Is a perfect GPA necessary for success in industry?

[bcrowell]

Also, one observation that I've made is that the educational system right now is designed mainly to produce corporate cogs that do one particular thing very well. This may have worked for the jobs of the 1960's, but it doesn't work that well for today's jobs.

There's some pretty decent empirical evidence that going to college 50 years ago used to improve students critical thinking skills more, and going to college now improves them less:

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Arum and Roksa, 2011

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand

How Robust Are the Findings of Academically Adrift? By Ernest T. Pascarella, Charles Blaich, Georgianna L. Martin, and Jana M. Hanson, http://www2.education.uiowa.edu/centers/Libraries/CRUE_Documents/AcadAdriftChangeArticleFINAL.sflb.ashx

 

[twofish-quant]

I know that's probably not what people mean, but that's the sense I'm getting)

It's not working less hard, but working hard at different things. My GPA at MIT suffered because I didn't put 100% of my time into physics, but I worked hard at doing things that I wasn't being graded for. Rather than spending five hours to get the extra ten points on the exam so that I could get an A, I spent those five hours at the Athena cluster trying to learn the X11 protocol or in the library reading Yeats and trying to think about the symbolism and how it connected with Irish history.

That hurt my grades because I wasn't being tested on the X11 Xlib protocol. Fortunately, my teachers were telling me that grades weren't that important, and as long as I understood the material, I'd be fine. Part of the reason they were telling me this is that they were smart enough to know that telling everyone that they should get A's wouldn't work.

If you tell the MIT physics students that they should all get A's, you are telling them to do something that is mathematically impossible. Your choices are to give everyone A's (which is more or less what Harvard does) or you have to weed out people (which you can do at big public state universities but you can't at MIT) or you have everyone work twice as hard, at which point people (literally) start jumping out of tall buildings and set fire to themselves because of the pressure.

So when I didn't spend all my time in classes, but instead wrote short stories and learned C++, I had a ton of people telling me that I was doing a good thing. Now the problem is that those people don't control graduate admissions, so when I couldn't get into my first choices of graduate school, I got quite angry, but it's worked out for me.

What would you say are the characteristics of the A student that ends up in good shape vs the one who ends up in bad shape? Would I be correct in saying that the successful A student will be the one who gets A's because of a love of learning combined with a good work ethic, whereas the one who ends up in bad shape is the one who's just terrified of failure or thinks that good marks automatically make them better than everyone else?

It's different from people to people, and one thing I find annoying about classifying people is that you become numbers and letters rather than people. We are talking about the "A student", we should be talking about Frank, Mary, and Jim. To quote the show Prisoner "I am not a number (or letter), I am a free man!"

I like to think, and I hate to stop thinking, so when people say "just get an A and stop thinking about what that means" that really bothers me.

I have to admit I'm a little biased, because a couple of my relatives are convinced that getting A's is pointless and that C/D students are obviously way smarter, so I get into this argument a lot.

As with most things. It depends. There are situations in which C/D students do end up on top. What I've found is that often it's not that a person is stupid, but they are smart in different ways, and sometimes those ways happen to get you more money and power... Or not.....

 

[twofish-quant]

There's some pretty decent empirical evidence that going to college 50 years ago used to improve students critical thinking skills more, and going to college now improves them less

On the other hand that empirical evidence can be challenged, and then we have to ask about the relevance of the test metric. For example, if the MIT physics classes that I took didn't improve my scores on the critical thinking skills test, that wouldn't have mattered.

One thing that you do have to be *very* careful about is the meaning of tests. For example, you can call something a "criticial thinking" test or an "intelligence" test and then people just will assume that the test measures "criticial thinking" or "intelligence" without thinking about that.

One reason that I am a bit dubious about the results is that the authors claim to be measuring "critical thinking" and "communication skills" whereas they making what seem to me to be some "critical thinking" mistakes in presenting their results. Even claiming that they are measuring critical thinking seems to be an act of non-critical thinking.

