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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

#211

Post by joeax »

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.

Can you cite some research studies that conclusively show this to be the case?

I'd like to counter by saying that companies like Google have largely ignored GPA as a measure of aptitude. From the article (link below):

"Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of school, because they don't correlate at all with success at the company. Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found."

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-...

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

#212

Post by optimuspaul »

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 have never asked or cared what grades anyone ever got. I don't think that there is any correlation between grades and real world performance. I am in the software engineering space though and I think that there is a lot of room for creativity. Having rigor in academic engineering isn't always useful and I've found actually prevents you from getting things to the good enough stage.

I totally agree that "determining a good hire requires multivariate". Maybe grades are a proxy for other meta skills, but I think evaluating those skills directly are a better indicator.

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

#213

Post by praneshp »

traviswingo wrote: post #87
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…

I think your grandfather was a wise man. I have frequently noticed the best employees I’ve hired are not the top students. They’re self starters, independent, and “street smart.” I actually never ask about education, simply because true intelligence doesn’t come from a classroom. The valedictorian will frequently bother me for the next task or to sign off on something, the 3.0 gpa figures it out on her own. Obviously…

As a former low GPA student, I thank you.

> I have frequently noticed the best employees I’ve hired are not the top students > I actually never ask about education

How do you know they are not the top students? Just from chatting over lunch, etc?

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

#214

Post by drb91 »

wenc wrote: post #118
drb91 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is why I mentioned nonlinear thinking. If you imagine a multivariate nonlinear function (I don't believe there exists a definitive function, this is just a framework to help us reason more rigorously) representing the performance of a hire, there will be ranges where the function is insensitive to the x (e.g. say GPAs between 1.0-2.0). If you discount x entirely, you're throwing out the baby with the bath water…

So what would you call the meaning of the low GPA? It is clearly meaningful to you. How would you describe the candidates you’re rejecting with this heuristic? It could mean anything from “i can’t read” to “i dropped out to form a business”.

I don’t see any value for the gpa beyond preparing students for performance reviews and identifying whether or not they give a shit about the material. And why would they? High Schools teach few real life skills and a lot of bad habits. Even in college, you’ll learn more (in some cases) by skipping class and building things.

Without context, gpa is not a meaningful metric

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

#215

Post by ChrisLomont »

dragonwriter wrote: post #189
ChrisLomont wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it is illegal in the exact same conditions as IQ tests And IQ tests are legal to give during hiring, in just about any form, if that result correlates to useful for that job. Since we're talking about jobs where IQ/GPA may well correlate to candidate quality for that position, this is not an issue. You have to first show there is no correlation between GPA or IQ and job performance to claim it's not legal.

> And IQ tests are legal to give during hiring, in just about any form, if that result correlates to useful for that job No, “correlates to useful” is not the standard; there also needs to not be a less discriminatory alternative available. > You have to first show there is no correlation between GPA or IQ and job performance to claim it's not legal. No, you don't: business necessity is an affirmative defense to disp…

Cite a case. Griggs v. Duke Power is what most people claim makes IQ tests not legal, but that's not what the case was about. It was about discrimination against blacks, which is a legal protected class. Intelligence is not a legal protected class, so this ruling does not impact such tests for general intelligence.

>there also needs to not be a less discriminatory alternative available

This was to prevent discrimination against blacks (if you're using the case above), not for intelligence. It's perfectly legal to discriminate based on intelligence, however you want to measure it.

>once the unequal impact is proven

Only against protected classes. Intelligence is not a protected class. Here's [1] the EEOC list of allowed testing. Top of the list is general cognitive tests.

So, what case are you basing your claims on? Are you conflating discrimination against a protected class with discrimination against intelligence?

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/factemployment_procedures.h...

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

#216

Post by tastyface »

commandlinefan wrote: post #158
tracer4201 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> whiteboarding coding questions Ah, you haven't figured out the trick. When somebody asks you to whiteboard something, write down all the nouns they said, draw boxes around each noun, and draw lines randomly between the boxes. Keep talking and pointing at the boxes and the lines, and then draw circles around some of the boxes (but keep talking - this is important). Point emphatically at some of the boxes, underline…

You jest, but this is exactly the feeling I got when I was reading up on how to do better at system design questions: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer

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

#217

Post by hellepardo »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #138
madengr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used that argument back in 4th grade to my parents: “Math is harder for me since there have been more advancements since you were kids”. I can only speak for electrical engineering, but the basics have not changed in 100 years. Crack open a text book from 100 years ago and you’ll find the same control theory, circuit analysis, electromagnetics, etc. The difference may be vacuum tubes vs. transistors, but the analys…

That's patently false, and your example is a straw man. Sure your grade school arithmetic hasn't increased much, but I'd assure you university maths have . As far as EE goes, I mean sure macro-electronic theory is pretty much the same, but micro-electronics didn't even exist 100 years ago. This is now a standard required class. Digital signal processing again, didn't even exist 100 years ago, now we teach it to sopho…

Thank you for saving me from needing to write the exact same thing!

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

#218

Post by sheepmullet »

joeax wrote: post #211
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. Can you cite some research studies that conclusively show this to be the case? I'd like to counter by saying that companies like Google have largely ignored GPA as a measure of aptitude. From the article (link below): "Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of…

> I'd like to counter by saying that companies like Google have largely ignored GPA as a measure of aptitude.

I think you have misinterpreted the situation.

What it's actually showing is once you have restricted the pool of applicants to the top 10% of the field GPA does not matter within the restricted subset.

I can't think of anyone I know that could do well in the Google interview process but could not get good grades.

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

#219

Post by Para2016 »

joeax wrote: post #211
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. Can you cite some research studies that conclusively show this to be the case? I'd like to counter by saying that companies like Google have largely ignored GPA as a measure of aptitude. From the article (link below): "Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of…

You want him to cite a trial or study and you have a business insider article to counter him..?

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

#220

Post by aswanson »

joeax wrote: post #211
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. Can you cite some research studies that conclusively show this to be the case? I'd like to counter by saying that companies like Google have largely ignored GPA as a measure of aptitude. From the article (link below): "Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of…

Sample bias.
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