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.

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 correlation is not negligible.

Doesn't mean say, a 2.5 GPA isn't a good hire -- but in multivariate thinking, there has be other factors that compensate for the low GPA. Otherwise you'd be hiring a 2.5 GPA who is truly mediocre, and my experience is that the majority of 2.5 GPAs are that. Not everyone with a low GPA is pursuing other interests or passions. Also, doesn't mean that everyone with a high GPA isn't (at competitive schools, the best students tend to be active in many extra curricular activities unrelated to their majors)

In the engineering/academic world, grades do matter and are highly predictive of ability. People with poorer grades often struggle a lot, and the amount of time spent on remedial training may not always pay off. We have this ideal of a genius hacker who blew off school but is a 10x coder in real life... but in reality those people are comparatively rare.

> 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)

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

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.

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.

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...

The paper does not seem to control for differences between colleges. It's unsurprising that the predictive value of, say, 3.8 GPA would massively differ between individual schools.

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.

Except that's not at all true of the underlying legal standard, and if GPA is essentially an IQ test, it is illegal in the exact same conditions as IQ tests, and any temporary advantage attend from the fact that plaintiff's lawyers haven't yet recognized that GPA is factually nearly identical to an IQ test, and some employer is going to get a big surprise when they first do realize that.

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.

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 disparate impact discrimination claims; once the unequal impact is proven, the challenged employer is required to prove the link to job performance. If they succeed, the challenging party has the burden of showing the existence of a less discriminatory alternative.

>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...

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 people claim makes IQ tests not legal, but that's not what the case was about.

Correct, it is instead the case that laid out the standards I articulated for disparate impact.

> Intelligence is not a protected class.

IQ is differently distributed with regard to a number of protected classes (race is most often noted, but gender also, and if using the same test rather than an age-normed test, also age; probably ethnicity, religion, and national origin, too, but statistics on that are harder to find), so virtually any use of IQ tests (or any criteria that very closely correlates with IQ) is almost certainly going to meet the adverse impact prong of disparate impact analysis, requiring the employer to prove business necessity. (This was exactly the issue in Duke Power, which founnd IQ testing unlawful in the particular circumstances because of the absence of proof of business necessity.)

> Here's the EEOC list of allowed testing.

You need to read more carefully, that's not a list of allowed testing, no such thing exists. That page contains a list of examples of forms of testing, none of which are categorically allowed or prohibited. It also lays out the standards for evaluating disparate impact which I outlined

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.

That being said, in my 20-year career I've never been asked for my GPA. Not once.

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-...

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.

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

There's a lot of reasons people don't get good grades that has little correlation to their ability. People get bogged down by life, develop entrepreneurial interests outside of school, or have little interest in academics. I've met people who are brilliant software engineers and couldn't or wouldn't complete a semester of school.

In most of the Google offices the percentage of employees with PhDs is hirer than the percentage of employees with a bachelor's alone (Seattle and NYC look like the only office where BS holders are the majority). While Google might not be explicitly selecting for GPA alone, academic achievement seems correlated with employment at Google.

[1] https://hackerlife.co/company/google/san-francisco-bay-area-...

I had exactly one of these guys. The reason I hired him was because he demonstrated mid-flight during a code review interview an immense capability to apply newly learned knowledge. I gave him a few (code) classes despite his background up until that point being nothing more than infrastructure-scripting, let him know he could ask absolutely any questions he wished, and would be scored on findings after he confirms he's completed the review.

Killed it. He was a bit rough around the edges in terms of social skills but I'd hire him again given the opportunity and given what he'd produced for me. He got picked up by a rather large firm in the Austin area whose name fits the pattern "A _ _ _ e"

Other hires aside from him were of the good-grades, great-work variety, but he was the exception who produced great work without that background.

This process comes up in other similar contexts. SAT scores are not generally correlated between Math and Verbal, but if you screen based off "incoming Freshman to a particular college", an inverse correlation comes up. This is because admittance is based off the sum of the scores - too high and they go to a better college, too low and they get rejected.

Your second point is correct, but your background is wrong; SAT math and verbal scores in the general population are strongly positively correlated, not uncorrelated.

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 because the signal might be meaningful in other ranges.

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

He said ETS does not recommend that schools and employers use test scores as a (edit: SOLE) way to decide whether or not to admit/hire someone. What I heard was ETS is aware that schools and employers do this and wants to cover its behind.

Having to confront the cognitive dissonance that their youth was spent chasing numbers that have little to no bearing on their present or future.

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.

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.

Or rather, they would matter if:

- Various different schools used the same standard for grading so that grades could be even compared across candidates

- There were companies that actually care about GPA when hiring, I've never encountered one

Who was more well-rounded? I challenged myself with some of the courses I took and was overloaded some of the time due to work obligations, etc. I got a "C" in one math class in my final semester. Grades tell a tiny fraction of a story about discipline and self-sacrifice.