This matters a lot in finance. You end up with a variable which everyone calls the "probability of mortgage default" and it stinks if that number has nothing to do with the actual likelihood of mortgages defaulting.

 

[flyingpig]

They don't in most US schools.

Also, if you are getting 99% or 98% on a calculus test, that means that they are teaching calculus in ways that is quite different than the way I think it should be taught if I were teaching the course. If I had control over a class, I'd want to teach it so that the median score would be like 60% and I'd do this by including "unfair" programs (i.e. problems that I didn't directly cover in class).

Well thank goodness I am too stupid to go to MIT. Just out of curiosity, would you have put it on the syllabus if you don't cover it in class or are you going to do a surprise "haha" thing...?

 

[Ryker]

I don't see where I was talking about "deserve."

I didn't say anything about "deserve."

I didn't say you were. I was quoting clope023 and replying to his statements.

*You* never see them. *I* see them. There are lots of people in the business world that are "dropouts" (including myself, I dropped out after getting my Ph.D.), and this impacts hiring.

You're taking things too far here. You have successfully obtained a PhD, you can't just throw yourself into the category of "dropouts"! We all know what was meant by the use of the latter word, and disputing what that word encompasses is beyond the point. You can't skew arguments like that in your favour by arbitrarily choosing to argue a point by defining it in a much broader way than was originally meant. That's called building strawmen.

It's different from people to people, and one thing I find annoying about classifying people is that you become numbers and letters rather than people. We are talking about the "A student", we should be talking about Frank, Mary, and Jim. To quote the show Prisoner "I am not a number (or letter), I am a free man!"

I agree, but it's you and other people supporting your view that started this. The rest of us were talking about A students as individuals and distinguishing between their personal traits and grades. But then the generalizations started surfacing about how B students are "better" than A students.

Again, I fully agree we should talk about Frank, Mary and Jim, and my point is that if we do, your argument loses all footing.

 

[bcrowell]

One thing that you do have to be *very* careful about is the meaning of tests. For example, you can call something a "criticial thinking" test or an "intelligence" test and then people just will assume that the test measures "criticial thinking" or "intelligence" without thinking about that.

Sure, but it doesn't have to be a complete mystery what a test measures. The simplest thing to do is to look at what is referred to as the "face validity," which simply means whether the test, on the face of it, appears to measure what it claims to measure.

On the other hand that empirical evidence can be challenged, and then we have to ask about the relevance of the test metric. For example, if the MIT physics classes that I took didn't improve my scores on the critical thinking skills test, that wouldn't have mattered.

It wouldn't have mattered because...? Maybe it would have indicated that your MIT physics classes were focused narrowly on building computational skills, and that you didn't really learn to do original thinking, argue logically, express yourself precisely, etc. Or maybe it would not have meant much, because the test had what people in the testing business refer to as low reliability, meaning basically large random errors on an individual basis -- but that wouldn't invalidate it as a measurement of historical trends, group differences, etc.

It's different from people to people, and one thing I find annoying about classifying people is that you become numbers and letters rather than people. We are talking about the "A student", we should be talking about Frank, Mary, and Jim. To quote the show Prisoner "I am not a number (or letter), I am a free man!"

I could argue that grades are relatively meritocratic, whereas individual judgments about Frank, Mary, and Jim are more susceptible to class and racial bias, good-old-boyism, sexism, etc.

 

[Sankaku]

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand

That article is well worth reading carefully and the "Academically Adrift" tests are only part of it. I think the more interesting thing is his discussion of what people think education is for.

To paraphrase crudely:

Theory 1: Sort the dumb from the smart for industry and academia.
Theory 2: Provide educational opportunities for all to improve.

The stress on grades is more correlated to Theory 1. You want to sort the strong from the weak. Personally, I think the entire grading system is broken. No, I don't have a brilliant idea of how to fix it, but I think that 'grade inflation' is just a symptom of our culture trying to purge itself of an unworkable metric.

