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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

#121

Post by akhilcacharya »

hitekker wrote: post #39

For college students, I absolutely recommend transferring up if your GPA is above 3.8 and you're attending a lower-tier school. Your alma mater will resonate throughout your career. Your GPA will disappear after your first or second job. Better to get a C at MIT than an A at RPI.

Unfortunately, if you have "only" a 3.8 good luck transferring. I looked into it my freshman year (I had a 3.89 :/) but getting into any of the top-tier schools is even more difficult as a transfer than out of high school, especially since I hadn't started a company or done cutting edge research yet.

Unfortunately, my school is going to resonate (poorly) throughout my career now.

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

#122

Post by vkou »

cirgue wrote: post #34
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can good grades ever be a minus?

If you have to use it as a selling point, it means you don't have more compelling things to show.

Including 7 ASCII characters on your resume does not imply that you don't have more compelling things to show.

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

#123

Post by tikhonj »

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…

> In the engineering/academic world, grades do matter and are highly predictive of ability. People with poorer grades often struggle a lot.

This is a purely empirical question to which you seem to have simply assumed an answer. While there are difficulties to studying this question empirically there have been solid studies to this effect.

I've seen a few solid survey papers on personnel selection methods; a solid example is Schmidt and Hunter (1998). Schmidt and a couple of others published an updated version of the survey as a working paper in 2016[1], which has a clear section on GPA:

> The validity value for grade point average (GPA) in Table 1 is for college and graduate level grade point averages. No estimates are available for high school grade point average, which may have validity higher than the .34 in Table 1. Apparently most of the validity of GPA is captured by GMA, because the incremental validity of GPA is negligible (less than .01). GPA has not been studied in relation to training performance, where its validity might be expected to be higher than the .34 for job performance, because of the strong resemblance between training programs and classroom demands.

(GMA in this context is a "general mental ability test"—basically an IQ test.)

This observation does not lend much credence to the idea that grades are "highly predictive of ability" or that people with low grades "often struggle a lot".

[1]: https://home.ubalt.edu/tmitch/645/articles/2016-100%20Yrs%20...

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

#124

Post by sadamznintern »

sudosteph wrote: post #59

I spent so much time and energy stressing over my very mediocre GPA. I had undiagnosed adhd at the time and struggled immensely with turning things in on time. I usually did above average on tests, but when there are only a few homework assignments in a semester and no-late work policy, one zero really hurts. I was able to work it back up from a 2.2 in sophomore year to a 3.0 by graduation, but that was only because…

I mean, in fairness have you gotten into Google yet? Everyone and their grandparents can get into Amazon these days. They need warm bodies, not smart people.

There's a reason why I get treated like some sort of moron whenever my company comes up in social situations (I hang out with a lot of people who work in HFT and Google/FB).

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

#125

Post by akhilcacharya »

tracer4201 wrote: post #120
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…

As someone who has interviewed and been rejected several times, I don't think cheating is why someone with good grades would do poorly at a coding interview. Some people are good test takers on paper. Ask me to whiteboard some code, and I genuinely get stuck on trivial problems because whiteboarding coding questions is not what I am great at. I've worked at Amazon and now I am at Google - after alot if stress, anxiet…

I agree. I did decently in my algorithms class - got an A, but I feel like my intuition is still lacking even though I have the pre-requisite knowledge. The class also wasn't inordinately tough like it would be at UWash/UT/UM/HYPSM, so its possible my fundamentals aren't as good as I would have hoped.

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

#126

Post by mos_basik »

sudosteph wrote: post #59

I spent so much time and energy stressing over my very mediocre GPA. I had undiagnosed adhd at the time and struggled immensely with turning things in on time. I usually did above average on tests, but when there are only a few homework assignments in a semester and no-late work policy, one zero really hurts. I was able to work it back up from a 2.2 in sophomore year to a 3.0 by graduation, but that was only because…

This is encouraging to read. Right now I'm at what feels like the nadir of a similar situation, and am trying to figure out the right steps forward.