One needs to factor in all the other predictors, as you alluded to in your story.

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.

I.e. deeply care about what you are working on. Some individuals care so much about the field they are in that they disregard the proxy metrics that judge their level (grades, awards, titles...). For some, the strong academic path happens to perfectly match up to their pursuit of passion. Others see the academic part as a hindrance to their passion and end up equally successful.

On the flip side, following some proxy metric in order to achieve passionate success doesn't work. You can't aquire passion with good grades† and dropping out of education because that's the cool thing to do ALSO doesn't buy one passionate success.

Yes this reeks of survival bias, but every single successful person I know is really passionate about the field they are in. They are always thirsty to learn more and go deeper.

†: as with everything, there are exceptions: individuals who are highly motivated by peer recognition. Everyone is different and we can't generalize too broadly.

But these things are not exclusive - you can't look at someone's impressive academic achievements and assume they don't have a social life or hobbies.

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."

The conscientious and prudent possibly have less tolerance for or interest in risk, so they're less likely to hit a home run, but their floor is pretty high.

At a more general level, I'm not fond of the common idea that people who are proficient in area x are probably deficient in area y (where area y is usually implied to be more important). It often seems to me like a face-saving technique for aficionados of area y.

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 this isn’t always the case, but it’s what I’ve observed in my mere 28 years on this earth, and happens to match my beliefs.

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 for them and searched for a better fit.

If they graduate with a very high GPA it signals they are a perfectionist, that they do well in highly structured settings, that they are obsessive about stats, and that they highly value authority.

A 3.0 with a good attitude and success in life outside of academia signals that they can identify important metrics of success and complete them, but are not obsessive about them. It signals that they do not take authority too seriously (parents are often the largest motivators for people with very high gpas). The goal is to determine how the 2.9-3.3 spent their extra time not chasing stats, and if those experiences will bring anything to the team. I look for things like internships, team sports, volunteer work, part time work, clubs, and awards.

What happened instead is that they struggled with discipline. They were late to client meetings, they missed important deadlines (rest of us had to pick up the slack), you name it. They were indeed street smart and stood out in terms of creativity, but their lack of what is typically called “work ethics” (which no doubt contributed to their average GPA) prevented them from meeting their obligations.

So yeah, GPA isn’t everything but it can be a really good signal for qualities necessary to succeed in professional work.

Those people aren't interchangeable and it's preferable to have both to run smoothly. It sounds like you're speaking from a position of upper management, where you don't have the time to be managing an executor type person and you'd prefer more independent people directly under 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?

that 30k i spent really wasnt worth it!!

They are simply easier to manage in day to day operations. And perhaps more adept at handling the stress of juggling a dozen plus projects simultaneously.

The corollary is that for real innovation. Your probability of a breakthrough increases by having a few geniuses at the chalkboard. But most companies aren't seeking Manhattan Project or Xerox PARC levels of radical technological advancement.

One company I worked for loved to bring in recent MBA grads. These kids had little work experience (IMO MBAs should not be given without something like 10 years actual work experience) outside their internships or whatever. They showed up and loved to try to introduce rigid systems for success, random rules, and / or just had no initiative outside being told what exactly to do and what would get them a good "grade" (some seemed uncomfortable with anything but academic like measurements).

Granted some did just fine but it was very much the old FedEx commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gh9k9qzddA

Give me some people who have had to make some decisions, fail and start over please.

True that.

Of course, GPA didn't improve his tenure chance as much as our R&D so, take that into consideration.

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.

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.

If you're talking about the average case then you might as well say 3.5 GPA rather than 3.0 GPA. I don't have access to any of the data so this is just speculation.

When in HS and college you have only one primary focus in life and that is to get good grades. Good grades show the world that you know how to study, how to work well with others, and how to put off the pleasures of today and work toward future goals. They may matter less when you're 40, but when you're 22 they count for everything and determine the opportunities tou have from the outset. And the experience you got knuckling down hard in school translates into valuable work skills right out of the starting gate.

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.

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

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 most students in recent years. More graphically though, the number of students who get a 36 on the ACT goes back a while and is a good representation of the upper score band:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(test)#Highest_score

And indeed at the graduate level, GMAT scores at the top business schools are rising steadily:

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-b...

So instead of the positive, hopeful story "our best students are becoming even more capable, year after year," we get a story like this shaming colleges and universities for "grade inflation" instead. Disappointing.

Other schools provided ACT prep time for their students.

So did our school.

The difference was our school provided practice and prep for all students and everyone took the ACT.

The other schools also provided practice and prep tim, but the ACT was not required so many students didn't take it.

Education stats are always curious.

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

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...

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

https://www.fairtest.org/sat-losing-marketshare-act-testopti...

Obviously people studied before, but our collective information about these standardized tests has become readily accessible.

