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Comment by fnimick | Hacker News Reader

Grades determine what college you go to, which determines the connections you make, which determines the trajectory of your entire life.

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This never made sense to me,

Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U?

(Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)

No one cares about your gpa after 2 years of experience. All they will see is Harvard or BU

Who mentioned ‘gpa’?

how else did you intend percentile to be inferred in your comment?

Based on their actual merit?

For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.

You're talking about the way the world should be. Reality is different.

For instance, having graduated from Harvard is going to get you a fairly good job _regardless_ of their GPA.

Similarly, there is no objective way to measure "merit" that isn't unfair to _someone_ and also scales to dozens/hundreds/thousands of students. So people use GPA.

Life isn't fair.

Why does it matter if there is an ‘objective way’ or not?

Clearly peers do evaluate each other in any ways they choose, pretty much every day at Harvard I imagine.

When discussing percentile ranks of students and their admission to top schools the school needs some way of measuring the percentile according to some measurable metric. It’s not a vibe based process. GPA and test scores are heavily leaned upon.

I would note that students who depend on AIs to answer questions on homework will do poorly on tests. I am not really sure what all the fuss is about. Kids cheating on homework is nothing new and a machine doing it for your is little different than all the other ways kids cheat on homework. And cheating on homework doesn’t help you in your grades - it hurts you because you’re unprepared for exams, which typically dominate the weighting of a grade. Then once you take a standardized placement exam you’re totally screwed.

> When discussing percentile ranks of students and their admission to top schools the school needs some way of measuring the percentile according to some measurable metric. It’s not a vibe based process. GPA and test scores are heavily leaned upon.

How does this relate to the prior comment?

I’m clearly not an admissions officer at Harvard, nor likely are the other HN commentors here.

Anecdotally, I failed out of undergrad 3 times. When I finally graduated, it had been 9 years and my final GPA was a 2.4. I also walked out that door with 6 interviews and an offer from each, all through the school job fair. Nobody ever asked about my GPA, they care about my degree and where I got it. For reference, I attended a respectable private school, but not one anywhere near the level of Harvard.

No. There are entire categories of employers (such as most of the prestigious financial firms for financial jobs) that only hire from the Ivy League. Twitter had its internal hiring policy leaked some time ago (before Elon) and Harvard was on the list (GPA 3.6) but BU was not at any GPA. School matters much more in the American class system than GPA (edit: or class rank) does. My understanding is that too high a GPA may in fact be disqualifying in some places; you might be uptight.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/twitters-internal-hiring-poli...

Yes but people actually think about 20th percentile Harvard vs 20th BU, and correctly deduces that Harvard would be better path.

Parents are worried about the worst case scenario, and going to Harvard raises that floor by ensuring they can get noticed straight out of graduation, even if they are bottom of the class.

How do you figure that? Isn't Harvard very much about the network of contacts?

‘The network of contacts’ isn’t some automatic mechanism that by default joins everyone in a class…?

By definition to join a network they need to be accepted by their class peers.

The network is not (only) your graduating peers, it's primarily the alumni. If you see a job you want and the hiring manager also went to Harvard, they will have a more favorable opinion of you. You may ask how this is any different from any other college, but, due to prior network effects, the prior Harvard graduates themselves are more likely to be in higher positions of power. Prestige begets prestige, in a way that lower universities do not.

But the difference might not be between Harvard and a local community college. People don't come out of "slums" to Harvard and immediately join the upper class.

But you'll be exposed to different people and opportunities by going to a state school instead of a community college, or a better school out of state with a scholarship vs. a state college, etc. The small differences matter.

I literally got my first job because my roommate's dad knew of someone looking for a software developer job. Would I have met that person in community college? Maybe! Lots of people with good networks go to community colleges, too - but I'd bet fewer than more expensive schools.

Crucially, this also determines the quality of your medical care, and how hard the nursing home staff will hit you after you retire.

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