Mar 24, 2007 Posted | 0 comments

GPA Not Crucial to Employers; C Students Get Jobs Anyway

Monday’s Courier Post Online, “South Jersey’s Website,” reports that having a good GPA may matter in school, but employers don’t really care:

Keeping your grade point average up can be vital to your academic success.

Slacking off could land you on academic probation, or the university could yank your scholarship.

Plus, according to U.S. News and World Report, maintaining a high GPA is crucial to those who dream of attending top graduate schools such as Harvard Medical School (3.8 average GPA), Yale Law (3.9) or Stanford Business School [sic] (3.6).

Thankfully, most employers don’t enforce these same academic standards on their applicants.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ “Job Outlook 2005″ survey, 70 percent of hiring managers do report screening applicants based on their GPA, but the largest group say they use a 3.0 as their cutoff.

Though not new, this is a major statement about the value of a GPA. If the private sector reaches consensus that something has little meaning, it’s usually accurate. GPA means so little to employers that the best conclusion they can draw is that 3.0+ is a only a general indication of quality that at best supports a larger body of evidence and is at worst irrelevant.

Generations ago, grades and the resulting GPA were a certification of knowledge. Grades of A/4.0 certified that a student demonstrated exceptional command of the material; B/3.0 showed mastery; C/2.0 showed competence; D/1.0 showed inadequate grasp of the material. If teachers and professors still applied universally this philosophy toward grading, employers would care - it would be useful information to evaluate a candidate because the number would have a clear correlation with measuring skills.

Grades - even at the university and graduate levels - can mean almost anything now. Some are a reflection of one or two assignments while others rely heavily on details like attendance and effort regardless of the quality of a student’s work. And, without matching a GPA up with a transcript that displays the courses taken, you don’t know whether a candidate’s 3.5 non-major GPA reflects exceptional knowledge in high-energy physics or 17th-century Siberian basket weaving. If your prospective employee went to Baja California Language College, he even graded himself.

I’ve interviewed plenty of job seekers, worked in executive recruiting and now consult privately on job/admissions applications (as well as going through all the processes myself). Players on both sides of the interview desk know that they have a very short time to get to know who’s across from them. The most valuable currency in these situations is a fact that isn’t open to interpretation. There simply isn’t enough time to investigate what a particular number means. For most jobs, employers are right to treat the candidate’s GPA as no more than a secondary measure of his knowledge or abilities.

Since the grade inflation of the 1990′s, many colleges and universities are trying their damnedest to make the GPA matter again [just read some of these articles about Boston University's and John Silber's crackdown on grade inflation, especially Chris Berdik's treatment]. It usually takes a University a decade to see a leveling of their GPA; we’re just starting to see it pay off at some institutions.

Maybe by 2017 the GPA will matter once again to employers.

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