Now, general test taking tips, test-specific guides, and even full courses on tests are available to everyone rather than those who could afford a book or a private tutor.

It says that it doesn't explain the "conundrum" of increased higher-end scores. But it definitely addresses that it's very unlikely the test has gotten easier, since average scores have remained stable, as they have for the PSAT and ACT.

Is it so hard to believe that more students are performing at a close enough level to their forbears to deserve the honor?

Several years later I began work as a developer because I had always programmed, and had come to the conclusion that it was something I really loved and wanted to spend my life doing.

Fast-forward, I'm a mid-20's senior in Computer Science, and you're absolutely correct about the VAST amount of information that is required to learn to be successful.

So here is my take:

1) There is a lot of sink or swim, at least in the program I'm in. And if you learn to swim, then your GPA balloons because you learn how to handle this vast amount of information thrown on you -- useful or not, it is the professors discretion -- which I think is one of the points of school to begin with.

2) Those who sink, end up going to departments with maybe less expectations, where they end up succeeding after having to deal with the previously higher expectations.

It's interesting.

With that said -- I grew up with a lot of GPA chasers, who I wouldn't trust with anything I personally needed done. But what they've done throughout their lives is signal that they can get whatever task you give them done, not necessarily come up with what task should be done, or how to interconnect subjects outside of an exam, or what was previously derived for them.

Learning how to bridge the gap between subjects is also another point of school. It's interesting because those lines everyday seem to be blurred more and more, especially with advancement of computing, so it's kind of hard I think for a lot of students to make that jump, to bridge. And also the stigma of Liberal Arts -- that many STEM kids subscribe to -- has lessened the ability of many students to be life-long students.

I have a few friends in grad school, who really, really struggle with that particular advancement. For example, one is in a neuro-lab and while they did have experience in FMRIs, they had never really invested in either math or computing. Now they're completely lost doing FICA and the like with MATLAB, and absolutely hate the work. They've called me to ask me about everything from what is an eigenvalue, to how to split a 3D Matrix into 4 based upon a fix set of indices. It's a shame because they are really smart, and passionate about the subject.

Sorry that was a bit of a ramble.

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.

We used to joke at all the pre med students as to why they chose Georgia Tech as just about every other school had gpa inflation. And grad schools don't take Tech's lower grades into account.

Effective fall 2017, when calculating the HOPE and Zell Miller Scholarship postsecondary Grade Point Average (GPA), an additional weight of 0.5 will be added to grades of B, C, and D for approved degree level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses

I think it's good since it doesn't affect their Institute GPA but can help them keep the scholarship. I knew a lot of people who lost HOPE/Zell and the increased financial burden made keeping their grades up that much harder.

Edit: Valdosta doesn't offer graduate CS. But imagine that it did.

I don't think it is uncommon for tests to be written such that with a student a strong command of the material will not score 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%.

I studied physics. It was possible to game the system to a certain extent. If you took the (subjectively) hardest modules like gauge theory, you could get a high grade even if you only answered half the paper. So if you were smart, but not top of your class, you'd be better off taking the hard subjects because every mark you got was effectively worth more. If you took the easy and popular modules, every mark would count and it might even be normalised down.

The reason I liked it was because I hated having to cram for easy subjects because the class average would be so high. I would rather put the same amount of effort in to learn concepts (and have to remember less in the exam) than rote facts.

My wife went there, and while most STEM grad schools understood that grades at MIT were not inflated, medical schools did not seem to care. One of her friends had to first get inflated grades doing a STEM masters degree before she could get into med school due to her uninflated MIT undergrad grades.

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 contributor to higher grades are the book summary and answer-key sharing sites.

If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance.

If the institutions have to stay relevant, they'll have to make sure the grades are correlated to successful people in some way even if it means handing out grade A to any student!

> If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful business people then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance.

What you describe is grade inflation.

Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance. My understanding is that once upon a time, a "C" grade meant your work was average or typical, which was perfectly respectable. An "A" or "B" mean your academic work was above the norm or outstanding. People could get C's and go on to have successful, non-academic careers (such as in business) with little comment.

With grade inflation, when "average" is an A or B, it's much harder to distinguish the truly academically talented based on their grades, since they're grouped into the same category as average performers.

Isn't it both? If we had figured out the perfect academic program for all time, then it could be just a reflection of performance compared to all prior students in the program. Since we haven't, we update the programs and that might mean some aspects become easier and some harder. Or maybe overall easier, if career demands have generally gone down (which, imo, is a much more interesting discussion than whether an 'A' is really an 'A').

What's happened is parents pressured schools to get their kids A's to get into college, then colleges set the minimum bar at A+ instead of A, then at A+ and a random selection of thousands of students, all with A+'s. We are at the point where a single A- will drop you 50 slots in class rank. This is like judging the difference between Olympic sprinters instead of seeing the real spread among students.

