

Ask HN: Does college GPA matter? - dasmithii

High School students, of course, have college applications to worry about while considering the value of GPA. However, once in college, is there any reason to fret over poor grades? Is employment the only justification?<p>Personally, I love learning, but hate having my knowledge evaluated without cause. And, as a HS student, I&#x27;m at a critical point deciding whether or not university is a good fit for me. From my perspective, it seems that I might as well design my own (free) curriculum with MOOCS, internships, and self-motivated projects. On the other hand, though, if GPA struggles aren&#x27;t mandatory in college, I could simply ignore material without purpose, replacing the workload with time to pursue my own interests.<p>FYI: I&#x27;ll be a life long learner regardless of college. As said by our beloved physicist, &quot;The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.&quot;
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darkxanthos
Depends on your goals. As an autodidact myself who has spent 8/9 years as a
software developer and now a couple years as a data analyst/scientist with but
a high school education I can tell you either way can lead you to great
things. It should be noted that I'm now enrolled in school however and
pursuing my bachelors with an eventual goal of getting my master's degree.

Why? Three things:

One is credibility. I notice myself referencing that different people have
their masters in a topic and it means something to me.

Two is that college has forced me to learn things I don't care about.

Three is that building a curriculum around topics I don't know is extremely
hard as is spending a budgeted amount of time on it and objectively measuring
whether or not I learned anything.

The quote you posted is nonsense. The only thing that interferes with your
learning is your pride.

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dredmorbius
Not as much as many would have you believe, though aiming for A/B grades in
your core curricula would be a good thing generally. In many colleges with
grade inflation (and this particularly includes more selective schools),
anything less than a 'B' is pretty much the mark of death. In engineering or
STEM programs, it's not unusual for the median grade in and early "weeder"
course to be a D or F.

In many cases, what a high GPA shows is that you've got a highly developed
ability to get along with the system. For positions in which that's important,
you'll get higher consideration than someone with a lower GPA.

There are a lot of observations about how grades don't correlate well with
innate ability. There are several well-known cases of highly successful tech
entrepreneurs who'd dropped out of college (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg). Though I
can also think of many who've completed undergrad or advanced-degree programs
as well. Robert Pirsig in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ notes
that his best students (he was a college professor for a time) got the worst
grades. Of course, the _worst_ students did as well, so don't be guided by
false equivalence. My experience is that if you're actively and directly
questioning material, you may well find your nominal academic performance
suffers for it.

For tech in particular, execution matters far more than GPA, and having a
solid project or projects under your belt will amount for far more than a high
GPA. I know and have worked with many people who lack a formal college degree
but who were absolutely brilliant in their work. Sadly, the lack of degree
_can_ limit opportunities and/or upward mobility in many firms, though this
may change, particularly with recent trends in college costs and financing.

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caw
Myself and some of my friends fretted over grades in college a lot more than
we should have.

You should aim for a 3.5 or higher on a 4.0 scale. If you're going for a
particularly tough job, maybe 3.8. Less than a 3.5 cuts out a lot of more
competitive companies, and less than a 3.0 is pretty much death unless you
have a very good reason (this assumes you can get past the HR filters).

What will a 4.0/4.0 get you? Basically nothing, except for some extra bragging
rights. My graduating CS semester only had about 5 or 7 people who had a 4.0,
but most of us had job offers prior to leaving college. GPA will count for
your first or second job out of college, then not matter as much.

Note, I went to a top 10 school for computer science. You may have to scale
this somewhat if your school isn't as "rigorous" according to the biases of
your interviewers.

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tostitos1979
I had a near perfect undergrad GPA and did well ... but so did many friends
with B averages. It makes getting into grad school easy. But grad school
probably hurt my career than helping it. Google supposedly cares about GPA but
I've never managed to get an offer from them. So GPA isn't everything.

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pawn
I cared about my GPA in college because I was relying on scholarships to help
me get through. I think generally, your first job out of college probably
cares about your GPA, but after the first one, you can take it off the resume.

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Semiphore
The answer is the following:

Yes, such that you should probably try hard enough that it doesn't
accidentally hurt your chances in the future, but not as much that it should
despair you from always improving yourself.