I attended Caltech for CS, struggled with chronic late submissions, cratering self worth and other issues over about three years, took several short leaves ending with a medical leave and was diagnosed with ADHD. Got on medication, got a development job for about a year at UT Southwestern and enjoyed it immensely. Decided to come back and try again, but coming back to junior and senior level classes after a break was very hard, and even being back in the environment that I associated with such failure was hugely draining. I decided to withdraw indefinitely.

I'd already finished all but one or two of my CS requirements, most of the rest were going to be maybe 4-5 non-CS math/engineering/science classes, several humanities and a biology. About a year and a trimester's worth. As far as GPA, I left with about a 2.7.

I'm still not sure if that was the right decision. Part of me says I'm living in LA and I have a year of work on my resume, a bunch of knowledge from the tech CS program, a couple of mildly interesting personal projects on my GitHub, and I should be ok; I just need to put myself out there.

Another part of me says I'm a piece of shit that can't complete the only thing worth completing related to my career, I'm going to have to explain why I don't have a degree to everyone I ever interview with, and why would anyone ever pick me over a graduate.

All this made more painful by the fact that if I had graduated, the Caltech degree would have been an amazing asset - and if I had gone anywhere else (well, anywhere a bit less high powered) I believe I would have at least graduated, if not done very well. Source: the two sophomore CS classes I took at UT Arlington in half a summer and got A+s in both.

This thread is hard to read. Thanks for your story; I need to remember people like you exist while I'm job hunting.

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

#127

Post by foobaw »

A major benefit of attending elite schools is the increased opportunity to network. Google used to filter candidates by GPA but "quickly" learned this was a mistake.

Some companies do still look at GPAs. Others specifically indicate they're looking for people from "top-tier" schools. Out of context, this means you'll have more opportunities if you have a higher GPA and if you attended a top-tier school.

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

#128

Post by pythonaut_16 »

vkou wrote: post #37
protonimitate wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's saying that if you are applying to a job and have more than 0 experience, you shouldn't be relying on your GPA as a selling point. And I agree - GPA is pretty irrelevant to anything in the business world. All it proves is that you can play by the rules in the school system - not a real indication of your experience, skills, or relevant knowledge.

Success in much of the business world requires you to play by the rules of the business system, which may be as capricious, arbitrary, pointless, stupid, and orthogonal to relevant knowledge [1], as success in the school system. For every hiring manager who takes the approach that anyone putting their GPA on their resume is an asshole or an idiot, there's three others who think that there's something wrong with a jun…

Without any evidence to back up your claim I could just as easily claim that for every hiring manager who cares about seeing a GPA on a resume there are three others who think there's something wrong with an applicant with any experience who does put their GPA on their resume.

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

#129

Post by xyzzyz »

tikhonj wrote: post #123
wenc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In the engineering/academic world, grades do matter and are highly predictive of ability. People with poorer grades often struggle a lot. This is a purely empirical question to which you seem to have simply assumed an answer. While there are difficulties to studying this question empirically there have been solid studies to this effect. I've seen a few solid survey papers on personnel selection methods; a solid exa…

Apparently most of the validity of GPA is captured by GMA, because the incremental validity of GPA is negligible (less than .01).

Just because GPA is basically a worse IQ test doesn’t mean that it’s useless. In fact, if you assume that IQ tests are useful in hiring, this actually makes GPA more useful, since US employers can freely use GPA in hiring, while use of IQ is significantly more complicated.

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

#130

Post by s-shellfish »

stcredzero wrote: post #110
s-shellfish wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

I agree with this. I wouldn't call it people with short attention spans though. People have to arrive at their own understanding independently in order to be able to know that understanding is their own. But that's also a problem, because once you get there, how do you check it's the right understanding? Check with other people, check with code. And then, it loops - argue with people to prove distinction - code distinctly, come to awareness independently - 'perfect' program, check with other people, check with code...

Code & computer science, etc. It is all insanity. Structured insanity, but insanity nevertheless.

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