Please, this is IMHO and not Great Debates or the Pit, so please, no potshots about President Bush’s C average at Yale.
With that out of the way, has your college GPA ever affected anything work-related? Like, you didn’t get a job because you had a low GPA? Or you didn’t get a promotion because of it? Or you were assigned Division B at work instead of Division C because you had to take Advanced Hair-Splitting 401 twice? Or you got the job over the other applicant because you had a higher GPA?
As for me… no. All my boss really cared about was that I graduated. When I applied, I was one of three applicants for the job. I got the job because I had more experience in the field. He tole me he never even looked at the GPAs of the applicants.
Twice I was chosen over other applicants because I had a master’s to other applicant’s bachelor’s. One said they thought that since I had a 4.0 GPA that I’d be smart enough to handle whatever they threw at me even though the field was completely unrelated to the job I was applying for. Also that higher education showed an ability to stick with a project and finish it. I’m not certain that any of that is actually true, but it worked for me. Either that or it was the short skirt and cheap perfume.
I worked reall hard and got really good grades in college. Sadly, no one seems to give a shit about those honors in the jobs that I have applied to or even gotten. In more than 50 interviews over the years, no one has ever asked about that.
I’ve never been asked for transcripts or anything else for that matter. I was asked once where I graduated from and what year but never to prove it. I’m a chemist and the interview always consisted of questions that only someone who took the classes or worked in the field would know. Either way they know you are qualified or not.
I am married to Miabella, and my experience was the opposite. No one asked and no one seemed to care. This is a good thing because I was too lazy to look it up after the first year. I am sure that if you pulled up a cross section of resumes through the years there are a number of different GPAs listed.
No one has ever asked me my college GPA in the course of a job interview and I have never put it on my resume (I’d have to look it up, since I don’t remember what it was).
My degrees meant something – I got my current job because I had an M.A. – but the GPA was never considered.
In my experience neither how well you did in school or even which school you went to have much bearing on your career. In the business world they are much more interested in your work experience. Your college experience has much more effect on your entry level job.
In the government they do take your GPA when they give you a grade. I’ve seen people with higher GPAs get hired over someone with a lot more experience. I’ve also seen people who got a grade higher because of their GPA. That may not happen all over the government but it does somewhat around here.
GPA was only a factor for the first year or two out. I went into Civil Service for my first job, and my mediocre GPA limited me to a GS-5 instead of a -7 if I had a B or better.
20 years later, no one cares, but the fact that I was continuing my education was a factor in getting my current position,
Once you get a few years’ worth of experience there are probably very few employers that will care at all about GPA. As it is, it seems like very few care even if you don’t have much experience. My employers certainly didn’t care; they only wanted to see my design and illustration portfolio.
I would care. I was involved in screening resumes at my former place of employment, and if a new graduate had a GPA below 3.0, I wouldn’t even bother with his resume. Heck, I was reluctant to even consider anyone with a resume below 3.5.
None of the experienced applicants that we got even bothered to list their GPAs. Having said that, I continue to cite my 4.0 GPA on my resume, even though I finished grad school 7.5 years ago. It doesn’t hurt, and it definitely catches people’s attention.
I don’t have an American-system GPA, but my university results were looked at when I applied for my graduate job. My employer received a few thousand applications and the first method of culling applicants was to toss out those CVs with a grade average below a certain level.
Similarly, in the UK, many grad jobs in banking, consulting and finance require at least a 2.1 degree (which I think is an average of above 60%). Many companies use a partially-automated screening process to cull CVs that don’t meet their grade critieria.
My fahter, years ago, was once asked for transcripts, long after he had graduated and recieved his SM (MS, for the rest of the universe).
My boss, ie the prof that lets me run around his lab and play with chemicals, says that all a BS proves is that you can be trained and it doesn’ t really matter what your GPA is. Granted he had a 1.992 out of college and didn’t go to grad school right away, but you know.
My GPA was only a factor in determining my salary range. I work in an academic science lab for a University, so maybe they care more about that type of thing. The GPA was definitely not a factor in obtaining the job, though, since they didn’t ask me for it until I was already offered the job.
Nope. No one ever bothered to check and people didn’t care too much. I’m told it is often important in your first job, but even then, no one checked or asked.
