Personally, I’d be inclined to fire a manager who didn’t bother to ask about the GPA of a fresh college grad.
Back when I was job-hunting I found that government jobs asked for transcripts, but I assumed it was just to verify that you actually had the degrees you were claiming, rather than to check the GPA. I’ve never been asked about it otherwise, except for my first academic job.
Maybe so. But he didn’t ask if I thought it should have affected my job, only if it did… It never did.
I’ve found that no one really cares or asks once you are in the working world and have some experience. However, for that first job out of school the GPA can be very important. The first job a graduate gets is often one of the most life changing. A college grad who makes 40K per year ends up making a lot more over their lifetime than a grad who makes 30K for year. Every raise you get can be based on that starting point.
Many companies who recruited at my school would have minimums for their applicants. For instance, a large bank or accounting firm might require an accounting or finance degree with a GPA of 3.5 minimum. This was a big deal to those types of graduates because they would actually take these requirements very seriously. Although, I suspect upon getting the job the subject would never come up again for the rest of their careers.
My $.02. YMMV. Etc, etc.
I teach at a school that boasts about having teachers from very big-name universities, and I came from a regular ol’ state university. I got the job largely because of my GPA, but obviously, I’m in an academic field.
As important in my case was that maintaining the GPA made it possible to get the degree in the first place, which of course affects my job. Without scholarships (mostly puny ones, but a lot of them, and they add up), I’d have had a much harder time getting through school. They were allegedly based on GPA and recommendations. I sometimes wondered if I got the scholarship only because I was the only one willing to slog through all the application forms.
Nope. Nobody was ever the slightest bit interested. At the time of my first job out of college, the field I had studied in was in high demand. I had 3 or 4 offers. I think the main requirement was a pulse and respiration.
Much later, when I changed fields, my college degree was interesting only for the fact that it showed I could finish something I started. The grades I got in the schools where I sought additional education in my new field were also of no interest whatsoever to anyone but myself. The certificate I got was nice, but actual accomplishments were all any employer really wanted to know about.
They let people into chemistry PhD programs with a 1.992?
I am hoping no, my grades wont matter but I don’t have any real experience right now so I can’t say but I have asked this question a couple of times on SD and people said ‘no, it doesn’t matter’. I should have a 3.4-ish GPA though.
I’m an old fart with a Ph. D., so I can offer three points of view.
When my wife interviewed for her first (math) teaching job, they told her she was the first applicant with more than a 2.5 that they’d seen. (Some principle at another school went on vacation with the only(!) copies of the resumes and transcripts. These guys actually broke into the District office to see her’s!) Her GPA mattered quite a bit. (She had some obnoxiously high one.)
When I applied for grad school, my GPA mattered quite a bit, and not in a good way. I graduated with “only” a 3.6/4.0, which was not good enough for the top physics schools, but was good enough for the next tier. Basically, I lazied and partied myself out of graduate school in my first 1.5 years. :rolleyes: My transcript also mattered for my first two jobs after graduate school.
Now that I am often called on to interview people, and have significant input in who we hire, I never see a transcript. I only see work experience. I’ve learned that GPA’s from technical “colleges” don’t matter at all. It is necessary to ask technical questions. The GPA of someone who attended a “real” school might matter, but I am mostly looking for someone who will fit in and who knows at least the basics. Usually, I’m one of two guys who asks technical questions. (I work in a software shop.) I’ve yet to interview someone from a major state school who couldn’t program. Beyond that, our major requirement is that they be able to get along with the customer, so the GPA wouldn’t matter.
My GPA was a factor in getting my first job.* It also played a part in getting me into a good grad school. It hasn’t come up since then. I’m still glad I had a good one, because a good grad school and a good first job has really helped me find subsequent employment.
