and the interviewer's time in revealing how little the interviewer knows about effective interviewing.

Depends on the relevance of the course to the job.

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