Comments on: Make More Than GPA

By: Francisco

Francisco — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:36:14 +0000

Feynman only got A’s in his science classes. He was notorious for failing all liberal arts courses, and was accepted to Princeton with a surprisingly low GPA.

By: Allyn Bauer

Allyn Bauer — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:36:44 +0000

Are you hiring?

By: Renee

Renee — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:46:28 +0000

Actually, you’re giving your the son the wrong advice. His GPA is worth a lot more than SATs.

Proof: http://www.umich.edu/~mrev/archives/1999/summer/chart.htm

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:03:17 +0000

Feynman was a straight-A student…

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 06:27:39 +0000

Yes, a good point.

By: Arthur B.

Arthur B. — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:49:40 +0000

Whenever people are graded on a curve, the curve matters a lot. When I was in France, I was graded on a gaussian curve, when I was in the US, I noticed the grad distribution was roughly exponential (mostly A’s, then B’s etc). It might have just been my program of course.

In the first case, the curve inverse is convex for good students, encouraging specialization, wherease in the second case it is concave, favoring consistency, hence dandellions.

By: Aaron Denney

Aaron Denney — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:41:14 +0000

Eh. If you know you’re going to actually go through the entire class, by all means take it rather than audit it (assuming no horrendous course fees). It can in many cases reduce the other college requirements, giving you more time to study exactly what you want to study.

But absolutely don’t stop working through outside material if you can’t get credit for it.

By: Shae

Shae — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:36:23 +0000

Unfortunately college doesn’t much make it possible to ignore GPA and focus on interesting projects.

If the question was whether to let an A slide into a B, then sure, focus on projects and get the B.

But too often the question is whether to stop absolutely swimming in homework and let an A slide into a C or D.

Many classes have dozens of pages of for-credit homework every class period. In calculus, I would have loved to have skipped the first dozen easy problems, and really sunk my teeth into the few hard ones at the end. That would have absolutely sunk my grade, so I did the first dozen easy ones, got credit for them, and sometimes muddled through one or two of the hard ones. After that, I did the same thing for three other classes, ate a bag of doritoes, and fell into bed at 2:00 am, unable to even consider a project, much less do one.

In other words, I agree, and it’s the school’s fault. At least it was at my school.

By: Fredrik Bränström

Fredrik Bränström — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:04:42 +0000

Thirded.

By: retired urologist

retired urologist — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:42:08 +0000

RU what’s you’re point?

I was responding to jorge’s contention that a 3.3 from UVA disqualifies one for med school. In reality, 71% of such applicants were accepted if their MCAT’s were high.

But a good start might be “What percentage of people who scored a 39 or higher had a GPA of 3.3 or lower?” That should be good for a laugh.

1682 med-school applicants 2005-2007 scored 39 or higher on the MCAT. 152 had GPA’s of 3.3 or less, or 9%. Strangely enough, there were 84 applicants with GPA’s of 3.8-4.0 who scored 14 or less on the MCAT’s; only 3 were accepted (3.6%).

Overall, 74.1% of the highest GPA level were accepted, but 88.2% of the highest MCAT’s were accepted, including one with a 2.3 GPA. It’s more important to have high MCAT’s.

If your MCAT’s are high enough, your are likely