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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

#71

Post by FlyingSideKick »

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 successful people I know had mediocre college grades if they went at all. One friend who’s net worth is over $100m dropped out of high school to became a carpenter and is now a major real estate developer.Too many people spend way to much of thier youth focused on grades. What’s important is finding what you love, learning a bit and just doing enough to get your diploma. If you want to get a masters then focus on just getting in. It’s like passing the levels in a video game. No reading to get a perfect score if you don’t need to.

When you are 40 years old your college grades will likely have no bearing on your career prospects. Your social network will.

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

#72

Post by elcritch »

arcanus wrote: post #57
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.

> Better to get a C at MIT than an A at RPI. That is a poor example. RPI is an excellent institution. After you get past the top-50 or so schools, reputation matters far less. If you are truly attending a 'low-tier' school then MIT might matter, but for most jobs the vast majority of institutions are only small differences. For my first job post PhD I was told I was selected over folks from Stanford and Princeton: my…

>In fact, I'm adverse to hiring or selecting students with a 4.0. This typically indicates a poor optimization heuristic (GPA over learning/challenges/interests).

That’s a great way to phrase it.

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

#74

Post by 394549 »

discreditable wrote: post #66
matte_black wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have school grades ever deflated? Or undergone some sort of correction? No citation needed, anecdotes are fine.

At the high school I worked at some years ago we pushed the margins for letter grades up a little. For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100%. Whether or not that affected the overall GPA distribution I could not say.

> For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100%

That sounds something like an older system. I don't remember it entirely, but IIRC, very early in my school career, an A was 93-100% and an F was anything less than 70%.

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

#75

Post by lisper »

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…

> What’s important is finding what you love

Actually, if financial success is your quality metric, then what matters is the ability to work with other people. In particular, the ability to motivate other people to work with and for you is probably the single most important skill a person can acquire (if the goal is to make money). Of course, academia not only fails to cultivate this skill, it actively tries to squash it. Convincing someone else to do your work for you is considered "cheating". In the real world, it's called "delegating."

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

#76

Post by fullshark »

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…

Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, and definitely not everyone can be a successful one. Real estate is also a whole other ball game, and you are projecting from a group that has survivorship bias.

If you want to be highly compensated labor, the best grades at the best schools are the best entry point into the social network + early career opportunities to lead to long run success.

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

#77

Post by s-shellfish »

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 with others in a face to face setting. When you run through so many interviews it can feel like, a double bind dilemma. Give away information that might be the perfect solution to a company's code problem, rinse and repeat, all for free, and what you are supposed to take away is gaining experience dealing with bosses, managers, hierarchies of organizations. But some people just suck at having social skills, like myself.

I wouldn't want to be in the position of an interviewer. Prefer open source, developers talking to other developers. When you hire someone you want to do all your thinking up front about your expectations of who you are hiring. But developers and computer scientists know, real world code and real world problem solving doesn't always get done that way.

I've seen some companies have job listings that state "you don't need to know all these technologies, but having an eagerness to learn and an interest is ideal" and that takes a lot of the pressure off, because it shows a company is willing to work with you instead of just drain you until you burn out with your most precious resource, your mind, completely depleted. That statement also comes across to me as "we expect you to work 80 hours / week and have no life besides your job" but honestly, that's fine to me as long as everyone around me is aware that we're all in this together. I'm gonna forget some stuff, so will you. That's just what happens when you have to program so much stuff. Load new problem, new program into memory, and forget what you were last doing. This happens over and over to coders. Does it happen to hiring managers?

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

#78

Post by carlob »

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…

What if this was due to the fact that a big portion of their grades are based on the assignments they complete at home (with whatever aid) rather than exams?

Edit: which is the flip side of what s-shellfish is saying

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

#79

Post by jurassic »

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…

Definitely. When I was taking 6.001 there was a person in my dorm who wanted to “work together” which ended up meaning “copy my work” because they couldn’t handle fizzbuzz-level problems much less tricky recursion and other material of the class. I don’t know who they attached themself to after me but they did well in the class and they went on to a very swanky job after graduation. I feel bad for the companies being defrauded out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by people like this. Whenever people say “fire fast” I think of that person.

Other techniques in use by these people: go to recitation sections and harass TAs for homework answers week after week. Trying to litigate every point marked off on an exam. Erasing incorrect answers before requesting a regrade. Etc.

I ocassionally get in the mood to go back for a masters degree. And then I remember how much fake bullshit is going on in university settings because the credentialist incentives are so perverse. I’d rather just read some books and tinker than deal with all that.

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

#80

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

losteric wrote: post #19
noobiemcfoob wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible that grade inflation has grown in pace to the expanding web of knowledge?

Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. So, it's possible there's an incidental correlation but there's no causation if the phenomena is real. If you've seen how the average kid uses the internet, it's a rather laughable suggestion... there is little overlap between social media entertainment sites and the web of knowledge. The biggest…

This is so ignorant to the advancements in pedagogy over the past several decades as to be insulting. Part of, if maybe not the biggest or only factor, the increase in grades is we are just hugely better at teaching than we were 30 or 40 years ago. Teaching for mastery, the idea of reversing the role of homework vs tests (in terms of relative difficulty and exposure to new information) to better facilitate self learning, formalized programs to act as tutoring and support systems, all of these are increasing student performance by design.

Not only that but as far as higher education goes how are you even trying to compare to "what used to be B or C knowledge"? What in the 70s was graduate level transistor research is basic undergrad course studies, for example. Introduction to programming would have been on punch cards in the 80s, today's students are using python. Are you surprised that they do better given the advances in tooling?

The "kids these days" argument is so, so tired and honestly every time I see it Im not surprised so many of the old guard (rich off of just being in the industry during the dot com boom) think they're being targeted for "age discrimination".

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