<p>I go to Penn, and I can tell you students study a lot…it would be impossible to pass 90% of the classes without doing 5-6 hours of work a week! Personally, I agree with the assessment of 2 hours of work per 1 hour of class…In my art history class, for example, I was assigned about 40 very dense pages of reading material every class that would take about 2 hours to read through and highlight. Math problem sets routinely take 5-10 hours depending on how good you are at math. The few people I know who are not studying are also the ones failing…</p>
<p>bovertine,
Not many people can afford your attitude now. I got that job and it is the best one that I ever had comparing to other 8 places of my employment and ingredible manager. If you can walk out the door during interview, you are at the top of your game with 10 offeres lined up for you. I have never been in position like this living in the most economically depressed area and not being able to relocate. I did not have choices but work my …off, getting education while working full time and getting hign GPA that also enabled me to go to Grad. school. And I will tell everybody who ask, having high GPA opens doors.</p>
<p>Kids are constantly in the library at Richmond. I probably clocked somewhere between 20 and 25 hours in a normal week.</p>
<p>I’m not sure how they measured and calculated their data, but in my four years as an undergrad, I filled out a lot of surveys that asked how much time you spent doing certain things. As an English major, I was always wondering what exactly to put when they asked about “studying”. Does everyday homework count as studying? Blackboard responses? Essay writing? Reading? What about taking photos for a photojournalism class? What about interviews for a news writing class? <em>I</em> wouldn’t call that studying, per say, but did they include that sort of work in their research?</p>
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<p>They did have GPAs though.</p>
<p>And they only ask. You can certainly explain that you don’t have a degree. I would guess that Google does have employees without degrees given that they have bought out many other companies.</p>
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<p>Okay, I was joking a little . If I really needed the job I would just give them my GPA -assuming I could remember it. But I still think it is incredibly silly, and incredibly rare, to ask someone with 30 years of high level experience for their college GPA. There are so many other things I have done in my career that better demonstrate my capabilities.</p>
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Of course it does, at the beginning of your career. But I still believe very few people hiring 30 year veteran employees care that much about their college GPA. That’s just been my experience.</p>
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I inferred that the answer mattered. Since Steve Jobs basically didn’t attend class, I assume his GPA wasn’t that great. I read similar things about Zuckerberg. I don’t know about Bill Gates - I assumed he basically just stopped going to class - so who knows what his GPA was. I refuse to believe if a person like this wanted a job at Google or a similar company now, anyone would give a rat’s-a$$ about their college GPA.</p>
<p>So I guess if you took one class in extension and got an A, that must be better than a 3.5 in a full curriculum. Your GPA would be higher.</p>
<p>Enginox: you wondered if “students are that good” Well, no they’re just tweeking the system. Brown allows students to take classes P/F throughout their 4 years. The classes usually change from a letter grade to P/F when they aren’t As, since gpa does not calculate a P/F course.</p>
<p>The conventional wisdom is that you have to dot the is and cross the ts to get a high GPA. This means that you have to perform consistently day in and day out and be able to recover from illness, screwups that are not your fault and that you’re able to navigate through crappy administrative systems.</p>
<p>These attributes are useful if you want to become a manager. Or to a manager with you as a direct report. The independent genius or the person that gets things done at his own pace is useful to organizations but sometimes you want that person that shows up early, works hard, deals with problems and is very reliable. We probably have more people that aren’t in this category but GPA still counts for new grads.</p>
<p>We already give away far more information. Please pee into this cup for your drug test. Please provide information for E-Verify. We need a company physical. We need information about your dependents. We’re going to run a criminal background check on you. We’re going to run a credit check on you. There are many things more invasive than asking about your GPA.</p>
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<p>I never denied this.</p>
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This is much better shown through a 30 year career than a 4 year GPA earned decades earlier. So much so that it would render the GPA a meaningless statistic for a 50 year old. It would for me, and I do hire people. That’s my whole point.</p>
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<p>It’s not the invasiveness. It’s the importance. All of these things you list here are things that reflect on the person you are currently. Not the person you were 30 years ago at age 18.</p>
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<p>I work with many 50 year olds that don’t have the best in work habits but they get the job done. Some managers or companies might not want those kinds of employees. At any rate, the company is owned by investors and run by management and management has determined that GPAs are important. Who am I to disagree with a meal ticket?</p>
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I can understand just asking for it to fill in a required box. </p>
<p>But let me get this straight. If a proven manager, with decades of experience saving money, motivating employees, bringing in new revenue streams, streamlining processes, leading initiatives, etc. etc. came to your company looking for work, you are directed to ask them for their GPA, and potentially turn them away if it is sub-par?</p>
<p>Because that makes no sense to me. Zero. In fact, I’ve never heard of such a thing until CC.</p>
<p>Treat college like a job. Put in eight to nine hours a day of class time and focussed studying and you should be okay. ECs take more time.</p>
<p>bovertine,
"But I still believe very few people hiring 30 year veteran employees care that much about their college GPA. "</p>
<p>-It is just a Corp. policy of a huge international corporation owned by Japanese with about 30,000 employees world wide. Question was asked as going down the list questions in HR portion of interview by personell who jsut follow procedure. I bet there are plenty places like this. Having extensive interview experience, I was not ticked off by this question at all and recognized it for what it was, formal procedural point. Actually, it was nice tension breaker full of jokes and enabled me to brag about my Magna Cum Laude, while telling them that we can only estimate at this point, since memory about exact number is gone and interviewer comment about being impressed. I remember interview only because it was the last job interview for me.</p>