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".

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 analysis is them same. Many things are a lot easier to do now with computers, and I’ll wager a student of 100 years ago had better analytical skills.

It’s not just grade inflation either, but degree inflation. The PhD is the new MS, etc down the line.

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 sophomores. The foundations that were the same have persisted and the field has done nothing but expand; this trend is replicated across most disciplines.

The data doesn't support your assessment of declining analytical skills. The ability for abstract thought has been monotonically increasing for the past 100 years.[0] I understand the appeal, oh kids these days aren't disrupting anything, my job is safe. The issue is, there's not much data to support the platitude. Globalization means you're competing with billions more people, education achievement has to increase to match; or be left behind.

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_...

Linking to another comment chain here [1] on this topic as this is something multiple people have also brought up as an argument against grade inflation. Unfortunately, it makes the inflation look even more absurd.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17447692

High school maths is pretty much Antiquity level, though much more formal. First couple of uni years are mostly 17-18th centuries maths. Last 2 undergraduate years is 19th and early 20th centuries.

A few areas have changed though, particularly statistics I think, also computer science if you consider it part of mathematics, but have a look at a textbook from a 100 year ago, and you'll feel right at home except for the style.

They are not. My experience as a public school student was far worse than when my parents went to school - double or worse class sizes, no teaching assistants, and occasionally the same textbooks my parents used. "Experienced" teachers were the worst - it often seemed like the only thing they changed over the years was to stop corporal punishment.

My parents required unreasonable numbers of As, so I regularly got undeserved grades just by acting like I'd make a big deal about it... teachers were too overwhelmed to pay attention even if they cared. Some of my peers had helicopter parents that called in arguing their kid deserved an A simply for studying all night, even though that "sudying" was often was just online RPGs.

The trend followed in college for non-major classes. Professors simply didn't care unless a student would be advancing to another class in their department - then they cared enough to fail students, but the grade curve was still logistic. Not the expected "C = passing knowledge".

Even then, I still never saw pedagogical advances outside of brand new assistant professors in liberal arts classes.

I'm not so sure you are talking about the same thing as grade inflation. For a particular course, in most fields, the content has not changed in 20-30 years.

Most of my undergrad engineering classes have not changed in 20-30 years (with the exception of the software ones). I'm pretty sure if I look at the curriculum of, say, a circuits/EM/communications course today it will be the same as it was 2 decades ago. Math courses definitely have not changed much.

I agree with you about the ballooning bulk of knowledge to be successful, but not to get a better grade for a given course.

I was kinda depressed because I knew the likes of Google would have no interest in me with that GPA, but my part time intern experience turned out to be worth so much more. I got a great entry level job from it, and from there got my foot in the door at Amazon where I thrived (who didn't ask about grades once) and ever since then, Google and everyone else has been reaching out to me. So while I have nothing against people with good GPAs, I'm never going to hire based on them.

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.

The best actionable advice I can give you is: put Caltech on your resume with your years of attendance, leave off your GPA entirely, and indicate in text under that that it's incomplete. You'll need a compelling narrative around why it's incomplete (which is admittedly difficult and usually circumstance-specific) or why it doesn't matter too much given that you've done X. X is something impressive, uncommon, and shows intelligence and initiative. As an example, my Xs were getting press in lifehacker for a side project and doing well in a FANG hackathon while in school.

For jobs, I think a common myth is that your credentials/resume is hugely important. From what I've seen, this is both true and false. The _specifics_ of your resume don't really matter 99% of the time, only that they're interesting. Also, keep in mind most resumes are screened by a real, live human - being authentic and passionate can help out as a break from the BS a recruiter sees day-to-day (but do think about what a recruiter would be looking for at a glance). After you clear the resume filter, you're on a similar playing field vs. every other candidate. And then it's up to you and your ability to pass interviews - that's a whole other topic which I won't cover here =P

If it helps, feel free to reach out through linkedin or email in my profile. Stay focused and keep your chin up!

Your GitHub projects are extremely valuable, some of the more interesting companies have scripts that automatically search for open source contributors to widely used projects on GitHub . I didn't even go to college and am paid at a competitive level for my experience with recruiters contacting me daily on LinkedIn, though I'm not a pure software developer (DevOps). Keep working on those GitHub projects, solve algorithm questions on LeetCode/Hackerrank/ any of the competitive programming sites, always be learning something new. The debt and stress with a college degree isn't worth it when no sane project owner on GH will reject a PR due to college credentials, thereby continuing to increase the value of your own resume in addition to your work experience.

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.

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 doctorate was 'only' from UT Austin.

I've also sat on admissions and fellowship committees for doctoral programs and students. GPA matters more, at least among the 'good' schools. And even then, I've never seen a 2.0 student beat a decent GPA (3.5+).

