So, Americans in high school are often told that if you have poor grades in high school, or did poorly on your SAT you are a failure, stupid, ■■■■■■■■ and you’ll never get a high paying job because everything is based off your high school GPA.
I don’t want to sound like a prick, but I graduated high school with a 2.2 GPA and I was able to get a job two months before graduating high school. It was a pretty good job. They didn’t ask for my grades, they just wanted to know if I graduated or not.
I look at jobs and they all say that they want experience, they say nothing about grades. Hell, the colleges I look at say they want their students to pass a entrance exam and they could care less about their high school GPA. Why is this?
Depends on what jobs you’re looking at. I’m looking for engineering jobs and they have college GPA requirements of 3.0, 3.2, 3.5. A few in the upper 2’s or with no requirements but the others seem more common in my experience.
High school GPA may get you into college. College GPA may get you an interview for a post-graduation job.
You are correct, OP. Higher education isn’t for everyone. The key to financial success is being “special”–having a skill/certificate/talent that is both needed and not possessed by everyone else. College is but one avenue towards becoming special but sometimes those in academia seem to act like it’s the only route and look down their noses at those who take a different path toward success and happiness.
Many people have skill sets that are not accurately measured by grades or school performance. It’s too bad that our culture doesn’t recognize those adequately.
Bad grades in high school (not Ds or Fs but Cs and maybe Bs) breaked me when I knew what I wanted to be or what I wanted to learn required me to go to a four year college because other paths didn’t interest me and I was wondering if going to community college and doing good there would be enough to still get into a four year college. Well the school I want to transfer to cares a lot more about my community college GPA/Grades than my high school grades (I just got to make sure I have the class requirements and make sure I make up my foreign language requirement). Once I transfer, my community college GPA may not matter because it will start over at university. I don’t know if graduate school or Employers would look at my community college transcript or not if I graduated from university.
I’m wanting to major in a STEM subject. Engineering is one of them and as mentioned above these are the Jobs that they tend to look at GPA for.
You aren’t a failure if you get poor grades, though you may have received failing scores on assignments and tests to earn them. Poor performance in school is not always a limiting factor unless continuing on in school is your goal. It really depends on the individual though. I don’t have the statistics, but I venture to guess if one looked at population statistics that success in school in general, not just high school, is correlated with better outcomes later in life. There are no guarantees or absolutes, it’s always about the individual’s choices in the process.
@SuperGeo5999 It makes sense that CC grades are given more weight than high school grades by universities because the education at the former correlates much more closely to work at the university. I know some royal high school students, on the other hand, who turned into pumpkins when the entered a four year school.
I don’t think people who get bad grades are failures by any means. There are plenty of fields/careers that don’t require stellar grades and still require skill.
There are a significant amount of jobs that do require good grades, though, especially STEM fields such as engineering, mentioned above. I’m a math/CS major, and I’m going into quite a specialized field (cryptography and computer security). All of the jobs/internships I applied for or looked at required at least a 3.0, some of them required a minimum 3.5 gpa.
I think that colleges have no other way of “quantifying” students to assess them in an organized way, so they rely on GPA and test scores. I am against standardized testing and think that it in no way predicts one’s true potential.