- My first job was in public accounting, and the top firms do require a minimum GPA as others have mentioned. My college graded on a 2 point scale (A=2; B=1; everything below was 0), and my GPA was 1.95. I didn’t get many interviews at first, and I have a feeling I was shut out because someone in HR typed “1.95” into the system without noticing that it was on a 2 point scale. I started listing my GPA as “equivalent to 3.95” on my resume, and I started getting interviews–even with firms that had previously rejected me.
While at this point in my career no one would ask specifically about GPA, there are GPA-related honors that will stick with me and are still appropriate to have one my CV/resume. I know one of them helped me land my current job.
I’ll add to the resounding “No!” responses. While several have commented that, as I agree, anything you accomplished in college fades rapidly in importance as your career progresses, my college track was not even very important in gaining my first post-graduation professional position. They wanted to know that I was a graduate, and that was about it.
Many years down the road, I took the position I’m in now, as the head scientist of my discipline for an NYSE traded company that is, frankly, doing quite well. I don’t recall anybody asking me if I even went to college when they hired me - it was all based on track record and reputation. They’d already hired me when they asked for a resume for the record.
Oh, yeah. No resume I’ve ever used has included my GPA (which wasn’t bad).
Which college you went to has a greater impact than your GPA (unless it is really bad, I suppose.) A 3.0 from MIT is more likely to get you a job than a 4.0 from Podunk Tech. Not to mention that a few colleges, like U of Chicago, still have low average scores, as opposed to grade inflated ones like Harvard.
As for me, I suppose a reasonable GPA helped me get into grad school (though other factors mattered more) but it had no impact on any jobs, and never has.
What a stupid program!
:smack:
Most HR people probably don’t know about the unusual scale, so you were wise to use the “equivilent” GPA instead. I can’t believe that your school would use such a silly system. The obvious result would be for the graduates to suffer when applying because of the mis-understanding.
It has never affected my work life, and no one has ever cared. Mine was a 2.7 with a BS in Physics from a run-of-the-mill school. Definitely average. The proportion of interest about college from managers has only ever been whether or not I have a degree, and how well the national rankings of the football team were at the time of the interview.
When I was doing hiring at one time, all I cared about was whether the applicant met the minimum job requirements educationally (i.e. did HR require a 2-year or 4-year). After that, it was all work-experience and interview performance that decided whether they got hired or not (plus the wink-wink-nudge-nudge racial and gender quotas that HR required me to maintain in the department, but that is another story). GPA does not correlate to work-ethic or skill in my experience. Some of the best workers I ever had were slacker-party-animals in college.
I’m civil service too, and my GPA allowed me to start at a higher grade and step. It also played a role in getting the interview, because there was a cutoff.
But I don’t know of any other instance where it’s mattered. Promotions and bonuses are based on accomplishments. And the few times I’ve shopped myself for work on the outside, the same thing held true. Once you’ve been working a while, the experience is more important than what you did in school.
As someone noted, this may be different in academia – my GPA played a role in getting in to grad school.
Only once in the past twenty years have I ever been asked to submit a college transcript for a job interview.
Transcripts from my college include a section that records all authorized inquiries about a person’s degree or grades. In all the years since college, with many jobs and more job interviews behind me, no one has even bothered to verify any information about my degree or grades.
But if you run for public office, be prepared. A top legislator in my state had claimed for years to have a college degree until the press revealed that she in fact had not completed it.
I have a question about GPA.
Say you took three college classes when you were 17, but then stopped going to two of them, thinking at the time that the professors would drop you automatically, and ended up getting two F’s.
A couple years later you go back to school (not the same one), and now you get all A’s in your classes.
Were you to put your GPA on a resume, or to answer a question about your GPA, should you include the F’s? What if you don’t want to include any of the grades or classes from the college you got the F’s at?
Well, what you can get away with, and what is correct, are two different things, as this thread has shown.
The correct procedure is to include those F grades in your undergraduate GPA if they were taken for degree credit, regardless of whether it was the school from which you got your degree.
From personal experience, I agree.