Now after about 3.3-onward, I agree that GPA does not matter a bit. 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).

I do agree with everything else.

[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/02/univers...

So I have standing to say that RPI has been mismanaged as an institution. Besides my personal experience, RPI's political troubles are well-documented and well-known [1][2][3]. With failed leadership and failed policies, this university has come to sit below CMU which itself is just below MIT.

UT Austin is a fine school from what I heard, and does not seem to have the toxicity of the RPI brand. That is, a second-rate school for second-rate students.

[1]https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-One-Leader-Set-a-Toxic...

[2]https://news.vice.com/article/americas-highest-paid-college-...

[3] https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Troubled-alumni-sto...

Man, does this list goes on.

https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Campus-Notebook-RPI...

RPI is a neverending horror story.

That being said, the only time I feel this is in social settings and it's usually minor. People ask where I went to school and then I usually get an "oh?" back, as they've never heard of it. But it's never really impacted my professional life to my knowledge. Maybe I didn't get the same opportunities as these people as quickly, but I've worked at and enjoyed success at a few of the big names and am enjoying my time at a well known "start up" now.

Kids, go to school where you can afford. Bust your ass, make connections, move on and move up. School doesn't matter once you're out of it.

By what standard? What does that life look like? It seems so foreign to me. It seems like a lot of HN is comprised of this sort of folk or people who know them.

I don't work in the Bay Area, I work in Phoenix. I imagine it's a different world out there: instead of saving 90% of my income and living in a van, I own a home and save 75%. Instead of talking to people who work at Apple and went to MIT, I talk to people who were self-taught, or attended some other institution I'm not familiar with.

Even the people that I do know who went off to work at Amazon, Apple, or Google aren't even that great of engineers. In fact, they're probably worse engineers than the ones I know at Fortune 500s which aren't even tech companies.

I've seen people who had 25+ years of experience lose a job position to someone who didn't know what `setInterval` was.

To me, an "elite" tech person would be someone who wrote software that people actually cared about and had a strong amount of domain knowledge in a particular area, or prototyped hardware and sold a product that people bought. Even then, these people are flawed just like everyone else. Not too long ago, the author of Redis posted an article about shortcomings of Lua here on HN, and a deep inspection of his post simply yielded the finding that he wrote a Lua binding with a glaring exploit in it, and his entire article revolved around trying to justify his own flaws.

To me having parents that have money doesn't make you elite; it's just something to think is rather nice and want to work toward as well.

It seems to me that there exists a demographic of people in tech that seem impressive to others, but haven't actually contributed anything significant or tangible to the industry. They probably exist in senior positions of companies that I've never heard of that serve a niche that I'm not a part of. I don't know, but they aren't "elite" to me.

Kids, do and make things people care about. School doesn't matter at all. Learning matters. Spending a small fortune to maybe associate with people who will get you a job is trying to play the lottery, but with a far more expensive ticket.

When you're denied a job at a startup after receiving multiple degrees ask yourself if it was worth it. It takes 30 minutes to invalidate 4-8 years of your hard work. People want people who can do the job.

That life looks like living in Seattle or the Bay or New York, making somewhere between $180-$230k a year first year out of undergrad, being able to travel for concerts and live in luxe Airbnbs with your similarly elite and pedigreed friends.

>Even the people that I do know who went off to work at Amazon, Apple, or Google aren't even that great of engineers. In fact, they're probably worse engineers than the ones I know at Fortune 500s which aren't even tech companies.

I think this is a reasonable viewpoint if you believe society (or even people) cares about how skilled you are in your craft. Unfortunately, society doesn't, and rather only cares about how much you make.

As such, society will always consider a jet-setting Facebook or Google new grad making $250k her first year because of a signing bonus or negotiation skills superior to someone who graduated from ASU working at Amazon/Cisco/HP/etc companies making $150k or god forbid, even less. There's a lifestyle difference that I'll never be able to match.

> The folks in Phoenix out here can't make that type of money unless they're a Principle Software Engineer/Architect/VP or higher

If they work at Amazon they can as an L6 or above.

Depends on the level of attainment you are hoping to achieve. If you want to become a major player in your company or industry, it most definitely has affected your professional career. Social settings are everything when it comes to business and tech when the higher up the ladder you go. If your aspirations are just a 9-5 programmer or at most a tech lead for your team, then your alma mater and your relationships and common bonding experience doesn't matter much. But if you have higher aspirations, then your connections, relationships and how you play within social settings matter.

One of the easiest ways to bond is with share experiences. And shared college experience is one of the easiest avenues to shared experience.

> Kids, go to school where you can afford. Bust your ass, make connections, move on and move up.

Unless it's an ivy league, stanford, MIT, etc. Then do whatever you can to attend because these names and the connections you make in top tier colleges will serve you forever. You get an opportunity to hang around with the children of the leaders of major world nations. The children of top business, tech, political, etc elites.

