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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

#251

Post by StanislavPetrov »

noobiemcfoob wrote: post #5

There 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…

>There 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.

As someone who has been in academia for several decades I can tell you, without a doubt, the opposite is true. Academic standards are vastly lower than they were just a couple of decades ago. Many incoming freshman lack even basic literacy skills. Much of the "core" curriculum is now comprised of remedial work that should have been mastered in high school (or middle school!). Basic reading comprehension, the ability to write papers and express complex thoughts coherently and the capability to think critically and engage in substantive debate are all severely lacking - virtually across the board. Society may be growing more complex, but the educational system in this country, on every level, is decaying rapidly.

While my statement will be rejected by many young people who view it as an attack on their intelligence, it is beyond dispute. I welcome anyone interested in disputing my assertions to look at the reading list and curriculum of any college class offered before 1990, and compare that to the reading list and curriculum of the same class today. I challenge you to read papers written by students from 30 years ago (before they had easy access to information from the internet, no less), and compare them to the papers written by students of the same year today. There is no comparison - none.

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

#252

Post by ChrisLomont »

dragonwriter wrote: post #248
ChrisLomont wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discriminat…

> Cite a case I would do better, and point you to the EEOC page covering the applicable regulatory and statute law, which also includes citation to some relevant cases, and entirely supports my description of the disparate impact standards, but since you cited the exact source I would cite, I'll instead just note that our disagreement isn't about authority, it is about application. > Griggs v. Duke Power is what most…

>and entirely supports my description of the disparate impact standards

When it impacts protected classes.

>unlawful in the particular circumstances because of the absence of proof of business necessity

Yep, and we're discussing jobs where IQ correlates to performance, so once again, do you claim in such jobs IQ testing is not legal? All case law I've read supports using IQ or other cognitive testing in such cases. Do you have a case otherwise? If not, then this entire thread is moot.

We're going around in circles.

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

#253

Post by yelloweyes »

jvanderbot wrote: post #191
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…

My advisor said if you were getting a 4.0, you were wasting your valuable research and development time on homework. Nobody cares much about GPA, when you could have built something amazing instead. Of course, GPA didn't improve his tenure chance as much as our R&D so, take that into consideration.

>Nobody cares much about GPA, when you could have built something amazing instead.

That seems to imply you were 100% guaranteed to build something amazing just by not doing homework, which we all know is far from the truth.

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

#254

Post by jhanschoo »

sago wrote: post #223
drawnwren wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yeah, both the distribution of highly successful people and people with high academic performance are heavily skewed and the slightest decorrelation should result in the phenomenon of heuristically seeming independent.

In an ideally meritocratic world, we should see fewer Harvard grads and magnis cum laudibus occupying the top of the industries.

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

#255

Post by kevinthew »

Lots of people trying to justify their college experience in here. Reality is, none of it matters. What matters is how you were raised 20 years earlier and how you choose to live your life every day. Is every day a new puzzle to solve? Are you motivated to learn and solve challenges placed in front of you regardless of banality or difficulty? Guess what, you're the elusive employee everyone wants. Rarely are jobs too difficult for grades/degrees to matter in hiring process -- the job itself is the screener. Yeah,sure, some jobs are incredibly difficult and require elite skill and knowledge but we aren't talking about those jobs, we are generalizing. And guess what, attitude and outlook on life are all that matter.

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

#256

Post by ShabbosGoy »

bernardino wrote: post #244
WalterBright wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I learned that being able to sit down on your desk and focus on a topic or problem set and learn through trial and error with no distractions for hours is what will determine if you get good grades or not, and it's becoming extremely hard to do so. Most of my friends resort to drugs to focus but for me, that does not prefer drugs because it makes me feel artificial, it's been tough - it's like strengthening muscles i…

> Most of my friends resort to drugs to focus but for me, that does not prefer drugs because it makes me feel artificial, it's been tough - it's like strengthening muscles in your brain in order to focus for long periods of time and those muscles for me are weak.

