Course rigor vs GPA in college -- effects on employment / grad school

Parents Forum
21

I’ve had long conversations with a person who has knowledge of hiring for technical positions at Google (in the sense that he has interviewed candidates.) He reports that Harvard is not ranked in the top tier. In his opinion, the top 5 are Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, University of Washington and CMU. And IIT for internationals.

He says that he gets frustrated when interviewing students from lesser schools (where lesser, here, is a tier or two below Harvard). He reports that they can’t do creative problem-solving. He says, dismissively, that they can do the plumbing kind of programming, where one links together various pre-written packages, but they can’t do real programming.

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Cardinal Fang - You’re absolutely right about the top schools for pure technical skills, and I understand why Google is hiring from them. But I’m not hiring these kids to write code; I’m looking for kids who are ultra smart, quantitative, and have drive and are entrepreneurial. IMHO, Harvard students do well on these metrics … sort of like Bill Gates, who IMO is definitely ultra-smart and had good technical skills for his time, but his real strength was his ruthless business acumen and competitive streak, not his technical prowess.

Besides, I’ve found that the Stanford - MIT - Harvard CS students don’t really want to write code for more than a few years (unless it’s for their own startup), so I don’t hire them in technical roles. They get bored and are more ambitious. (But my technical roles aren’t as interesting as Google’s, so I’m sure they can retain ultra smart kids in technical roles better than I can). Berkeley and CMU graduates seem to have longer longevity in these roles. To be honest, I think the top graduates from the really good state school CS programs like Washington and Illinois seem to make the best career programmers. But broadly speaking I agree with your contact at Google - the best programmers are easily 10 - 20 times more productive than the average ones, and a team of the best programmers can get a complex project done while a team of good but not great ones will just make a mess that has to be thrown away.

23

Not everyone at Google shares this opinion. Several articles over the past few years have mentioned that they no longer emphasize college name to anywhere near the degree that they did in the past since their internal studies found such practices to be ineffective. Instead they have notably increased hiring of qualified candidates without a formal education, the latter making up as much as 1/7 of employees in some groups. For example, the article at http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top-college-graduates/ states,

“Google has spent years analyzing who succeeds at the company, which has moved away from a focus on GPAs, brand name schools, and interview brain teasers.”

I expect the more typical practice is to recruit at nearby schools, even if they don’t have top ranked CS programs. For example, Apple has more tech employees on LinkedIn who attended San Jose State than any other school. San Jose State is not ranked as a national university at USNWR and would probably fit in your “lesser school” grouping. Instead it gets a lot of hires because it’s located ~10 miles from Apple headquarters. The same pattern appears at most other companies for tech hires. For example, the colleges with the most alumni on LinkedIn at Microsoft’s Dallas office that have jobs with “engineer” in their title are all within the University of Texas system.

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The discussion here speaks to a very narrow range of majors and occupation types. Do we really know that a Yale grad with a 3.80 is at a significant disadvantage than a Yale grad with a 3.94 in ANY type of graduate school admission, job search, or “life” (career opportunities)? I agree that admissions to graduate and professional programs depend a lot on GPA and test scores. But in most fields they also depend on work experience, research experience, internships, and extra-curricular achievements. And in an application to doctoral programs the personal statement of purpose makes a lot of difference in my field. Among other things it speaks to the fit between the student’s interests and the interests of the grad department faculty.

In employment, it’s not so much GPA as it is the breadth and depth of someone’s training, experience, and skills – which are only captured indirectly at best by grades or even by the course list on an applicant’s transcript.

I recall when my son interviewed for his first job as an economic consultant. They were interested in his grades, but had to adjust for the fact that there was low grade inflation at his college. They asked about his SAT scores, and even about his LSAT score. They were interested in his international experience and his interest and capabilities in statistics. They were interested in (curious about) the fact that he had been a champion debater in high school. “What does your being a very good debater mean to us?” In addition to the fact that he could write analytically and think on his feet, he told them that debaters read and digest an enormous amount of information beyond anything they may have studied in school. “If you give me a complex study or publication, I can read it and write a summary and critique of it in 30 minutes. And it will be very accurate.” That is a skill that isn’t taught in class.

Sorry, but while I might make excuses for a few professional areas, where admission to graduate programs is strongly determined by one’s place in a GPA/Test grid, I don’t think the vast majority of even very smart students should be grubbing for grades in college. I think they should work hard in their courses, but breadth of knowledge and their willingness and ability to explore subjects and address problems that are beyond the core requirements of their “major” speak a lot more about the student’s potential beyond undergrad school than their location on the grid.