> School doesn't matter once you're out of it.

GPA doesn't matter. Your school does matter if ( a big if ) it is top tier. And it matters even more internationally. Go anywhere in the world and tell people you are from harvard or yale or stanford. Trust me on this. There are doors only open to these people.

The only time you should mortgage your future on college is for one of the top elite colleges. Anything else, just go to the one that makes the most business sense to you.

I work at a top tech firm, and while we hire across the board, at the micro level I have seen strong biases by some managers for the top tech schools. As an example, I once forwarded the resume of an undergrad whose GPA was decent (not stellar), but whose resume indicated strong initiative and interests related to software (Lisp, etc - material not taught in that school). He made lots of excuses not to even interview this person. And later hired someone with a really low GPA (low 2.x), but he was from Berkeley! This person did well in the interview, but the candidate from a lower ranked school never even got an interview.

So much so that I often feel like I would have been better off never having gone to college in the first place than having gone somewhere not in the top 50 (or even in the top 10). Presenting yourself with no degree at all as a "tenacious, self-taught fighter" feels better than "I went to the University of Bubba because MIT said you're not smart enough" (plus MIT is really far from where I grew up and really expensive). On the other hand, I've worked with plenty of really smart programmers who don't have a degree who've felt that not having one has held them back - although I've always wondered why they don't just go back and get one.

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

I did this too, so I can definitely relate there. Went to undergrad 15 miles from home and commuted my last year.

> and enjoy being young.

I'm afraid only the elites get to enjoy themselves when they're young. The rest of us aren't so lucky.

The government of Sweden does routine quality checks on the university program (we don’t do the whole major/minor thing, we have focused programs) and my computer engineering program in a small university was ranked second while KTH and Chalmers were tied for last and were ordered to change their programs to keep giving out engineering degrees in that field. In case you’re not Swedish, those two are the most renowned schools.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.

- William Shakespeare

Better to be a top student in an average school than to be an average student in top school. More opportunities are offered to the better students. More chances to grow come about too.

[laughs maniacally]

...no one will be." - Syndrome, The Incredibles

At my daughter's high school award ceremony they just gave the awards to everyone. Times change I guess.

What we have here is that we leave everyone mediocre but tell them all that they are super. Now we are left with no way to measure the people who really have put in the work to become better.

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 is partially responsible for grade inflation.

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, anxiety, and prep, I was able to get through and get hired. Microsoft outright rejected me.

One other thing - CS degrees don't teach people to code. They reach computer science. It just so happens that labs and assignments may require coding, but spending half a day or a day to do a project and getting an A has very little relationship with being forced to quickly hash out code in a 45 min interview.

IMO, at both companies I have been at, the majority of new hires are fresh grads. The barrier to entry whose been out of school is extremely high... but I digress.

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 some of the words, and redraw some of the lines - bonus points if you can use different colored markers. As long as you keep talking, the interviewer will get bored, assume you drew something smart, and offer you a six figure salary.

As someone who has interviewed and been a TA at a top school, I would not be so quick to dismiss - especially for a broader definition of cheating.

In the school I went to (and I've anecdotally heard this is common for many top schools): Most professors don't change their homework sets and often don't change their exams either. The place was loaded with students who would get the assignments from older students and just memorize. As a TA, I remember one student who consistently only got the answers correct for questions that came from previous semesters, and got all the more original questions wrong - even trivial ones.

He was an extreme case, but the sentiment was strong in the student population, and is just as another commenter out there described: People who got to top schools tend to optimize for GPA, and not for learning. Most of my fellow students would refuse to learn anything beyond what was needed to get an A.

I get what you're saying: Live coding is not for everyone. But I also get what the GP is saying.

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.

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?

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 you structure code correctly, you can forget about all the details you need to know to keep from getting hurt, but rediscover those things quickly when you need them. This is a great way to talk about program design in a nutshell, but it's also a terrible way, since it's prone to make people with short attention spans think you're nuts!

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

Far too many managers in the 90's and early 2000's simply thought they needed to hire super-memorizers who just knew everything, like they're characters out of a movie. I'm not so sure this has changed in 2018.

Work smarter, not harder.

This is great, I'm definitely using this analogy in the future.

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

Students complain. They complain a lot. We know that we're losing pre-med students to UBC -- which awards much higher grades on average -- because when we ask them why they decided to not accept SFU's admission offer, they reply "I'm planning on becoming a doctor and UBC will give me the higher grades I need". This also happens to a lesser extent with pre-law students. Over the past few years we've started displaying course average grades on transcripts and sending letters to graduate schools saying "so, there's something you should know about SFU's grades...".

I don't know how long SFU will be able to hold the line against grade inflation, but we're trying. It's not fair to students who worked hard to get a GPA of 3.7 (currently around 2% of students manage this) if next year's students can get that just by showing up.