Yes, we need decent feedback for students on their academic abilities. And yes, we need to be able to fail people who are completely non-performing. I am not so sure about all the rest, though.

 

[twofish-quant]

Well thank goodness I am too stupid to go to MIT

It's not stupidity, just a certain type of teaching that I think works well. I've found that students in other schools get really offended if the prof puts things on the test that weren't directly covered in class, but this happens less (i.e. students getting offended) at MIT.

Just out of curiosity, would you have put it on the syllabus if you don't cover it in class or are you going to do a surprise "haha" thing...?

If I'm teaching a class in physics, then I'd include a problem on the final that was about physics, but wasn't directly covered in class.

Also there isn't any real surprise. All of the tests for the physics courses at MIT are online so that you can see how the teaching works.

 

[twofish-quant]

You're taking things too far here. You have successfully obtained a PhD, you can't just throw yourself into the category of "dropouts"!

1) It's my life and I can do what I want.

2) Seeing oneself as a dropout and a failure is pretty common amount physics Ph.D.'s, and something that you should expect if you go down that route. One thing that is interesting is that in some situations, the more prizes and success you have, the more of a failure you end up feeling.

You can ask some of the other physics Ph.D.'s that didn't to into academia what they think of themselves, and I think you'll find that I'm not that unusualy here.

We all know what was meant by the use of the latter word, and disputing what that word encompasses is beyond the point.

Something that you will learn when you talk with other people is to avoid statements like "we all know" since "we all don't know" something.

What happens is that there is a funny trick, you divide society in "winners" and "losers". The "winners" are hard working people that get all A's and are destined for greatness. The "losers" are people that smoke dope, have sell drugs, drop out of high school, go on welfare, and are generally people that you don't have to worry about. You are a "winner" so you can stomp down on the "losers". Because you get all A's, you expect to be a great success.

Except, in my case, I found out that life didn't quite work out that way. What happens is that when you are young, it's easy for people to make lots of promises. Get the A's, you'll be a success, because you are a winner. At some point, you try to cash in, and find out that you are a loser.

You can't skew arguments like that in your favour by arbitrarily choosing to argue a point by defining it in a much broader way than was originally meant.

I'm not arguing. I'm stating the fact that I see myself as a loser and a dropout, and so I have a lot of sympathy for losers and dropouts. Now if you want to argue that I really don't believe this then that's weird.

The rest of us were talking about A students as individuals and distinguishing between their personal traits and grades. But then the generalizations started surfacing about how B students are "better" than A students.

But there are certain personality traits that A students have that impact hiring. If you have gotten a B, I can be reasonably certain that you won't totally freak out if you get a B. If you have only gotten A's, I don't know this so that I'm going to have to ask more questions to make sure that you won't, that I woudn't have to ask someone that I know has been non-perfect.

Again, I fully agree we should talk about Frank, Mary and Jim, and my point is that if we do, your argument loses all footing.

It's not an argument, it's an observation.

Also, there is agreement in the abstract, and agreeing in a way that promotes action. Personally, I think that universities shouldn't be giving out grades at all, since at least when it comes to hiring, they are pretty useless.

 

[twofish-quant]

Sure, but it doesn't have to be a complete mystery what a test measures. The simplest thing to do is to look at what is referred to as the "face validity," which simply means whether the test, on the face of it, appears to measure what it claims to measure.

And it doesn't seem to have that to me. One problems that if you start *calling* the results of your test critical thinking or intelligence, you start defining what critical thinking and intelligence mean, and then you get into all sorts of "bait-and-switch" confusion.

It wouldn't have mattered because...?

Because the point of going to MIT wasn't go get a high score on the critical thinking test. One problem with the work is that they are making some very broad and suspect statements on what purpose of college is

but that wouldn't invalidate it as a measurement of historical trends, group differences, etc.

