With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster • Hacker News Board

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#101

Post by tormeh » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

dsajames wrote: post #86

xstartup wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance. If the institutions have to stay relevant,…

That's not what happens. If A meant success at X, like running a mile in X time meant you could outrun a bear, no matter the percentage of people, it would be great. What's happened is parents pressured schools to get their kids A's to get into college, then colleges set the minimum bar at A+ instead of A, then at A+ and a random selection of thousands of students, all with A+'s. We are at the point where a single A-…

That's why I think the universities should be holding high school exams. More generally, students/pupils should be judged by the institutions they're about to enter, rather than the ones they're leaving.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#102

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

paulie_a wrote: post #81

I occasionally interview people and review resumes. There are two things I don't even bother looking at: where you went to school and what your GPA was.

Yes. The projects someone has done is more useful, but only as a source of topics to ask questions about. I keep on running into recent grads from prestigious University of California system schools with 3.75+ GPAs who don't know basic things about pointers, who can't concretely specify a design for even a small subsystem, and who seem to have only ever glued libraries together with a high level language, nothing more.

I introduce a 2 element cycle in a dataset, and ask how we can detect such things, and have repeatedly gotten an if-clause that would only detect the 2 elements. Then I ask about a 3 element cycle, and I've even gotten another if-clause to detect the 3 elements as an answer multiple times.

What in the world!?

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#103

Post by ataturk » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

wenc wrote: post #90

FlyingSideKick wrote: post #71

My grandfather was CEO of an NYSE listed company and he preferred to hire people out of college whom had lower GPAs around 3.0 then perfect students because he thought these folks made for better team members and well rounded employees. Simply put he wanted to hire people who perused side passions and had a social life. Personally after having been in entrepreneurial circles for years it seems the most financially su…

There's a significant tendency on HN to unduly discount good grades. I think this is a mistaken tendency due to univariate, linear thinking. Grades are not everything, but they are not nothing. The fact is, determining a good hire requires multivariate, nonlinear thinking. Good grades can be a proxy for metaskills like discipline, cognitive ability, etc. They don't always measure these things perfectly, but the corre…

I worked my way through college and still got a 3.75 in a double major of Math and CS. My girlfriend at the time got a 4.0 at her college but had a full tuition scholarship and did it by dropping any hard math course that wasn't absolutely required. We both later got PhDs in our respective fields. I used to help her with her homework a lot.

Who was more well-rounded? I challenged myself with some of the courses I took and was overloaded some of the time due to work obligations, etc. I got a "C" in one math class in my final semester. Grades tell a tiny fraction of a story about discipline and self-sacrifice.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#104

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #31

criddell wrote: post #17

I 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 projec…

You're lucky if they even look at GPA or transcripts for your first job. College is the new high school.

I've taught in college. Freshmen and sophomores aren't that distinguishable from high schoolers by knowledge, ability, and maturity.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#105

Post by mrexroad » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

hashkb wrote: post #53

drewg123 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT? My wife went there, and while most STEM grad schools understood that grades at MIT were not inflated, medical schools did not seem to care. One of her friends had to first get inflated grades doing a STEM masters degree before she could get into med school due to her uninflated MIT undergrad grades.

GT. I heard you all got to play with kittens freshman year. In response, GT professors replaced 20% more lectures with exams.

To hell with Georgia!

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#106

Post by mrguyorama » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #32

recharged93 wrote: post #24

Do grades even matter anymore? Unless you're applying to a gov't job, you're connections, friends, professors that like you, github accounts, art or MBA portfolio are the tools that move you "up" in the world. And in that order. Online education dilutes GPA too. As well as more tech skill degrees (devops certs), aka those were called trade/vocational schools in my day. I've never seen a GPA on an intern application/r…

GPA, in my experience, seems to map exactly onto your ability to wrangle a good GPA. That set of skills is largely orthogonal to solving hard problems or making useful contributions to a team.

To me, that just sounds like your teachers and professors were piss poor at their job and had no idea how to grade properly.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#107

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

phlyingpenguin wrote: post #26

JTbane wrote: post #8

It seems there is a moral hazard involved here- administrators pressuring professors to pass more students, which leads to grade inflation. All this to retain students and keep the tuition money flowing. I'd love to hear from front-line profs about this issue- does grade inflation need to be addressed?

I teach. I can say that I have never had direct pressure to pass students or raise grades, but there are two issues that I run into related to grades. First is the ever-growing methods of academic dishonesty. I do not have enough hours in my life to create and design new homework that prevents cheating. It's possible for some assignments, but not all. I don't give up on cheating detection, but this leaves tests and p…

Can you explain more about this “litigation”? Your students actually sue over their grades?? That’s nuts!

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#108

Post by njarboe » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

zach wrote: post #67

icedchai wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds believable, until you consider that the standardize tests are all getting easier, too.

Right, score inflation alongside grade inflation. The administrators of the GMAT have an answer to that: https://www.gmac.com/why-gmac/gmac-news/gmnews/2017/july-201... It says that it doesn't explain the "conundrum" of increased higher-end scores. But it definitely addresses that it's very unlikely the test has gotten easier, since average scores have remained stable, as they have for the PSAT and ACT.

If the top 20% of the population took the ACT in the 1980's and now its the top 60%, one could easily see how the test got easier and the average scores remained stable.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#109

Post by drb91 » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

wenc wrote: post #90

FlyingSideKick wrote: post #71

My grandfather was CEO of an NYSE listed company and he preferred to hire people out of college whom had lower GPAs around 3.0 then perfect students because he thought these folks made for better team members and well rounded employees. Simply put he wanted to hire people who perused side passions and had a social life. Personally after having been in entrepreneurial circles for years it seems the most financially su…

There's a significant tendency on HN to unduly discount good grades. I think this is a mistaken tendency due to univariate, linear thinking. Grades are not everything, but they are not nothing. The fact is, determining a good hire requires multivariate, nonlinear thinking. Good grades can be a proxy for metaskills like discipline, cognitive ability, etc. They don't always measure these things perfectly, but the corre…

But a low gpa isn’t inherently meaningful at all. What do you mean “make up for” a low gpa when you shouldn’t be hiring around gpa in the first place? Like it’s not some debt to be paid; it just means they attended class sometime in the past. Just discount it entirely. What’s the worst that could happen?

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#110

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Jul 02, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

s-shellfish wrote: post #77

bhouston wrote: post #69

I do a lot of interviews and I am pretty sure that quite a few students are cheating to get high grades. There is no way that I get a student who has a A average in computer science and then I ask them to do some simple coding and they outright fail. The some people cheap right in the interview, I step out of the office and then quick come back and I see they have their cell phone out to copy from. I am sure cheating…

I had a 3.98 GPA for my MSc computer science but honestly it took me a long time to be able to learn how to demonstrate that ability face to face. Some people just crumple under other people, brain shorts out, whatever you want to call it. That doesn't make us bad developers or computer scientists, just makes us humans who prefer figuring stuff out at a computer, and gradually growing trust with how to solve problems…

Load new problem, new program into memory, and forget what you were last doing.

I used to say that being a great programmer was being a professional forgetter -- in that you had to know how to forget vital details without getting yourself hurt. So, like a professional tumbler, or a stunt-person specializing in falls. It isn't about the falling. Anyone can fall. It's the expert who can fall without getting hurt.

If you structure code correctly, you can forget about all the details you need to know to keep from getting hurt, but rediscover those things quickly when you need them. This is a great way to talk about program design in a nutshell, but it's also a terrible way, since it's prone to make people with short attention spans think you're nuts!