In the mean time, if you see a student with a 4.00 GPA from Simon Fraser University... believe it.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, I pulled some statistics from the class graduating from SFU at the end of the 2017/18 year:

   First Class Honours with Distinction (Honours program, 4.00+ GPA) 6
   Honours with Distinction (Honours program, 3.50+ GPA)            61
   Honours                                                          61
   First Class with Distinction (Major program, 4.00+ GPA)          24
   With Distinction (Major program, 3.50+ GPA)                     265
   Bachelors                                                      1769

Ultimately I think everyone should be judged on merit, like an audition, or based on a portfolio. But many businesses with deep pockets still award these types of positions based on nepotism and personal connections

What's more, each school should report your score only relative to those of your peers. You should be compared only to other engineers, to other history majors, to other biology majors, etc. Because performance in physics is incomparable to english, education, or art, it's absurd to contrive a relative metric of comparison (AKA grades) to conflate them when none can possibly be meaningful or fair. Grades do an injustice to everyone.

As for comparing students from one school to the next, entrenched standardized tests like GREs have become a nightmare. Especially in terms of STEM curricula, schools often differ radically in how much they challenge the students and how far their skills develop by graduation. There simply is no way a three hour multiple choice test like a GRE can accurately reveal the difference between someone who attended Columbia vs Lehigh, for example. But a big difference there is. (I know since I attended both.) To pretend that some quick A/B/C/D/E test, which explores none of the practical skills learned in labs or projects, can accurately AND reliably reveal a meaningful difference among 'peers' -- this does a disservice to everyone.

Finally, there's no better illustration of disparity in the academic ranks than the rise of for-profit degree mills during the past couple of decades. The pretense that millions are not being cheated by these 'schools' is simply an abomination. I blame unchecked grade inflation and academic elitism for the tolerance for slap dash scholarship assessment that the sorry state of these 'schools' has revealed. As long as we avoid a precise and accurate accounting of the scholarly performance of the individual and the academic product of the university, we will continue to confuse student merit and invite charlatan schools to victimize their customers.

Somehow all these forms of false credentialism must end, and soon, or 'college' really will become the stinking albatross that Mark Cuban and others claim they are.

Until companies stop valuing kids solely by their 'School and Grade', this cycle will continue.

To make this an interesting conversation, how DO companies hire great people without relying on their 'School and Grades'? Are 'Schools and Grades' really the best indicator for worker performance?

X% of employers are still believing the high worth of these shitcoin degrees, and for some reason, the bubble has yet to explode.

It's like, there's no difference in skill between buying bitcoin early vs a valueless coin. But, there is a massive difference in perceived wealth.

I think the real problem here is that investment capital (i.e money) is still so centralized in the hands of the fortune 500 and some investment banks. Most "run-of-the-mill" startups won't be differentiated by uniqueness of idea or ability to execute-- they'll just be differentiated by how much money they're given and how many rich dudes are in their network.

I really dream of the day that 10 high school graduates from Detroit can form a company and bootstrap their way to 100,000 users with a net profit of $1,000,000 a year.

I'm not sure such an example exists.

Unless you're applying to a gov't job, you're connections, friends, professors that like you, github accounts, art or MBA portfolio are the tools that move you "up" in the world. And in that order.

Online education dilutes GPA too. As well as more tech skill degrees (devops certs), aka those were called trade/vocational schools in my day.

I've never seen a GPA on an intern application/resume in the last 3yrs. Unless and (unfortunately) its from a visa student. Hmmm.

I actually don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to know an applicant’s GPA. Surely if they got a 2.1 that communicates something about their work ethic, ceteris paribus.

The students who go to these schools tend to be overachievers. Achieve honors at all costs kind of mentality. So just because too many students are actually achieving, do you try to bring them down? Or make coursework unreasonably hard?

I once talked to a professor from my university long after graduation, and I told him that I as I saw the students become better at the coursework (I was helping them so) the exams became harder and harder, to the point where the only way you could truly get the questions right and on time is by having a year of so experience doing those problems. He responded with the bell curve. That a few students should get A's, some should get B's, and majority should get C's.

Seriously? There are careers at stake here!

I disagree with this statement, at Carnegie Melllon I noticed that a lot of 4.0's were engineered. Students avoid taking hard classes, avoid difficult requirement classes by taking at an easier university, avoid challenging themselves outside of their major.

Fortunately for me, I got my degree without too much torture that many others go through. Unfortunately for me, nobody looks at my nice 3.7 GPA!!!

Shit, there's no reason most low-level programming positions need a CS bachelors. We really, really need good associates degrees that teach functional coding (logic structures, two common languages, git, agile). There is no reason to expect someone to be in school for four years to be able to code.

Grades must be inflated to accommodate the horde passing through universities. The masters degree is the new bachelors degree.