But it would invalidate it as a statement that "something is wrong" with college.

I could argue that grades are relatively meritocratic, whereas individual judgments about Frank, Mary, and Jim are more susceptible to class and racial bias, good-old-boyism, sexism, etc.

You could, and IMHO you'd be right.

A lot of the ideas in testing and education came out of the 1920's with people like James Conant who was president of Harvard, and some of the people had really noble goals in breaking down class system. Some of them had goals that were less noble, but it's an interesting story.

It's worth noting that China has a college examination system that is based on one number. The national entrance exam score. Nothing else matters for college admission, and the reason the system works that way is that anything that involves any human judgment is subject to corruption.

The problem with meritocratic systems of selection is outlined by the book The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young. It's a dystopian future history about what happens to a society when people are selected via IQ+effort, and he *invented* the word meritocracy. One thing that he argues is that in a non-meritocratic system, people at the top realize that they really didn't deserve to be on the top so they have more sympathy for people at the bottom, because they could have ended up there two. However, if the people at the top think they deserve power, they are going to be less sympathetic, and this will create social revolution.

The other problem (which I don't think that Young mentions) is the problem of "too many smart people". If the number of places at the top stays the same, but the number of people that are qualified increases, then you have a problem in that in order to get into the top you end up having to be hyperspecialized which in turn causes problems. If you increase the competition to get to the top, then eventually you'll have so much pressure that something bad happens.

(Also spending time reading and thinking about Michael Young's points is the type of thing that killed my GPA in college.)

 

[twofish-quant]

FYI the guy that invented the term meritocracy...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

 

[flyingpig]

It's not stupidity, just a certain type of teaching that I think works well. I've found that students in other schools get really offended if the prof puts things on the test that weren't directly covered in class, but this happens less (i.e. students getting offended) at MIT.

It's okay but if you don't even put it on the syllabus it's just students guessing what to learn...

All of the tests for the physics courses at MIT are online so that you can see how the teaching works.

Only the lectures, the recitations videos are a bit unorganized

 

[HeLiXe]

Only the lectures, the recitations videos are a bit unorganized

Yeah I have to agree. I would use it more often if it were better organised.

 

[twofish-quant]

Yeah I have to agree. I would use it more often if it were better organised.

It's really hard to get recitation sections into videos. The best recitation sections I had at MIT were those which were pretty interactive. Typically, you'd do the problem set, get confused about X, Y, and Z, and then the recitation section were where you got some hints about how to do the problems.

The core of the MIT physics learning experience was the night before the problem set was due when you'd end up with some of the friends over cola and coffee and tried to figure out how to do the problems. One thing that MIT has done since I graduated was to move that part of the physics curriculum into the center, so they now teach most students through small groups instead of lectures.

That's one of the critical missing pieces that keeps the whole thing from getting online, but last I checked OCW had links to online study groups.

At that point the missing pieces are:

1) how to get junior lab online
2) how to "monetize" knowledge
3) career services
4) residential advising

But I think everything is going to be there in the next decade. Trying to figure out how to get an undergraduate physics curriculum online is the type of interesting problem that there is no class for.

Also part of the reason I talk a lot about MIT is that OCW provides the skeleton for the MIT curriculum, but it's important to provide the muscle. One thing that MIT tries to do that is interesting is that at most schools, if you learned everything the teacher taught you, the teacher has succeeded. Part of the MIT philosophy is that if you learned everything that the teacher has taught you then the teacher has *FAILED*, because the point of MIT is to teach people to go beyond what they were taught, and to come up with new ideas and insights that were not taught in class. You are supposed to come up with new and original stuff, and if you just can repeat what you were taught, that's not acceptable.

You can sort of see how this deep ideology fits in with testing policy.

