It is incomprehensible to me that you would even consider using grades as a hiring indicator.
Internships have almost completely replaced this imo, but i think that mostly speaks volumes to overall disappointing performance of education in recent decades.
30 femtoseconds into thinking about how to approach the task I realized that it was and always had been impossible to compare grades across institutions, across courses taught by different faculty within the same institution, and even across different revisions of a course taught by the same faculty within the same institution. Did the TA in the fall 2020 Aerospace Flight Mechanics class post good review guides or did they hang the class out to dry just to watch the carnage?
As far as I'm concerned, every course in every degree program should be pass/fail.
You either met the standard or you did not. It has been my experience that 10x'ers don't exist, rockstars fizzle out, and the best coworker is one who is easy to work with, meets the standard, is eager to learn, and is willing to help out no matter how big or small the ask.
My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript.
And now we know why the bolts keep coming out of Boeing plans :P
Joking aside, I agree, this (very untestable) skill / attitude is the key thing I look for too. But it really depends on the role, I'm mostly concerned with getting a reference I trust.
They still had to grind out the work. Actually, some of the BS in academics is not that different from the BS in the corporate world. They're going to have some BS metric, and depending where you work, they just thumb their scales for developers they want to keep (or lose).
In my experience, there are many "developers developers", and outside of software, engineering geniuses with poor grades. That said, these developers often seemed to have other issues, and frankly might be wrong for like 80% of gigs.
If someone is genuinely talented, but thinks there's zero value in demonstrating that with more abstract, academic pursuits that tells you something about them. Perhaps more of a problem for stuffy corporate jobs.