As an example, Goldman Sachs has an admit rate that is as low or lower than admission to Harvard undergrad. They do not take anything resembling any applicant who wants the job, even if they attended Harvard. There was recently a thread about a Harvard grad with a 3.9x GPA who was complaining that he couldn’t get into IB and all the jobs were going to be what he perceived as wealthy kids with existing connections.
There is a lot of information about how IB hiring works on the web, as well as some in published journals. One thing everyone seems to agree upon is math/business skills/knowledge matter. While an IB might hire a particular Harvard humanities major with high GPA who was successful in a good number of math/econ courses outside of major. that doesn’t mean “elite” finance jobs are there for any grad who wants to take them.
Unknown, though lowering monetary cost of medical education substantially could have the effect of increasing SES diversity.
It could also affect the relative popularity of higher versus lower pay medical specialties. $200k debt may be seen as more manageable than $400k debt for a primary care physician, for example.
It was that way at my college back in the late '70’s. Lots of upperclassmen who were former Biology or Engineering majors. I agree it might have been rigor of courses, but also lack of knowledge of other options.
This I think is due to the fact that Canadian employers tend to be much more rigid in their hiring models than American employers. American employers from what I have read anecdotally tend to be more major agnostic at least for students from top schools. In Canada in contrast to work say in business employers want hires to have an actual business degree (B.Com or BBA). They may stretch this out a bit to math/engineering for more quant roles but then the expectation is that these students will go on to get an MBA. They’re less likely to pick someone with a history/English/classics background. They also want relevant work experience which explains the rise in co-op and internship options at many universities. As a result Canadian students are much more vocationally focused in their choice of majors than American students appear to be.
I’m not sure what one would consider to be “big employers”. At least a few highest paying employers do seem to rely on IQ, even though they don’t actually give potential candidates an IQ test. Their interview questions may be phrased differently but they’re really testing candidates’ IQ, among other things.
As one of many different factors that are considered in the hiring decision. The original claim that was quoted in the text was instead “At the end of the day most big employers are just looking for raw iq.” I interpret “just” as meaning only – major, skillset, past employment history, … has little/no influence, “just” raw IQ.
Agree. To your earlier informed points about medical training, it seems like you are very knowledgeable about training and med school. As someone who has no background in that area, I’m happy to see that people are thinking about ways to solve/improve training. Every problem is solvable including the limited number of doctors. We have figured out more difficult things.
II do hope some of these issues get solved as I have family members who would like to become doctors. I can’t tell a young person it’s a good path. Then again, we need doctors. Kids in our extended family have no interest in NP/ PA path.
While there is some truth to this, I also think that you are also identifying a difference in the way that some humanities and arts high school teachers grade compared to many high school STEM teachers.
I think grading in the humanities and arts tends to be a bit top heavy in high school for a variety of reasons. Thus, those grades do not always reflect the full difference in the strength between a merely good humanities student and an extraordinary one.
Put more bluntly, I’ll use this extreme example in a subjective area. I used to teach fiction writing. I would never give a student a C if they put in a reasonable amount effort and time to their creative writing. It didn’t matter how lousy or cliche their fiction was. I deliberately chose to grade on a lot of different aspects of their performance in my class not just their creativity. Engagement was a big factor.
When a STEM (or any) kid got an honor grade in my fiction writing class, it didn’t always mean that kid was a good fiction writer (and lots of 14-18yos are terrible writers because of their lack of lived experience and exposure to the real world). It just meant that I clustered my grades, and so it appeared that some merely decent students were strong students.
To lesser extent, this was true in the literature (non-creative) classes that I taught as well though grades were a little less clustered. There were kids who could ace certain types of tests and (often with the help of parents and tutors) turn in reasonably good essays, but they weren’t necessarily what I would call excellent literature students. The difference would come out in areas such as class discussions, the depth of their analysis in-class essays, or the grace and fluidity of their prose. However, those areas would not make the bulk of their final grades. If a kid could organize an essay, support their thesis, and had good mechanics, I just didn’t penalize somewhat clunky and awkward prose that heavily because writing beautifully is not a skill that I really expect from most teenagers. It is a skill that some students don’t develop until well into college and I was OK with that. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t some students in the class whose writing was truly remarkable.
On the other hand, I have rarely met a STEM teacher who didn’t use the full range of grades A-D to differentiate between students. In my experience, the difference in grading styles left some literature and creative writing students with a somewhat inflated sense of their relative strength compared to the truly excellent kid in those fields. They weren’t bad students, but no, they were perhaps not as comparatively strong as they thought. Maybe a simpler way of putting it is that I was generally not comparing my students to each other when I was grading. Lots of STEM teachers were (more or less) using their grades to show the range of students’ overall strength.