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@ixnaybob,
D at Yale also. In HS, took classes that interested her, but not for the grades. At Yale, 1st sem did same thing, and with the wild grade inflation, did very well. 2nd sem, got really crazy with pursuing her interests, taking a graduate seminar (as QuantMech says), and an intermediate level course without taking the intro level course. Well, GPA dived even with the grade inflation. Experience and peers have caused her to dial it way down and look toward GPA protection and has taking “easy” classes since. I told her basically the same arguments that you gave your kid, @ixnaybob. Especially since her career goals don’t include grad school nor a good GPA; getting a job in her field requires internships and connections. But the protect your GPA is so engrained at Yale the kids who do not try to protect their GPA stick out like a sore thumb.

Yale was briefly talking about instituting a grade deflation policy similar to Princeton. Not sure where that stands currently.

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Agree 100% ruthless business acumen. " sort of like Bill Gates, who IMO is definitely ultra-smart and had good technical skills for his time, but his real strength was his ruthless business acumen and competitive streak, not his technical prowess."

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@YoHoYoHo, I don’t think that my son’s future includes grad school either, at least not without some work experience first. My son has a knack for Computer Science; his mother and I are/were both in the field (so it was part of the dinner table conversation) and he’s had two internships in high school that involved data mining (for a hedge fund) and pretty cool coding (for a physics lab). But, and this might dovetail with the suggestion above to do CS and something else, he really has wide-ranging interests, and doesn’t want to just do what comes easily to him. Thus, he will probably wind up with a 3.6 or thereabouts.

I think that perhaps the grade inflation problem doesn’t exist in each course. I have heard that some courses tell the students that there is a hard limit for As, eg, no more than 30%. That’s still a high proportion of As, I guess, but not if you’re in the 70% :slight_smile:

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There is less grade inflation in the STEM courses and more grade inflation in the humanities courses.

But enough about my comments on Yale grade inflation. I am more interested in what people who actually do the hiring, such as @al2simon and @blossom have to say. Since @al2simon will toss out all of the less than 3.85s, then my approach about taking the “interesting class” seems to be wrong, should my D change career interests.

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It depends a lot of the industry and type of employer. The hiring practices described in reply #15 appear to indicate a very school-and-GPA-elitist employer (elite finance or consulting?), which is quite unlike what I have seen in computer software employment. What I have seen is that, while prestige and reputation in CS does matter in determining recruiting targets (note that Ivy League schools are not heavily recruited, probably due to their distant location, mostly small size and number of CS majors, and competition with finance and consulting), school prestige and GPA fade in importance as one gains experience. Most people are graduates from state universities, including non-flagships, that school-and-GPA-elitist employers would never go near. Some are self-educated in CS, though many of those have bachelor’s degrees in other subjects.

Of course, a student at a university who intends to go into a computer software career would be well advised to cover the widely used concepts (see the course list in reply #9). As noted, CS is one of the more accessible subjects to self-educate, but if one is at a school that teaches it, that gives one a head start for future self-education one does in one’s career.

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@YoHoYoHo - I’m trying to be careful not to give misleading feedback or claim it’s universally applicable. We’re just one particular type of employer. Advice is different for medical / law school / grad school, or other industries. Say we get 200 resumes in the resume drop and suppose we send 2 people to do on-campus interviewing to see who we’ll invite for on-site interviews. 2 people can at most talk to 25-30 people during a 12 hour day, with the goal to invite 5-10 back. So we need to somehow cull the 200 resumes down to 25-30.

Our process is “holistic”, but roughly we’ll discard the < 3.85 GPA resumes from Yale if they majored in something fluffy and don’t have some accomplishment that sticks out. Much more tolerance if they have a hard major and took super hard classes, but funny enough those kind of kids actually tend to have great GPAs despite the hard classes - they’re just ultra smart. And if a kid built a software company and sold it for a few million dollars, then of course we want to talk to him regardless of GPA (This actually happened, but not at Yale. The kid didn’t get the entire sale amount, but he did get 25%).

I don’t really give a crap about GPA (in fact, my complaint was that it’s becoming meaningless), I’m just trying to figure out who might be ultra smart and worth talking to, and I have to make the decision somehow. It’s like college admissions and SAT scores - Yale doesn’t give a crap about SAT scores per se, but they still use it because they have to use something, and they’ll throw out SATs < 1250 unless there’s something compelling. So please don’t advise your daughter to change her interests too much just to get a good GPA - besides, if she majors in something she doesn’t like she’ll probably stink at it.

