Still only matters for first job and then if you have nothing else to show. As a hiring manager, its a minus for me to see unless its for intern. But surprising how often i see on cvs. (Speaking as former top of ChE class and frequent outlier to be removed on grading curves.)
With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
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Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#12There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. Students today are faced with an ever ballooning bulk of knowledge with which they are supposed to find the boundaries and gain control of enough interconnected parts to become a useful contributor to society. There's a lot of noise in the system, but th…
I don't think the point is how their performance compares to their forebears so much as how do they compare to their peers. If you compare today's students to those of 50 or 100 years ago of course they have more information and advanced skills to master. It's apples and oranges. These honors really only have meaning when comparing within the same cohort.
Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.
Have school grades ever deflated? Or undergone some sort of correction? No citation needed, anecdotes are fine.
My grades underwent a correction or two back in the day :)
Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#14There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. Students today are faced with an ever ballooning bulk of knowledge with which they are supposed to find the boundaries and gain control of enough interconnected parts to become a useful contributor to society. There's a lot of noise in the system, but th…
Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.
Is it possible that grade inflation has grown in pace to the expanding web of knowledge?
Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#15Grade Inflation has been an issue for decades. I think we all know to look up how rigorous a school or program actually is and adjust. Also, um, students cheat a lot.
Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.
Have school grades ever deflated? Or undergone some sort of correction? No citation needed, anecdotes are fine.
Yes. At my school we had a real curve. If we all got perfect scores, that's a C for everyone. (More often we all got 15s and they became C's). Teachers who gave too many A's would be benched. We laughed at Ivy League 4.0s which just require a phone call from a parent.
Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#17I haven't read the whole article (paywalled), but I wonder if the honors losing their luster is more about a low correlation between high GPA and professional success (at least in STEM careers). I've been involved in hiring and for recent grads we will look at transcripts, but GPA as a factor isn't weighted very highly. I'm much more interested in hearing a candidate talk about their senior project or personal projects and other areas of interest.
Does anybody even look at transcripts or care about GPA beyond your first job?
Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#18There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. Students today are faced with an ever ballooning bulk of knowledge with which they are supposed to find the boundaries and gain control of enough interconnected parts to become a useful contributor to society. There's a lot of noise in the system, but th…
I spent several years out of the school system after finishing high school, and while I had a lot of great offers from schools, I wanted to go into a trade.
Several years later I began work as a developer because I had always programmed, and had come to the conclusion that it was something I really loved and wanted to spend my life doing.
Fast-forward, I'm a mid-20's senior in Computer Science, and you're absolutely correct about the VAST amount of information that is required to learn to be successful.
So here is my take:
1) There is a lot of sink or swim, at least in the program I'm in. And if you learn to swim, then your GPA balloons because you learn how to handle this vast amount of information thrown on you -- useful or not, it is the professors discretion -- which I think is one of the points of school to begin with.
2) Those who sink, end up going to departments with maybe less expectations, where they end up succeeding after having to deal with the previously higher expectations.
It's interesting.
With that said -- I grew up with a lot of GPA chasers, who I wouldn't trust with anything I personally needed done. But what they've done throughout their lives is signal that they can get whatever task you give them done, not necessarily come up with what task should be done, or how to interconnect subjects outside of an exam, or what was previously derived for them.
Learning how to bridge the gap between subjects is also another point of school. It's interesting because those lines everyday seem to be blurred more and more, especially with advancement of computing, so it's kind of hard I think for a lot of students to make that jump, to bridge. And also the stigma of Liberal Arts -- that many STEM kids subscribe to -- has lessened the ability of many students to be life-long students.
I have a few friends in grad school, who really, really struggle with that particular advancement. For example, one is in a neuro-lab and while they did have experience in FMRIs, they had never really invested in either math or computing. Now they're completely lost doing FICA and the like with MATLAB, and absolutely hate the work. They've called me to ask me about everything from what is an eigenvalue, to how to split a 3D Matrix into 4 based upon a fix set of indices. It's a shame because they are really smart, and passionate about the subject.
Sorry that was a bit of a ramble.
Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.
Is it possible that grade inflation has grown in pace to the expanding web of knowledge?
Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.
So, it's possible there's an incidental correlation but there's no causation if the phenomena is real.
If you've seen how the average kid uses the internet, it's a rather laughable suggestion... there is little overlap between social media entertainment sites and the web of knowledge. The biggest contributor to higher grades are the book summary and answer-key sharing sites.
Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.
Is it possible that grade inflation has grown in pace to the expanding web of knowledge?
Is it possible (wink wink) that our ability to distribute and search information has far surpassed the pace of the expanding web of knowledge?