 

[thegreenlaser]

^I have to agree with that kind of idea and I wish my school had a testing policy more like this. I wish that studying for tests didn't involve blindly memorizing formulas/theorems. I understand that they want to see if people have learned the bare minimum, but I would love a few questions that were truly challenging, and not just regurgitation of class exercises. Questions where you have figure out how you can use what you know to solve a problem you've never seen anything close to before. Sure, grades might hurt a little and people would complain endlessly about how unfair the whole thing is, but I think if you're throwing the same thing at everyone, it's not unfair in the slightest. Not to mention it would develop skills that are actually useful in a real-world problem solving environment.

 

[sfs01]

^I have to agree with that kind of idea and I wish my school had a testing policy more like this. I wish that studying for tests didn't involve blindly memorizing formulas/theorems. I understand that they want to see if people have learned the bare minimum, but I would love a few questions that were truly challenging, and not just regurgitation of class exercises. Questions where you have figure out how you can use what you know to solve a problem you've never seen anything close to before. Sure, grades might hurt a little and people would complain endlessly about how unfair the whole thing is, but I think if you're throwing the same thing at everyone, it's not unfair in the slightest. Not to mention it would develop skills that are actually useful in a real-world problem solving environment.

That's how college exams work in many countries anyhow. E.g. In the UK an A corresponds to a mark of 70% and someone ever getting close to 100% is exceedingly rare in an individual exam, let alone consistently, would say the average is usually around 60%. Everything's still based on the syllabus/what's taught, but some questions will typically be extensions or generalisations of things taught on the course and there isn't much time, making it very difficult to complete everything perfectly.

Not saying the college system there is much better or anything, it has its own problems, but there's many different approaches of grading/testing around.

 

[HeLiXe]

Also part of the reason I talk a lot about MIT is that OCW provides the skeleton for the MIT curriculum, but it's important to provide the muscle. One thing that MIT tries to do that is interesting is that at most schools, if you learned everything the teacher taught you, the teacher has succeeded. Part of the MIT philosophy is that if you learned everything that the teacher has taught you then the teacher has *FAILED*, because the point of MIT is to teach people to go beyond what they were taught, and to come up with new ideas and insights that were not taught in class. You are supposed to come up with new and original stuff, and if you just can repeat what you were taught, that's not acceptable.

You can sort of see how this deep ideology fits in with testing policy.

Well this I can appreciate. In elementary school I had critical thinking class and we were taught to always do this even if our new ideas do not work at first. I remember the critical thinking teacher used to review inventors, as opposed to those who improved their inventions, and he would objectify the concepts of original thought, abstract thinking, and critical thinking with various exercises and comparison. Although we are talking about college level stuff here, one thing that I have realized is this "going beyond" type of thing is not generally appreciated or encouraged throughout grade school. I think this puts students at a disadvantage particularly if they are interested in the maths and sciences for undergrad and graduate levels. In fact this is one of the major problems that I have with my current physics teacher...she is not open to questions and does not listen enough to follow your thoughts but interprets questions to be at a fundamental level and responds in an insulting manner. Anyways I am starting to ramble lolol But thanks for posting this :) Although I'm not going to MIT, it is good to know that they embrace this ideology.

 

[lsaldana]

Also I've heard of perfect A students speaking of a pressure vector. High grades doesn't mean you know everything, it just means you know how to pass a test expertly.

Well said, I know many students like this. Just working for the high grade but have no general knowledge of what went on in class all semester.

 

[thegreenlaser]

Well said, I know many students like this. Just working for the high grade but have no general knowledge of what went on in class all semester.

This may be true occasionally, but it doesn't mean that every A student just studies to pass a test well. I do know a few A students who don't seem to understand what's going on in a class. However, I know more B students like that, and I know significantly more C/D students who have no idea what's going on. (I'm talking proportionally; it's not just because I know more B students than A students)

 

[twofish-quant]

Something to point out here is that the standards of evaluation and selection are very different in industry than in academia. In academia, GPA's, course work, and recommendations are important, whereas in industry (at least in my experience), they are irrelevant. I've never put in my GPA, coursework, and and recommendations in my resume, and there has only been one company that has asked (DE Shaw, if you are wondering). The reason these are irrelevant is that it is widely believed (and IMHO correctly believed) that GPA's, coursework, and recommendations don't provide much of an indicator of the hireability of the employee.