Last time I saw data, 70% of the grades given at Yale were some kind of A and a 3.89 was the cutoff for the top 15%. So all I’m saying with a 3.85 cutoff is that if they don’t have a rigorous major or something noteworthy, then they better be in the top 25%. I don’t think that’s completely crazy. I’m sure the corresponding GPAs in STEM fields are lower but I haven’t seen hard data (though frankly from resumes I’ve seen I don’t think the averages are that much lower). Personally, I think it’s better to try to learn stuff and to take advantage of the unbelievable opportunities at Yale and worry about GPA secondarily, but like everything else in life it’s a balance.

For CS, the one word I would tell Dustin Hoffman would be “internships” (not “plastics”). In fact, that probably applies to most other industries.

I have no idea how much GPA affects ultimate career outcomes. I’m just painting the campus hiring problem from one employer’s viewpoint, but all employers have to filter the resume pile somehow even if they’re looking for different things. And truly nobody cares about GPA once someone’s been working a few years. It definitely matters for med / law school admissions though.

Regardless, Yale graduates are unbelievably privileged, and even if they have a bad GPA they aren’t going to starve. IMO, they do have a responsibility to figure out how to make some kind of meaningful contribution back to the world in exchange for this privilege.

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I’d expect very few employers have such a policy. I work in a similar sector to CS and have never heard of such a high cut off filter before. No company I have worked at has had such a policy, although I have heard of much lower filters, often as low as 3.0. In the survey of hundreds of employers I listed earlier, page 26 mentions that GPA and relevance of course work were both among the least influential factors in hiring decisions of the surveyed science/technology employers. Instead internships and employment were ranked far above everything else for this sector.

I attended Stanford, which I believe has similar degree of grade inflation as Yale. During my final year, my job search involved handing out resumes at career fairs. I handed my resume my out to some big name companies that are popular among tech grads, as well as some smaller tech companies including start-ups, and a few non-tech companies, such as the CIA. I had good results with my resume, getting an interview offer at the vast majority of companies I gave my resume to. However, my resume did not list a high 3.9x GPA… it did not list any GPA at all. The companies were willing to pay for flight when distant, hotel, and car rental, as well as invest in a day of interviewing without knowing my GPA. My GPA wasn’t low, I just didn’t know it was common to list GPA on your resume at the time. Instead I listed a lot of work experience – 5 different positions during academic year (not all simultaneously) including a current part time job at a local tech company, starting my own tech-related company, research on campus, and a campus tech job. It also listed out of classroom non-work activities like a sports team, student government involvement, engineering school tutoring, and minor programming competition win. I expect these non academic activities had much more to do with the resume decision than GPA, course selections, or school reputation.

Many students who get admitted to Yale were very grade focused in HS, often being valedictorian of their HS class. It’s understandable that they continue to be focused on grades during college, but this does not mean that most of the outside world shares their degree of emphasis on grades… Of course I am not an expert on hiring of Yale grads. Yale has a Career Services Center that is much more knowledgeable. Your D might want to check in with them. They can likely give better answers than anyone on the forum.

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@al2slmom Is prestige very important at your firm? If not, the “system” mentioned by Jim Manzi should work well.

Screened first by standardized test scores (a cutoff of 750 on the math portion of the SAT, and a math + verbal well over 1500) should eliminate most pretenders. Then check for hard majors, or at the very least, hard quantitative courses within a softer major and finally, a minimum GPA of 3.5 (preferably 3.7 or higher) before interviewing should do the job.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/285160/how-elite-business-recruiting-really-works-jim-manzi

Interview later in the application cycle should greatly increase efficiency and reduce your workload.

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My child is a very bright STEM major with test anxiety and adhd. She goes to a mid level public university and her GPA is not great. She has a very diverse and interesting resume and excellent people skills. For internships and part time jobs in her field, If she makes it past the GPA hurdle and gets a phone interview she ALWAYS gets an in person interview and an offer. It has become a bit of a family joke at this point.

Of course, being female in a male dominated field helps her case. But her success also illustrates that STEM employers are hungry for bright, personable, interesting people. If you have those qualities, they can outrank GPA during an interview.

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al2simon, I wasn’t suggesting that the students getting high GPAs at Yale were completely filling their schedules with courses where they already knew the content–but there is certainly some repetition by some students. Also, there are many courses from which to choose at Yale. Some are quite a bit easier than others, and I suspect that this is true within departments, as well as across departments. I don’t doubt that in a number of the courses, 70% of the grades are A’s. That seems very plausible, given the high GPAs overall. But it does not appear to be universal. Grading in STEM might be easier at Yale than it is at other places. I don’t have a lot of recent comparisons across colleges.

