

Ask HN: What does GPA indicate of a person? - _RPM

What does it say about a person with a 4.0 or GPA v. a person with a 2.5 GPA?
======
tbirdz
All a GPA indicates is the average grades that person got. But that is not the
same thing as ability, skills, motivation, passion, etc. Most classes aren't
really that similar to the actual work in the industry either, so it's not
even a good indicator of probability of work success.

If this is for a hiring type decision, I think what projects a person has done
is more important than their GPA.

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quarterwave
GPA is useful when curated with the 'reputation' of a particular college or
university. For example, "Person P scored 3.25 from XYZ college, which is more
impressive than person Q who got 3.75 from ABC college". This reputation
information is usually known to those who have interviewed several years worth
of interns and entry-level hires.

It usually means that P from XYZ has the discipline to undergo the grind, so
at the minimum one can expect some business value from that discipline. It
doesn't say whether Q is incapable of the same discipline, just that P is a
safer bet. Outlier E&OE.

~~~
dalke
You have no evidence for that, because there is no evidence for that.

Google tried to find indicators for success at Google. One quote from a NYT
interview:

> One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s
> are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no
> correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a
> slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript
> and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few
> years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

> What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education
> at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have
> 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

>After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely
unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you
required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different
person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

> Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial
> environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re
> conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when
> I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking
> for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more
> interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want
> people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Even in your own scenario, would you prefer someone who graduated with a 3.25
and triple majored in physics, business, and history, or would you prefer
someone with a 3.75 who majored in business?

~~~
quarterwave
The person who went to a 'high reputation' college is more likely to have had
better peers, and so more likely to have learned more by thermalization.

Also, software jobs are unique - one can be effective in a software job
without knowing much about computer science. Jobs such as designing
transistors or aircraft require strong basics, of the type that is usually
acquired by undergraduate rigor. I doubt if a situation would exist where 14%
of aero engineers at Boeing or Airbus never went to college.

~~~
dalke
The topic is about GPA, not choice of college.

Where is your evidence that "a 3.25 GPA from XYZ college, is more impressive
than person Q who got 3.75 from ABC college"?

As we all know now from Moneyball, long-held views can be wildly ungrounded in
reality, so why should I believe "those who have interviewed several years
worth of interns and entry-level hires" are any better at judging competence
than, say, professional baseball scouts in the pre-Moneyball era choosing
someone based on how sexy his girlfriend looked?

Or any better than orchestras before the introduction of blind auditions in
the 1970s/1980s. Before then, female musicians were 5% of the top orchestras.
By 1997 (see 'Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of "Blind" Auditions on
Female Musicians') they were 25%.

Or any better than the hiring practices where the only difference in a resume
was a "white" name vs. a "black" name. The resumes with a black name required
more attempts to get a callback (see
[http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html](http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html)
)

Unfounded unconscious bias pervades everything. Why should I assume that
there's no unfounded bias in your observation, given that all attempts at
quantifying what you believe to be true have failed to find a long-term
predictor of success?

Also, there are plenty of jobs where one doesn't need to know much about the
underlying science in order to be successful. Programming is not unique in
that regard. One can be an excellent chef without knowing "rigorous" food
chemistry, an excellent athlete without a degree in sports medicine or
biology, an excellent writer without a degree in English, an excellent
musician without knowing much about pressure waves, an excellent CEO without a
business degree or training in economics.

~~~
quarterwave
One example i can speak to is analog chip design.

In a more civilized age, an analog hiring manager chose students based on some
mysterious Force, mentored them - and they worked in that company for a long
time, often on several generations of the same chip.

The scenario today is different. Hiring managers designing a chip product are
in a prisoner's dilemma situation - they follow the 'hire from XYZ school'
formula precisely because they don't want the risk of a "contrarian hire" to
be found useless for the current chip tapeout.

The XYZ universities that have higher 'analog chip design reputation' also
offer more immersion: star faculty, elective courses, exposure to tools and
labs, sending project chip designs for fab in a foundry shuttle. An XYZ hire -
even with lower GPA - can be put to productive use immediately, no learning
curve with tools etc. The learning happened in school, talking with other
students while doing projects.

Contrast with a student from ABC school that offers only one proforma analog
course, has better grades but needs at least a quarter to ramp up. The short-
term costs in this field of statistically proving the lack of a long-term
correlation may be too high - no matter the quantitative evidence from other
fields such as software.

~~~
dalke
I think I read a different interpretation of your original post than you
suggested, but I think you have the wrong emphasis, to the point of
distraction. You talked about the "'reputation' of a particular college or
university" when you probably meant "'reputation' of a specific degree program
for producing graduates with the training needed for a specialized field."

This is a much more constrained and much less actionable qualifier.

To express it in more words, I thought in your original statement you were
saying something like "Harvard has a good overall reputation so a 3.25 from
there is better than a 3.75 from a school with a (sufficiently) lower
reputation, _all else being equal_."

Now you're saying something like "Missouri University of Science and
Technology's EE program has a good reputation in vacuum power engineering, so
someone with a 3.25 from that program is better than a 3.75 from the EE
program at Harvard, _all else being equal_ , if you need someone with vacuum
power engineering skills."

I assumed you implied an " _all else being equal_ ", because it's meaningless
to say that someone with a music degree from Stanford is a great hire when
you're looking for someone to work with x-ray crystallography, just because
Stanford has a great biophysics program with lots of world-famous x-ray
crystallography work being done there.

No, I think you should be saying "if you have two candidates, both with EE
degrees and similar coursework, then the reputation of their corresponding EE
programs should also be factor, and not just GPA."

But your scenario just now has the student from XYZ (the better school) also
taking more courses in the specific field of interest, while the person from
ABC only took a single pro-forma course.

So I'll invert it. Let's say that student X from college ABC, which has a
second quartile ranking as an EE program, graduates with triple major in EE
(with a focus in analog chip design), physics, and English, with a 3.75 GPA.

While student A from college XYZ (which has the best analog chip design
training reputation in the world), graduates with an English degree with a
3.25 GPA, and a EE minor, with a single analog circuits class. (Student A came
in thinking to be a EE grad, then in sophomore year switched to English.)

Who would you rather hire - the student with a higher GPA and with more
training and interest, but from a lesser reputation program, or the student
with a lower GPA and not much interest or training, but from the school with
the higher reputation program?

BTW, the hiring manager is not in a 'prisoner's dilemma situation'. That
requires two people who can make a choice, where the payoff matrix depends on
both choices, but there's only one here. The scenario you describe is much
closer to the FUD of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment."

~~~
quarterwave
The inverted scenario got me thinking. I would prefer to hire the triple major
with interest and training, putting interest ahead of training.

And you're right - the hiring manager isn't a case of prisoner's dilemma.
Thanks for calling that out.

I've learnt several new things from this discussion, especially the references
to scientific studies of selection bias. Thank you.

~~~
dalke
Cheers!

------
Giraffenstein
In the absence of other data, approximately nothing.

