Essay on How Important Are Grades in College

Worried about my GPA? Of course. As a college student, I have been told that grades are important for getting a good job in a good company. As the end of the semester as well as the final exams period approaches, I may be spending sleepless nights studying to score an A on the test and boost my GPA. An article entitled “Grades Still Good Indicator of Candidate Quality, Employers Tell Student Forum” (Ang, 2019) and published by The Straits Times, analyses the fact that employers take into consideration grades/GPA during the hiring process. This subject was mentioned during the forum on employability organized by the Nanyang Technological University Students’ Union.

Therefore, do grades matter for employers? When it comes to picking talent, why is it that companies seem only to pay attention to GPA or other grades that show how well a person can score on a test? Through this assignment, I will critically examine this issue by showing why employers should take into account grades. In the second part, I will talk about the disadvantages of doing so, and lastly, employers should take into account other factors during the hiring process.

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Grades are important for employers

Some employers do look at your grades when applying for a job offer. The National Association of Colleges and Employers conducted a survey of more than 200 employers that shows 67% of organizations screened candidates by their GPA (Adams, 2013). Taking into consideration grades can present some advantages for employers such as shortlisting candidates and evaluating their capability and quality.

Easy way to shortlist candidates

As mentioned in the article (Ang, 2019), from a human resource point of view, grades provide the easiest way to shortlist applicants, especially for large companies. According to a study by Glassdoor (Gladstone, 2017), the average job opening attracts 250 resumes. Reading through all these resumes is a waste of time and money for companies. Since the percentage of graduates with a 3.5 GPA or higher is small, some employers will use GPA standards to tighten the candidate pool and select talent. In some industries such as education, health, and law, GPA matters for employers. For example, if you want to become a teacher, you need to have a 3.0 GPA or higher (Martin, 2016). This is a recommendation made by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation and many states in the United States have adopted this recommendation. Therefore, depending on the industry and the size of the company, employers should use grades to cut down the list of candidates and focus on recruiting talent.

A good indicator of a candidate’s capability and quality

Grades can be an indicator of some traits and characteristics of a candidate’s personality that have value for the organization. Indeed, a strong GPA shows that the applicant can learn quickly apply concepts, handle pressure, and be motivated to succeed (Reshwan, 2016). For young people, college has been the greatest challenge faced and may be the only experience close to the professional world that they have. Besides, students with good grades have proved that they can maintain a high level of focus and have patience since they need to exert effort for at least four years to get a college degree. Furthermore, according to a study done by Rice University, students who were considered conscientious had better grades than other students (Imose and Barber, 2015). Conscientiousness is a broad trait that is related to some characteristics such as dutifulness and self-discipline. Employers may prefer recruiting top students who have demonstrated their work ability by performing well having a strong GPA and achieving a long-term objective.

Grades are important for employers who want to reduce the number of candidates and to ensure that they can perform well in the organization. However, taking into consideration grades can bring some disadvantages to employers and hurt the organization.

Employers need to be careful when hiring students with a high GPA

Hiring candidates based on grades presents some disadvantages. It limits the talent pool, and hires candidates with some negative attributes, and some other traits such as creativity.

Limiting the talent pool

First of all, using grades as a screening method during the recruitment process limits the talent pool because it doesn’t give a chance to qualified and skilled applicants with low GPAs (O’Donnell, 2018). When employers use traditional methods to recruit talent, they limit their access to a qualified labor pool and don’t give opportunities for an entire portion of the workforce which limits the diversity of the workforce. Besides, GPA may be a potential discrimination risk towards students having mental illness, financial or family issues, and those who were bullied. Let’s take Google as an example (Osborne, 2015). Lazlo Bock, the head of the human resources department at Google told in a New York Times interview: “GPAs are worthless as a criterion for hiring, and test scores are worthless…We found that they don’t predict anything.” (2013). Besides, George W. Bush said: “To all the C-students: I say, you too can be president of the United States.” (2001)

