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Comment by pbj1968 | Hacker News Reader

pbj1968

“It is not clear how employers would be informed of the narrative-based performance of students in school.”

Is an employer demanding to see your GPA such a common thing? I’ve seen it used as a weed out for things like internships but even they will bend the rules if you actually talk to someone behind the curtain.

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I graduated in the aughts, but at that point every single employer asked for the GPA if you were straight out of school.

Most places it was just a filter for interviews, so you could back-door in, but in other places it would gate hiring even if you got an interview some other way. One place I got an interview because I knew someone, and after a successful interview, they rejected me once they asked my GPA (their HR form required it to be filled in for anyone coming straight out of college).

In the 90s I found not only would they want to see GPA but often the full transcript. In more than one interview I had people commenting on grades I had for specific classes.

That place that rejected me on GPA post-interview actually asked for my transcript after hearing my GPA to see if they could justify hiring me based on which classes I passed or failed. I was a rather equal-opportunity poor student, so that was not a success.

My recollection is that asking for undergrad GPA used to be pretty common--and maybe even transcript (though I don't really remember and certainly don't remember discussions about specific class grades). Though I got a Master's directly after undergrad so I may not have had the standard post-undergrad interview experience.

It is common for employers to use GPA to screen candidates for intern and entry level positions. As a practical matter employers receive so many applications that they just don't have the resources to interview everyone, so they need a quick way of filtering down to a reasonable number. Using a GPA cutoff is unfair and leads to the unintended consequence of students and schools both optimizing for that metric instead of for real learning. But at the same time there doesn't seem to be a good alternative that works better at scale.

It was very common for on campus recruiting. And, really, there it makes some sense? Even if you disagree with the idea that people can be ranked, at large, if everyone is aware of the ranking and working with it, you are almost certainly best served getting the people that are excelling at what they are trying to get ranked at.

As soon as you open up your search to things across rankings, or in areas without rankings, though, I can't but imagine the utility of it drops off?

Not sure you always want people that are good at ranking. The way we rank software dev could lead to some fun effects.

Oh, for sure. You should continue to do extra searching at that level. But I think it is mostly fair to assume that the high end of one ranking is a safer bet on finding talent than any other location.

It feels like the "search where the lamp post is," but I think it is different. It is close to the "we have data, it must be useful."

And there are plenty of jobs (see IB, consulting, etc. mentioned) that have an endless appetite for young, hard-working bodies that you only really expect some percentage of to work out anyway. If you miss some diamonds in the rough or late bloomers, they probably wouldn't have fit in anyway and you're fine with your simpler heuristic.

for your first few jobs, yes. i still have it on mine because some more conservative employers _still_ care about it, 15 years later.

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