<p>..by the employer if both compete for the same position?</p>
<p>-one from an ivy league with a 3.3-3.4 GPA
or
-one from an above 'average' school with a perfect GPA?</p>
<p>all other achievements like research(if any),internships,etc.. are assumed to be the same.</p>
<p>and as far as location of the job is concerned,assume that the job is placed far away from both the schools.
thanks =)</p>
<p>also,
if both compete to get into a good grad school,assuming both have identical GRE scores,
and everything else similar,</p>
<p>which one will get preference over the other?</p>
<p>Depends; how strong is the engineering program at the “above ‘average’ school” and which Ivy League school?</p>
<p>It is not this remotely simple. Only in ‘highschool land’ is the world divided tidily into “Ivy League” and “other” and where dichotomous choices rule. </p>
<p>Quality of school matters, quality of program matters, GPA matters, among many other things. And each partially predicts the likelihood of ‘acceptance’ (but also the weight given to each factor in the model is going to vary by individual decision maker, company or school, as well as possibly other factors in the overall package or comparison others in the pool). Moreover, even if someone feels they can give you a straight answer, research shows that people are actually poor at estimating the weights they actually give to different factors in complex decision making tasks (when tested out with protocol analysis). </p>
<p>As for grad school, since I have served many years on those selection committees, we could not possibly care less if someone went to “Ivy League” (in fact some such schools do not even offer coursework in the area in which we are strong so those schools are less relevant to us). What we care about is the quality of the school and program (defined by their reputation in our field and subfields), which faculty they worked with there, what those faculty have to say about the candidate and what kind of research experience and success they have had. That could come from lots of different schools. (Anecdotally, it appears that the folks who end up strongest in our field as academics are not those that went to Ivy League schools or even top USNWR schools, but rather ones who were clear outliers at large publics…but I don’t have data to support this). </p>
<p>Likewise we couldn’t care less about mincing GPA of 4.0 to 3.8, or 3.8 to 3.4. It depends very much on where they went to school and their major(s). And we look closely at transcripts. We like to examine what grades they received in particular courses and also how the transcript jives with their GRE performance and other factors. And we are looking for an applicant’s sense of their work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and cognitive abilities (all of which matter, and of which GPA is only one indicator and sometimes a poor one).</p>
<p>BTW, at least with regards to grad school, no one cares about UWNWR rankings of schools or if something belongs to a league. They may care about ranking but it will be specific to a school’s reputation in a given field. Look at rankings such as The Times, which break down by field and are based more strongly upon research reputation (rankings that are closer to what academics care about). </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/[/url]”>http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/</a></p>
<p>If it were me, and the only difference were that one candidate had (better school, good GPA) and another had (good school, better GPA), I’d choose the one who went to the better school. Naturally, that doesn’t necessarily generalize to other people. My reasoning is thus: the one who went to the better school beat out a lot more people to get in than the other guy. That means he might have a longer, more consistent or more impressive track record. Otherwise, it means he is more ambitious and driven, which are also positive. Also, having e.g. a 3.4 GPA at a good school indicates that the student did well (A’s and B’s) but wasn’t necessarily breezing through the coursework. Anybody with a 4.0 in a technical discipline is either (a) not the kind of person I’d want to hire or (b) somebody who had a relatively easy time in undergrad… if he ever struggled at all, it was the difference between an A- and an A+, which means the material was too easy for him. I went to a decent - though, frankly, mediocre - school and had a near-perfect GPA, and if I had it to do again I’d have looked at more presitigious or well-respected institutions.</p>
<p>That being said, Harvard isn’t necessarily better than other schools for every technical discipline. Although school X might be “good but not great” compared to school Y, school X’s program in Z might be leagues ahead of school Y’s comparable offering. This isn’t a fundamental problem with your question, just an observation that the level of granularity should be the program, not the school.</p>
<p>Both would get an interview and the offer would go to the one who seemed like a better fit for the company. If they’re both awesome, maybe hire both.</p>