I'd love to hear from front-line profs about this issue- does grade inflation need to be addressed?

First is the ever-growing methods of academic dishonesty. I do not have enough hours in my life to create and design new homework that prevents cheating. It's possible for some assignments, but not all. I don't give up on cheating detection, but this leaves tests and participation (be it simply turning in work or in-person) as the primary grade-changing events for many students.

Second is the issue of student "litigation". It is not unusual to find a student that will fight to get their 4.0 by attrition, and that requires very good record keeping on the professor's part, taking away from time for other tasks.

My situation is at an extension of a very large university. We focus on teaching and student connection, not research. I know that these experiences change drastically when professors have graders and a research program taking their time away from teaching duties.

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 wanted better evaluations from his students.

In addition, students will badger their teachers for better grades, and dealing with it adds to the workload and stress of teaching. After each exam, I had a line of students at my door, asking me to review the grader's marks.

My view is that it's always marginally easier to give out higher grades, even if there's no overt pressure from above.

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.

I introduce a 2 element cycle in a dataset, and ask how we can detect such things, and have repeatedly gotten an if-clause that would only detect the 2 elements. Then I ask about a 3 element cycle, and I've even gotten another if-clause to detect the 3 elements as an answer multiple times.

What in the world!?

I myself went to a Canadian University (so fairly unknown to people in the US), so I'm not trying to defend my honor it something by saying that

[0]: < https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect >

And you are right, the population is growing, but the number of prestigious universities has not, furthering the competitiveness. There aren't opening new Harvards.

In past times universities were very elite educational institutions that few attended. Today college is seen as basically high school 2.0. There's a lot of numbers in this [1] report from the census. [1] Today 33% of Americans have a bachelor's or higher degree, and 12% have a masters or doctorate. Those numbers also continue to skyrocket. In 1970 only about 10% of people had any degree and advanced degrees were a rare sight indeed. In other words we have more people with masters or better than had any degree in the 70s.

The explosive normalization of post-secondary school education has turned into a massive industry. College is now a half a trillion dollar industry per year, and rapidly growing. This has shifted students from being trialing and exceptional aspirants to... customers. And there is immense pressure to keep these customers happy. For instance many universities rely on student evaluations to measure teachers, yet those evaluations often work as a strong proxy to difficulty which works as a strong proxy to grades. You can see this connection in crystal clear fashion on any of the countless 'rate my professor' type sites.

[1] - https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

The answer depends on the qualities the employer is optimizing for in its employees. It’s easy to imagine how a high GPA could be a positive signal or a low GPA could be a negative signal. However, it’s also possible to imagine some circumstances where a high GPA may be a negative signal and a low GPA a high signal.

For example, perhaps a high GPA at a hard school implies a tendency for isolation, a preference for conformity over risk, and quality of work that depends solely on the specificity of instructions given. Depending on the stage of the company hiring, and/or the role it’s hiring for, these traits may be undesirable and therefore useful as a negative hiring signal.

That said, the question of GPA as a signal is too focused in scope. Any such consideration of a signal metric like GPA should be balanced with its inverse: the likelihood of a low metric (e.g., GPA) being a negative signal.

A holistic approach would include creating a matrix of (x) traits the company wants to select or filter, and (y) input signals like GPA. That is, a mapping of signals to traits.

For each signal and trait the company should strive to estimate the probability function of the following cases:

- High metric (GPA) is a negative signal for trait

- High metric (GPA) is a positive signal for trait

- Low metric (GPA) is a positive signal for trait

- Low metric (GPA) is a negative signal for trait

The company should consider the importance of the trait(s) it is selecting for, and the relative risks (downsides) of misinterpreting any signal used as an input for selecting those traits. Only then does it have the information necessary to create a useful hiring strategy and rubric for candidates.

When everyone is special. No one is special.

- To give students feedback about their progress

- To competitively rank students knowledge

- To competitively rank students organizational/bureaucratic hoop jumping skills

To conflate these three things is incompetence to the highest degree. Whoever invented this system, and everyone who has ever gone along with it should be deeply ashamed.

Of course, this is an oversimplification - there are many more confounding variables packed into a single stupid grade than just these three. I really can't overstate how stupid this system is. It's not even a system.

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.

Some companies will not even consider engineering candidates who did not come from a narrow list of schools (Ivies and similarly prestigious institutions). I know for a fact that Oracle has such a list along with several major finance companies.

It seems odd to leave it out, but it definitely doesn’t need to be the focus of your CV.

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.

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 junior applicant who doesn't put their GPA on their resume.

Unless you tell the applicant what you want to see, they have no idea which of these two hiring managers you might be. Instead of downmarking people for having the audacity to present this information to you, perhaps you could just ignore it?

[1] Which the hiring manager in this thread has unironically demonstrated.