Conversely, there are things that will help. Actual business experience. Someone with a 2.8 GPA that has been an intern has a much stronger resume than someone with a 4.0 GPA that doesn't. Projects. If you *done* something useful or tried, this is also something that will help you. Also certain sports and hobbies. If you've finished a marathon, are a rated chess master, or are a champion bridge player, that will help. The important thing is that you have be able to demonstrate something. I jog or play chess, is pretty useless, but "I've finished the Boston marathon" will be looked on positively or "I have an ELO rating of 2100" If spending time preparing for the Boston marathon pushes your GPA from 4.0 to 3.6, it's probably a good trade as far as hiring goes.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I think you are lumping "industry" into too big a category. Maybe GPA and coursework doesn't matter in finance, but it is commonplace for these to be important considerations in entry-level engineering hires.

 

[Sankaku]

Interesting. As a business owner who contracts Engineers for land development design, asking a professional their GPA is right up there alongside asking how big their private anatomy is. Granted, though, they are not 'entry-level' if we are hiring them.

That said, the GPA effect is probably more commonly seen with big firms. For the professionals that we hire (and we are fairly small and rural), single-person outfits are quite common. In this case, Land Surveyors, Engineers, Foresters, and Lawyers tend to be just as successful in 1 or 2 person firms. In fact, there is a huge need for good Land Surveyors in rural Western Canada (although I can't speak for the oil patch).

 

[twofish-quant]

I think you are lumping "industry" into too big a category. Maybe GPA and coursework doesn't matter in finance, but it is commonplace for these to be important considerations in entry-level engineering hires.

Also one shouldn't lump "finance" into one big category. D.E. Shaw cares a lot about GPA. When I interviewed with them, they wanted my transcripts, and I had to dig up some old report cards, because they wanted to know what my graduate GPA was, and I had no clue what it was. The other thing is that I haven't worked exclusively in finance.

I also worked in oil/gas. Oil/gas is interesting because a lot of the people in positions of power are people in rural Oklahoma and Louisiana that started as roughnecks driving trucks and pouring concrete, and so "book learning" isn't very highly respected. There are some companies on Wall Street that started more or less the same way.

The other thing is that when I talk about "finance" I'm talking about the "parts of finance that hire physics geeks." MBA hiring is a totally, totally different world, but that's a different forum. One of the big differences is that working in an investment bank is pretty much the first choice of careers for an Ivy League MBA, whereas its low on the list for physics Ph.D.'s, so most of the physics Ph.D.'s that you meet in finance are drop outs that are in finance for lack of anything better.

One other interesting thing is to see a mix and clash of corporate cultures. A lot of the megabanks are mergers of places with very different cultures, so it's interesting to see what happens when a "white shoe" firm that was started fifty years ago from prep-school blue bloods gets merged with a firm gets started with a "boiler room" firm that was started fifty years ago with high school dropouts who are proud of having little formal education.

I think most places won't care what your GPA is, and in some places and some people, high GPA is a negative. However, it still is different from academia. How important your GPA is in graduate school admissions is something we can talk about, but I don't know of any admissions committee that thinks that's it's so unimportant that they would rather you not mention it. However, this is common in places that I've worked for.

Also, there is a selection effect here. I'm more familiar with places that don't care much about GPA, because any place that requires stellar GPA's wouldn't have hired me. :-) :-) :-)

Also, if you are giving an application to a grad school committee, you can be reasonably certain that the person reviewing it did well in school, whereas this is not the case with industry. It's unlikely that Microsoft or Dell would have a "no college dropout" policy.