"Earning a 3.5 GPA in college is harder than earning a 3.5 GPA in high school " - That is often true (although a loot depends on the high school program and the college program.) Based on own my experience and that of kids/friends and what I’ve read over the past years here on CC … it’s almost always true for Engineering.
Personally I would prefer not to drive my car over a bridge designed by an engineer who worried more about easy grades than gaining the requisite knowledge. Tell me which bridge was designed by engineers who busted their humps to become competent engineers.
@MADad I don’t know any engineer who did not have to work hard to get their degree (and professional license for those designing and building bridges) regardless of where they went to school. This is what the OP will find. Some schools make it easier to maintain a scholarship. And not all schools are as tough as MIT. But, even the smartest students in my major at my large state school had to work darn hard.
My child is an engineering major and it is harder than any class in hs by miles. Never had to study in hs, never really studied as a dual enrollment student at a four year institution, never studied for the ACT and now she lives in the library at college.
@eyemgh wrote: “Why hardly matters. It makes it difficult for someone hiring to know if an applicant is average, good, or really good, if they all get the same grades.”
In the traditional education model, classroom GPA tells all. It all seems so simple, the 3.3 GPA clearly beats the 3.25 GPA. It seems so precise, so clear and so objective.
If schools and corporations were to spend more time actually studying the mathematical relationship between college classroom GPA and professional success as measured by patents awarded and professional achievement recognition they may be surprised to learn that, at least in the competitive STEM world, the GPA may not be the best predictor of professional success.
WPI feels that the new graduate’s project work often provides the would be employer with a better look at a student’s capabilities than does a small difference in classroom GPA. Look at their project work. Listen to them talk. See an example of what they have done on solutions to real world issues.
University/college admissions staffs are attracted to the ease of SAT/ACT selection. In a competitive situation they can rationalize their selection by the test scores. They can defend and justify their actions. Job done! No one will argue.
Employers can be making the same mistakes by projecting the GPA selection process beyond their valid use (i.e., one based on demonstrable behavioral science). As time honored a process as it may be, fine tuning of the GPA will not obtain the employer the best employees.
:bz
In many respects I agree with this, but I think what I said is still germane. In schools where the average GPA tends to be high, three types of students will get high GPAs, those with high mental horse power that have softish work ethic, those with moderate mental horse power and very strong work ethic and those who display both. At WPI a 3.7+ student could easily fall into any of those categories. In my son’s program for example, a 3.7+ student will only fall into the last, high horsepower, high work ethic. The grade deflation further splits student performance. More than 10% of the grades given in his program are Fs. WPI doesn’t record Ds or Fs. Will that differentiate them as practicing engineers, maybe not, but on the fringes it might be important. It depends on what’s required of the job. Some positions, like for instance the ones @ClassicRockerDad, recruits for (from my understanding based on what he’s posted here), require very high caliber applicants. I’m assuming he can more easily vet applicants from more stratified programs. That’s in no way to demean the practical experience students get at schools like WPI or to say that such students can’t come from WPI. They absolutely can. The practical experience might even make them better. It’s simply harder to vet who they are.
This is an interesting thread. My son is at Case, he has merit aid, and is an engineering major. At Case, students need only maintain a 2.0 GPA to retain University merit aid. And this turns out to be a good thing, because although (in my opinion) he is smart and has a work ethic, he has faced quite a steep learning curve on things like when to seek help in rough patches, and how to review effectively for exams. Weirdly, it is comforting to me that Case let’s him keep his aid, notwithstanding his relatively low GPA.
So, no money worries, but he is going to be one of those lowish GPA students who may struggle for his first job. But he is getting a great education and this is what he wants to do.
In the thought process at WPI that led to the “no record” grade (a D or an F), the argument was presented that we really wanted students to take risks and not to always seek the safest road. Failure is not a sin, but is often part of the process of learning. They still pay a price for the risk taken in the form of time, money and no credits. In college, one is still in training.
In 1968 I was crawling through a maze of mud, logs and noisy explosions while machine guns were firing tracers overhead as part of Army training. As it was a training exercise, the tracers were higher above us they we were likely to strike if we lost our control and jumped too high. The Army still had us in an educational process and wanted to optimize the chances of survival while not neglecting the need to acquire experience.
:bz
I have no disagreement with what you say about WPI, none of which refutes my assertion about the usefulness of more stratified GPAs. We are big fans of WPI. My son agonized until the deadline between WPI and Cal Poly, the program he eventually ended up at. Interestingly, GPAs are MUCH more heavily stratified in ME and any other major within the CENG at CP.
From my reading (mostly CC Forums) and limited work experience with WPI grads, I suspect that most grads are in general well prepared for the real world regardless of GPA. They are sharp students, and their project experience seems really valuable. (Yea - as an engineer and an Olin mom, I am biased toward project-based learning… admittedly it is not the ideal prep for all fields/grad schools.)
We are too. That was a major criteria for my son and why, as you know, he was interested in WPI, Olin and ended up at Cal Poly. Their motto is Discere Faciendo…Learn by Doing.
^^^^Anecdotally. My D interviewed for a position and they spent most of the time discussing her experience in her co-op rather than her education. She got the job. In her case at least experiential learning proved valuable.
I didn’t know about that at WPI but love it because it supports a growth mentality.
I get frustrated that some colleges just dump the information on the student who may or may not get it and it seems when they find out it’s already too late because they found out on the test. Seems colleges are taking the $$ to share good information but not so much on “teaching” the information and then at test time let’s see who got it - then move on to the next topic.
Failing at learning challenging new information and then redoing it to get an A, in a way, seems more useful in the real world than getting the A in the first place. So many A students don’t know how to deal with failure.
If a student gets a poor grade in a class, retakes it and then gets an A - that’s still an A. It means they have now learned the material. Isn’t that what we want? The only difference between them and students who got A’s the first time around is that it took them a little longer, however they still now know the material. No assumptions can be made as to why that one student did poorly in the first place - there are endless explanations. I think the important thing should be that they now know the material.