On the other hand, I’ve read a couple of QMP’s papers that were marked A- or B+, in supposedly “soft” fields, and I thought that they were actually quite good. QMP’s college at Yale (about 100 students per year’s cohort) had only 2 summas in the year we went to graduation, and not more than a handful of magnas.

Also, specifically at Yale, it seems to me that in the softer fields, students who readily contribute to discussions get a boost of about 0.33 in grades per class, relative to those who don’t. It is a valuable skill, but it is unevenly developed at U.S. high schools. I think it is well-developed in a lot of prep schools, which may account for the fact that private school students tend to have a higher GPA in the first two years, and then they are overtaken by the public school students in the final two years (or so I have heard).

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DS took a “soft” subject as a writing course. Midterm and Final grades: A. Papers: A, but one of them received a B on the first draft. Grade in the course: B+. Blame it on the quota, and, I can’t prove it, but I suspect that majors in that field got the A if they had “run out of A space.”

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For employment, I think it is charmingly old school… although in tech fields a student certainly needs to be able to hold their own in a technical interview or when givens programming problem. But except for that, I think it matters little in employment.

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Carnegie Mellon believes so strongly that you should do CS and something else that they require a minor.

For CS at least what you can do and work experience is, I believe, far more important than the GPA. My son was on the Dean’s List freshman year, but after that his GPA slipped considerably. (Especially when he did dumb things like stop attending a math class because the physics class turned out to be covering the same math material better. Not attending class wasn’t the problem, he handed in all the problem sets, forgetting to take the midterm was though!)

He had similar high school experiences as IxnayBob’s kid and was able to work (aka paid internships) in CS every summer of college. I believe someone working at Google suggested him for an internship and he passed all the interview stuff and the rest is history. So networking and employment history and ;the quality of the CS program look like the most likely things Google actually looked at.

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I have to confess that as someone who attended a college at which students did not receive grade reports (I never saw a grade report or transcript until after I had graduated and made my applications to law schools and grad schools), it’s remarkable to me that some of you know the details of college course grades and GPA’s of your kids. I guess that’s the way it is in the wider world. I live in an alternate universe.

Yet graduates from my college seem to have no problem gaining admission to the best graduate and professional programs. Of course we did take the required standardized tests (GRE, LSAT), and transcripts were sent to the schools to which we applied. What those programs did in those days (and may still do informally) is adjust our transcripts for the lack of grade inflation. There used to be a formula discussed on this forum about how grade inflation adjustments were made by graduate schools. I’m going to report the following not to brag but to make a point that graduate admissions isn’t all about – or even mainly about – undergraduate grades. Without knowing my GPA, which some might consider equivalent to failure at Yale, I was admitted to every graduate institution I applied to: law schools at Berkeley, Chicago, Hastings, Stanford; doctoral programs at Princeton and Wisconsin.

So what did those schools see, especially law schools which are notorious for admitting by grid (GPA/LSAT)? Not a straight-A transcript; but I did have some A’s. Not a perfect LSAT (~90th percentile, as I recall). But maybe some substantive things that mattered, including my essays, the fact that I had completed an undergrad thesis on a legal matter (not an “honors” thesis – all students at my colleges wrote a senior thesis). Like all graduates from my college, I had completed an enormous amount of independent research and writing.

I took interest in my own kids’ college grades. Copies of the grade reports were sent home. But I wasn’t prodding the kids to get higher grades, just checking to see that they were making normal progress and making good decisions on course selection. I took strong interest in their standardized test scores in high school. But I couldn’t get either one of them to prep for those exams; they did just fine. They’ve successfully taken their heterodox talents into the working world because they are smart and want to make a mark, and perhaps as well because they didn’t fixate on either grades or test scores in high school or college but rather more on extracurriculars and hobbies – on developing their talents and following their interests.

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I don’t know what my older son’s GPA ended up being. I just know they stopped sending Dean’s List letters home. We asked about grades if we remembered. I know he ended up with a C in the math course where he blew off the midterm. My younger son I actually know his GPA inside and out because he’d asked for help in trying to figure it out. He had a Tufts GPA which didn’t count any junior year abroad courses (where he had a 4.0), he senior year GPA was oodles better than the first year. In the end he took all references to the GPA off his resume except to say that he’d been on the Dean’s List senior year.

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Some parents might have a vested interest in their kid’s gpa due to a merit scholarship requirement. In that case, I think we can all agree that, since funding is pretty darn important, parents have a legitimate ‘need to know.’ Otherwise, I am a big fan of communication: grades, course selection, rigor, major, minor, dual major, change in major, all sound like great dinner table conversation to me.