<p>As Mokonon said, if both are that similar, the job will go to the one with the better interview. My previous experiences with other graduates from the same schools would also factor into the decision.</p>
<p>For employment, if both get to the same on-site interview, then interview performance will decide (and it is possible for both or neither to get offered a job).</p>
<p>As far as getting to the interview, there are a lot of “it depends”. The university world is not neatly divided into “Ivy” versus “everything else”. Strength of the school in the subject being sought helps. GPA helps, but it may be the case that an employer just has a cut-off GPA. General (as opposed to in-subject) school prestige may or may not matter (more so in employers like investment banking and consulting than in CS). Being local helps, more so with less prestige-conscious employers and smaller ones for whom air travel for recruiting is less convenient.</p>
<p>People over-emphasize how they look “on paper”, and they don’t think enough about how they come across in-person. I recently helped a friend of mine interview for a job at Google and I knew fairly quickly that he wasn’t going to get the job.</p>
<p>This friend is a smart guy who went to a prestigious school (not an Ivy but among US News top 20) , and like a lot of smart, young guys from elite universities, he seemed to have a weird sense of entitlement and arrogance that I quickly found annoying. Interesting enough, I never really noticed this in him because we rarely talked “shop” before. He seemed to think that he knew it all already despite the fact that he had less than 2 years of experience in the industry, and he didn’t want to listen to advice from some lowly public school graduate. If he didn’t like a technical question I asked him, he became surly and complained about the question. If I couldn’t understand some of his sloppily written answers, he attributed it to my own ignorance, rather than his inability to explain things clearly. Worst of all, I didn’t really understand WHY he wanted to work at Google so bad. He didn’t seem to care about what he would be doing there. It seemed like he just wanted to work at Google for the bragging rights, which is probably how he selected schools, too. No surprise that he didn’t get an offer.</p>
<p>Also, sorry to tell you people but unless you went to MIT, public universities usually have better engineering schools than IVY leagues.</p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>
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<p>MIT is not even in the Ivy League.</p>
<p>The 4.0 from MIT.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I would be skeptical of a 4.0 from MIT without interviewing him/her. Can they relate to their coworkers? Can they work as a team member?</p>
<p>I would be skeptical of hiring anybody for a full-time position without an interview. New grads are a big investment for companies.</p>
<p>As a hiring manager the difference between a “name” school and an “average” school affects the process two ways. First, a name school will tend to get an automatic second read relative to the average school. However, a 4/4 or scholastic honors award, from any school, will do the same thing. </p>
<p>Second, depending on the major, many name schools maintain better personal connections into industry. So often the name school student will have a contact inside. All this means, the name school person has an easier time landing an interview. However, in general once the interview starts, everyone is the same. </p>
<p>There are exceptions, as some organizations try to hire from specific schools. But if you aren’t from one of their desired schools, you don’t want work there anyway. :)</p>
<p>“The 4.0 from MIT”…that would be a B average, since MIT is on a 5.0 scale. ;)</p>
<p>It seems like if GPA matters, it would only matter for getting the first job.</p>
<p>… and your first job matters when you’re applying to your second job.</p>
<p>Seeing a high GPA, or simply scholastic awards in the misc or awards section of a resume will always get a glance, first, second,…, tenth job. And yes, your academic background matters less over time, while work experience begins to matter more. But it’s odd what catches your eye when you go through a stack of resumes. So if you have the score, brag. Your really shooting just to stop the reviewer for an extra second, in order to get them to focus on the rest of the words on the page. The longer they hold onto the paper, the better the chance of a follow-up call.</p>
<p>Reading back over these replies, I actually have a criticism somebody might address. Responses to the effect that how you do in an interview matters more than prestige and that, after your first job, work history matters more than the school you went to… aren’t these missing the point? The question is who you’d hire under the unrealistic assumption that the school were the only difference. If you guys would just flip a coin, fine; say so. I would not.</p>