Ask HN: What does GPA indicate of a person?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7383894

by _RPM • 12 years ago

2 10 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What does it say about a person with a 4.0 or GPA v. a person with a 2.5 GPA?

Giraffenstein• 12 years ago

In the absence of other data, approximately nothing.

tbirdz• 12 years ago

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.

quarterwave4• 12 years ago

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.

dalke4• 12 years ago

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?

quarterwave4• 12 years ago

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.

Ask HN: What does GPA indicate of a person?

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