This is desirable. People who use psychostimulants to focus are using it as a crutch.

You can train your mind to focus, it just requires a larger time investment than popping a stim.

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

#257

Post by SamReidHughes »

tomc1985 wrote: post #225
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…

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 als…

Or you can just easily get an A, because you enjoy doing a few fun programming assignments and learn the things taught in class.

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

#258

Post by tmpz22 »

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…

The most solid career path I'm familiar with is to go straight from college into a software development role at a FAANG company, then mostly coast, optionally diverge to some other highly payed role else ware, and eventually come back to the FAANG company at a higher pay grade. You'll be able to live a lavish lifestyle, be a millionaire by 30, and really not have to work that hard.

To get this job you really have to have good grades. Why? Google etc. will ask for your transcripts coming out of college - anything short of a full degree and a 3.0 will likely disqualify you.

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

#259

Post by TangoTrotFox »

alexbeloi wrote: post #136
zach wrote: post #56

> "Academic researchers say that uptick is a sign of grade inflation, not of smarter students." I don't think this is right. There is good evidence that the highest percentiles of students (the ones populating the competitive colleges mentioned) are indeed smarter, because they have standardized test scores to match. First off, the bar for a PSAT score that gets National Merit recognition has risen significantly for…

IQ scores are also increasing[0]. Are we actually smarter than our grandparents? Or has the education system trained us to be better test takers (one of the suggested contributing factors). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

You should read section 4 [1] of that page.

Somewhere around the mid 90s individuals in most developed countries started to end up with lower IQs than previous generations and there are ever more results corroborating this change, whose magnitude has been rather significant. IQ results are distributed to ensure a population distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of about 15 points. And of course 84% of all people fall within one standard deviation. We're seeing declines that already in the multiple points and they do not seem to be stopping.

One critical point here is that there are two 'convenient' ways to try to dismiss this. And they really amount to the same thing and suffer the same flaw. Those ways are to argue that humans have started to reach some sort of peak intelligence, or that environmental effects were driving former increases in IQ and as we reach a very healthy and wealthy society compared to past times, we're just seeing diminishing returns. The problem is both of those convenient hypothesis would lead us to expect to see an asymptotic decline in growth that would approach zero. We're not seeing that. We're seeing IQ literally decrease, not grow more slowly.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

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

#260

Post by lsc »

sheepmullet wrote: post #218
joeax wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gr…

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

To get good grades, you must be able to do rote work on time. I did really poorly in high school, because if you don't do one thing, and you do brilliantly on the next thing? That averages to a failure. Doesn't matter how brilliant that next thing was. For me? This means I barely cleared 2.0 in high school, and didn't seriously pursue college. But in industry, I seem to do pretty okay. My experience is that if I finish between 2/3 and 3/4 of what I start? I get a positive performance review and a raise. They even talk about it; like "if you are accomplishing all of your goals, you probably aren't being ambitious enough when setting those goals."

(I mean, I've been in industry since 1997, and my impression is that breaking in was a lot easier then than it is now... and it did take me a long time to work up to the point where I could get a job at a top-tier tech company, and even now, I'm a SysAdmin and not a SWE, (I have worked SWE type jobs at less prestigious companies... but here? I'm a SysAdmin.) I would be a better employee, with better job prospects if I had the personality and follow through to get a degree, no question.)

My experience with those interviews (at least for a more senior position) is that they test knowledge of whatever specialty you are dealing with and to a lesser extent, intelligence and problem solving ability. The former, of course, can (and should be) studied for; the latter, less so.

I'm sure intelligence and problem solving ability also help (and to some extent, are required) in academia, but if you aren't the sort of person who does 'good enough' work every time on time, you aren't going to get good grades, as far as I can tell, even if you are brilliant. That sort of plodding follow-through is not tested at all in interviews, and while it's a positive attribute to have as an employee, from experience, it won't kill your career if you are lacking it.

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