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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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

lev99 wrote: post #161
traviswingo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think 2.9-3.3 is the ideal range. I pass on anything less than a 2.5 or more than a 3.7 unless there is something else in their resume that makes up for it. GPA signals a lot about a candidate. If they graduate with a low GPA it means they are okay staying with a path of life they are not succeeding in. I'd prefer if they dropped out and did something nonacademic, because that signals they noticed something wasn't…

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by danieltillett »

analog31 wrote: post #159
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 taught for one semester at a big ten university, many years ago. And I live in a college town, so I have a lot of friends and relatives who are teachers. It's widely held that student evaluations are proportional to the grades that the students expect to get. My office mate, and a professor, were co-teaching a course, and they got into shouting matches about grades, because the professor was up for tenure, and want…

As a former professor, there is some correlation between grade and evaluation, but there is a much higher correlation with workload. The less work in the course the higher the grade. I needed to maintain a teaching evaluation over 3.5 / 5, but I cared that my students actually learnt something so I would aim for a score of around 3.6 - 3.7 and then loaded up my students as much work as I could and achieve this.

The sad thing with teaching evaluation is they are collected while the student was doing the subject. I can't tell you how many of my students complained like crazy about the subject while doing (what you expect me to work), who a year later told me the subject was the best one they had taken in their whole degree because they had learnt so much.

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

#223

Post by sago »

drawnwren wrote: post #147
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…

Yes. To go along with this, the other misstep I see frequently is the inability to differentiate between statistical distributions and the individual. Your friend dropped out of college to become a carpenter and is now worth $100m? That's incredible. I'd take fairly bad odds that the P(Salary>$!00k|Dropped out of college to become a carpenter) is lower than P(Salary>$100k|Graduated with 4.0 gpa). It would be harder t…

The GP explicitly reverses the conditional probability

> the most financially successful people I know had mediocre college grades

is saying something about p(mediocre grades|successful) i.e. among the people I know who are successful, a surprising number had bad grades.

where the interesting question, given the chronology of the two events is, as you point out, p(successful|mediocre grades)

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

#224

Post by WalterBright »

drawnwren wrote: post #147
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…

Yes. To go along with this, the other misstep I see frequently is the inability to differentiate between statistical distributions and the individual. Your friend dropped out of college to become a carpenter and is now worth $100m? That's incredible. I'd take fairly bad odds that the P(Salary>$!00k|Dropped out of college to become a carpenter) is lower than P(Salary>$100k|Graduated with 4.0 gpa). It would be harder t…

> the cost of a high gpa is fairly low

That's right. I started out nearly flunking out in college, and eventually graduated with honors. The difference was not busting my ass studying, but more effective time management. I had as much free time as before.

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

#225

Post by tomc1985 »

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…

Other, more traditional careers place a bigger emphasis on grades as a matter of course. I don't think one just reduce it down to number of variables held in one's head whilst contemplating. All a high GPA should tell you is that the person successfully input things that the academic system accepted as an 'A', or whatever the score might be.

Good grades can be proxy for all those things you describe, and they can also be proxy for corner-cutting, systems-gaming, cheating, laziness, and other chicanery. I graduated sub-3.0 and, at least in my suburban, not-top-tier city environment, I seem to run circles around most of the technology-practicing clowns 'round here -- and it seems their muggle-ness transcends particular bands of GPA scores.

An "A" tells me you're either a cheater, a systems-gamer, or a schmuck.

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

#226

Post by commandlinefan »

tastyface wrote: post #216
commandlinefan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Wow, that's an amazing resource - thank you!

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

#227

Post by dom96 »

I just graduated with a "First Class Honours" degree (70%+) from a UK university. I'm really curious how companies in the UK view these grades (and how US companies convert these grades to a GPA, assuming that they do perform such a conversion), can anyone share their experiences?

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

#228

Post by chiefalchemist »

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…

Grades are not ambition. They are not chutzpah.

When I was an employer what I looked for was the willingness and capacity to learn. Someone who is (book) smart isn't as important as someone who can think, see patterns, be willing to offer ideas, etc.

Sadly, many of the things that are of value aren't even mentioned in school, let alone taught. As a result I'm troubled by all the talk about free / cheaper higher edu for all. That's not the answer. It might just create more (expectation) troubles than it solves.

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

#229

Post by workinfunk »

joshvm wrote: post #28
hashkb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is standard practice at a lot of universities. At my university results were scaled based on the class performance in that exam and the performance of everyone in other exams. So if you're all 4.0 students, but the exam is horrendous and everyone only gets 20%, you'll probably end up with a good grade still. I studied physics. It was possible to game the system to a certain extent. If you took the (subjectively)…

Of course this only works until everyone becomes wise to it. Then you're worse off where you started.

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

#230

Post by jschwartzi »

throwawayqdhd wrote: post #131
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 don't think grades are important at all. But the effort and discipline that leads to good grades, especially if they're in a setting that requires self-motivation (such as college - you have mom and dad breathing down your neck in school).

I didn't have mom or dad breathing down my neck in school. In fact, my dad was basically absent for my last three years while the only thing my mom cared about was how soon I would be finished so that she could stop paying. By the end of it I was working two jobs with an 18-21 credit hour course load.

I wouldn't assume anything about anyone's source of motivation in college, at all.

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