Not in Canada. There aren’t too many of those types of degrees. The only one I’m familiar with is Management Engineering at Waterloo though I’m sure there may be a few others. When I say they hire engineering grads I mean broadly.
@neela1 stated that the work ethic is driven by the GPA.
I’ve never seen this in decades of working. And the assumption that elite jobs are filled based on GPA is not correct. Perhaps, the first job out of college. But elite jobs in the fields mentioned require a high level of social skills in addition to high intellect. A kid coming out of a name brand school ( Harvard and Yale were mentioned)with the highest GPA is not the smartest. That’s a crazy premise. One might find a kid whose GPA is lower whose skillsets are far above the perfect GPA. As a rule, I’d personally stay clear of perfect GPA’s. Perfectionism isn’t a bonus in the workplace.
I’ve hired and been a voice on hiring decisions for many new graduates in an elite field, I look at intellect, poise, manners and writing abilities. Discount some things and highlight others. I don’t think we ever discussed the winner as the one having the highest GPA. Personality was always the thing to get someone in the door. And the choice of major was also a factor. Some skills are absorbed through one’s major, some can be taught.
Yeah, you can make decent money bartending. I don’t know any college grads who work as a bartender or waiter/waitress. Even the humanities grads. I’ve always thought it’s a silly assumption. I do know people who worked as bartenders and waiters during college or on the side to earn extra money. I know bartenders and waiters/waitresses who aren’t college educated.
I told my kids how much we could afford to pay for college. We also didn’t let them take out loans, we would’ve required that no matter what they wanted to study. They could major in what they wanted. We expected them to get good grades and do what they could to maximize their chances of getting a job. They were on their own after college. I think kids need to major in what they’re good at. No one wants to hire an engineer who barely passed all his classes. Both kids worked and are working in college. If humanities grads are unemployed or underemployed after college, then maybe they need to pound the pavement and find a better job. Also, if a college grad is at mom and dad’s house playing video games all day: that’s mom and dad’s fault for allowing that.
The finance companies are hiring for brains, rather than skills. The finance knowledge for investment banking takes only a few weeks to learn, and for prop trading, the companies don’t care about finance knowledge at all.
For CS, a lot of companies care primarily about how well a student can do on LeetCode style problems of various difficulty. As you say, that’s only a few classes at most.
They do that because those are testable within the context of a 30-60 minute interview session.
They may also ask more conceptual questions on CS topics relevant to the company or the job (networking, operating systems, algorithms, AI, …), although the range of topics is typically smaller than the range of topics required for CS majors in college (but different jobs or companies may focus on different topics).
I agree with you that in writing and literature the difference between a very top student and a typical good student in those subjects is huge and isn’t often reflected in their relative grades. STEM courses tend to have more quantifiable and delineatable standards for grading, but because of grade inflation, the grades in STEM courses these days also don’t really reflect the gap between a very top student and a typical good student in STEM subjects.
This does make sense. It is also not much different in the STEM subjects – the difference between a very stop student and a very good student is not visible if you grade the two students on just Calc BC or similar subjects. The test lacks the power to differentiate between the two students.
I was blessed to be able to retire in the nick of time. LOL. 38 years in hospital pharmacy gives you a lot of good old experience but as more and more graduated with doctorates, we had to prove we could stand with them. I.E. Board Certifications for the old B.S. group. There had been a time when I would have been thrilled to earn such a recognition but when it started happening was when I was also burned out. I didn’t have another care to give to it. Blessed to be able to retire.
I assume your post was referring to high school, since that’s what the previous posts were discussing.
But you bring up an interesting corollary at the college level. STEM courses are typically graded on a curve. The desire to differentiate student abilities has been used as a rationale for soul-crushing curves, where 30% is a passing grade, and 50% is an A. I’ve heard it explained as “we want to find the student who can get 80%” (or whatever outlier).
Whether or not that is the best (or only) way to find that student is a matter of opinion.
Grading on a curve in a large class is probably convenient in that the test writer does not have to finely regulate the difficulty of the test. I.e. it does not really matter if the median score on a 100 point test is 30, 50, or 70. Of course, this relies on an assumed distribution of academic strength among the students, which is more likely to be valid in a large class than a small class.
Yes, I was referring to high schools. At the college level, grade inflation is also generally prevalent in all sorts of courses, including some STEM courses (probably less so in the weed-out courses because they wouldn’t serve the purpose otherwise). How hard a course is graded and how difficult the assignments and exams are generally follow the tradition of the course but the individual professor has a lot more discretion than a high school teacher.
Also, if a course is almost always taught by the same professor, s/he doesn’t need to grade on a curve. S/he knows what an A means for that course from all the prior classes s/he has taught.