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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

Why does Google still care about people's undergraduate GPAs from 25 years ago? When my friend interviewed at Google (they did hire him), the recruiter wanted to know how many hours per week he worked (to pay his tuition) at university 25 years ago to account for his "low" undergraduate GPA (3.0 - 3.5).

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Grade inflation = stealth ageism.

You can guess my approximate age by knowing that my high school GPA was around 3.5 and that was considered pretty good, but not near valedictorian level.

However, in the 2010s you can get a 3.5 just for attendance so you can tell I'm older.

I'm so old that the highest grade point I could earn in a class was 4 points, I guess now a days an A+ in a AP class gets you 6 points now or something like that in modern high schools.

Google doesn't care about GPAs from 25 years ago.

1) No one cares what the recruiters think. If you mean interviewer that might be different.

2) My GPA was worse than that, and it was only 5 years after the fact, when Google totally-ignored-my-GPA. Anecdote stalemate.

... I am stealing that phrase, it is awesome. "Anecdote stalemate."

... I might add ", bitch!"

Undergraduate GPA is a great measure of how prepared you were for college and how certain you were in your major. And you know what? Maybe some people think its important to hire the kind of people who had everything figured out at 19. I'm not one of those people, and I think its bad as a recruiting tool, but I can see what would lead someone to ask that.

What would happen if you didn't remember your gpa? It is shocking that they would ask something like that though.

I see a lot of people put their GPA from 25 years ago on their resume. I didn't put mine on my resume and nobody has ever asked about it.

GPA seems to be an American thing. I graduated Uni in 2007 (in Scotland) and I've never been asked mine.

No, it's a Google thing. No American company has ever asked for my GPA, but the Google HR person next door said that if I wanted to interview for a job at Google, HR would demand my GPA (from decades ago!) and would not grant an interview unless it was above some (secret) threshold. If their recruiters reached out to me, HR would still require the GPA, but she said that the interviewers might not care about it.

What stage of interview? I have had two phone screens with Google recruiters, and one actual phone interview. Nobody ever asked for my GPA, and my degree is from a university most people here have probably never heard of (and is EE, to boot).

GPA is similar to degree class in the UK. I think the GPA system is better though.

Nearly every employer in the UK asks for your degree class.

That recruiter is bad at their job, then.

A lot of those annoying interview questions are just tests to see how someone handles borderline-insulting questions about their past. It's to see how the person handles stress.

It's not a practice I like, but it's something everyone will have to face. The older you get, the more people want to know about your past (which is rarely as good as it should have been).

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