Top students with negative attributes

Secondly, top students tend to be perfectionists which is a negative attribute when the employee is facing a large workload with high amounts of pressure and speedy service. Not being able to adapt to a different environment also represents a negative trait of students with high grades. A structured classroom and a work environment are two different settings and require different skill sets to succeed (Hess, n.d.). Another negative characteristic is the fear of failure and not being able to overcome this failure and learn from it. During her talk for TEDx Eden High School (2017), Eva Ren talked about one of her friends who was interested in taking an English literature course. She didn’t take this course because she wasn’t good at it and was afraid to not get an A for this course. Going to school is supposed to be an opportunity for learning new things and be better and understand better the subjects that students don’t know. However, grades make students focus more on the exam than on the learning cycle. They usually just study subjects that are on the test and forget everything as soon as they get out of the exam class.

Other traits such as creativity are neglected

One of the disadvantages of recruiting based on grades and GPA is that employers are neglecting some other traits that are essential for fitting in with the job. Indeed, GPA can’t determine an applicant’s work ethic, his fit in the company culture, and his KPI (key performance indicator) alignment (Hess, n.d.). Many of the skills essential in the classroom such as memorization and note-taking are not as important in the workplace. Intangible skills such as creativity, desire to learn, team-building skills, or leadership capability cannot be easily quantified by a GPA. Steve Jobs is an example that grades aren’t everything (Heath, 2013). He was a genius and a great leader with a creative and innovative mind, but he was a college dropout. During his high school years, he averaged a 2.65 GPA which means that he got mostly Bs and Cs. Despite his average GPA, he managed to co-found and be the CEO of Apple Inc.

Taking into account the GPA during the hiring process includes some pros and cons for employers and the organization. The most important cons are the fact that it reduces the candidate pool for recruitment, top students may be too perfectionist and have a fear of failure, and employers don’t consider critical intangible skills such as creativity and leadership ability.

Other factors need to be taken into account

In addition to academic success, employers need to take into consideration other factors such as the experience outside academics as well as the candidate’s personality, during the selection process.

Experience outside academics

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, academic success is not one of the most important elements for employers in hiring a new graduate student. As we can see in appendix 1, internships, jobs, volunteering, and extracurricular activities are more important than college reputation, GPA, and courses (Thompson, 2014). Internship is the top on the list because an employer is indirectly evaluating the academic achievements through the internship. Besides, the job marketplace is becoming more competitive and employers will have dozens or even hundreds of candidates from which to choose (Issid, n.d.). Having a college degree won’t be enough to distinguish yourself from the others. That’s why internships and work experience will be essential when applying for a job offer. This poses a dilemma about whether to get a part-time job and risk being distracted from the studies or not. According to Issid’s perspective, his advice is to get a job while studying if you have the opportunity to do so. Having some work experience in addition to the education received will be invaluable on the resume.

Candidate’s personality

Employers should look for different character traits such as curiosity, humility, teamwork skills, a willingness to learn, and social, political, and emotional intelligence. Academic grades rarely assess these qualities. Therefore, employers should use employee interviews, assessment centers, and work simulations to select the right candidate for the right position in the organization. In his book “Smart is Not Enough” (2007), Guarino introduced the Five Secrets to South Pole Talent: communicator, challenge, stood out, passionate, and creative. These qualities and traits are essential for a South Poler (someone with a GPA below 3.0, who has a strong record of extracurricular activities and leadership roles, and significant stand-out accomplishments) to succeed in an organization. Barbara Corcoran is an example of a South Poler. She started her company, the Corcoran Group, in 1973 and sold it for 66 million dollars. She matches up her experiences in school and at work with the Five Secrets to South Pole Talent. A solution for hiring the best candidate based on the traits was mentioned in the article (Ang, 2019). It consists in hiring up to 10% of employees without looking at resumes and grades.

In conclusion, the article poses the issue of the importance of grades/GPA during the hiring process. By taking into account grades, employers can easily shortlist applicants and have an idea about the applicant’s ability to learn quickly, handle pressure, and focus on a task. However, using grades as a screening method can limit the talent pool, and make employers hire bad candidates who are too perfectionist, can’t handle failures, and are not creative and ethical. Therefore, employers should look at the work experience of the applicants and evaluate their personality through interviews or assessment centers.