Is a perfect GPA necessary for success in industry?

[twofish-quant]

FYI the guy that invented the term meritocracy...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

 

[flyingpig]

It's not stupidity, just a certain type of teaching that I think works well. I've found that students in other schools get really offended if the prof puts things on the test that weren't directly covered in class, but this happens less (i.e. students getting offended) at MIT.

It's okay but if you don't even put it on the syllabus it's just students guessing what to learn...

All of the tests for the physics courses at MIT are online so that you can see how the teaching works.

Only the lectures, the recitations videos are a bit unorganized

 

[HeLiXe]

Only the lectures, the recitations videos are a bit unorganized

Yeah I have to agree. I would use it more often if it were better organised.

 

[twofish-quant]

Yeah I have to agree. I would use it more often if it were better organised.

It's really hard to get recitation sections into videos. The best recitation sections I had at MIT were those which were pretty interactive. Typically, you'd do the problem set, get confused about X, Y, and Z, and then the recitation section were where you got some hints about how to do the problems.

The core of the MIT physics learning experience was the night before the problem set was due when you'd end up with some of the friends over cola and coffee and tried to figure out how to do the problems. One thing that MIT has done since I graduated was to move that part of the physics curriculum into the center, so they now teach most students through small groups instead of lectures.

That's one of the critical missing pieces that keeps the whole thing from getting online, but last I checked OCW had links to online study groups.

At that point the missing pieces are:

1) how to get junior lab online
2) how to "monetize" knowledge
3) career services
4) residential advising

But I think everything is going to be there in the next decade. Trying to figure out how to get an undergraduate physics curriculum online is the type of interesting problem that there is no class for.

Also part of the reason I talk a lot about MIT is that OCW provides the skeleton for the MIT curriculum, but it's important to provide the muscle. One thing that MIT tries to do that is interesting is that at most schools, if you learned everything the teacher taught you, the teacher has succeeded. Part of the MIT philosophy is that if you learned everything that the teacher has taught you then the teacher has *FAILED*, because the point of MIT is to teach people to go beyond what they were taught, and to come up with new ideas and insights that were not taught in class. You are supposed to come up with new and original stuff, and if you just can repeat what you were taught, that's not acceptable.

You can sort of see how this deep ideology fits in with testing policy.

 

[thegreenlaser]

^I have to agree with that kind of idea and I wish my school had a testing policy more like this. I wish that studying for tests didn't involve blindly memorizing formulas/theorems. I understand that they want to see if people have learned the bare minimum, but I would love a few questions that were truly challenging, and not just regurgitation of class exercises. Questions where you have figure out how you can use what you know to solve a problem you've never seen anything close to before. Sure, grades might hurt a little and people would complain endlessly about how unfair the whole thing is, but I think if you're throwing the same thing at everyone, it's not unfair in the slightest. Not to mention it would develop skills that are actually useful in a real-world problem solving environment.

 

[sfs01]

^I have to agree with that kind of idea and I wish my school had a testing policy more like this. I wish that studying for tests didn't involve blindly memorizing formulas/theorems. I understand that they want to see if people have learned the bare minimum, but I would love a few questions that were truly challenging, and not just regurgitation of class exercises. Questions where you have figure out how you can use what you know to solve a problem you've never seen anything close to before. Sure, grades might hurt a little and people would complain endlessly about how unfair the whole thing is, but I think if you're throwing the same thing at everyone, it's not unfair in the slightest. Not to mention it would develop skills that are actually useful in a real-world problem solving environment.

That's how college exams work in many countries anyhow. E.g. In the UK an A corresponds to a mark of 70% and someone ever getting close to 100% is exceedingly rare in an individual exam, let alone consistently, would say the average is usually around 60%. Everything's still based on the syllabus/what's taught, but some questions will typically be extensions or generalisations of things taught on the course and there isn't much time, making it very difficult to complete everything perfectly.

Not saying the college system there is much better or anything, it has its own problems, but there's many different approaches of grading/testing around.

 

[HeLiXe]

Also part of the reason I talk a lot about MIT is that OCW provides the skeleton for the MIT curriculum, but it's important to provide the muscle. One thing that MIT tries to do that is interesting is that at most schools, if you learned everything the teacher taught you, the teacher has succeeded. Part of the MIT philosophy is that if you learned everything that the teacher has taught you then the teacher has *FAILED*, because the point of MIT is to teach people to go beyond what they were taught, and to come up with new ideas and insights that were not taught in class. You are supposed to come up with new and original stuff, and if you just can repeat what you were taught, that's not acceptable.

You can sort of see how this deep ideology fits in with testing policy.

Well this I can appreciate. In elementary school I had critical thinking class and we were taught to always do this even if our new ideas do not work at first. I remember the critical thinking teacher used to review inventors, as opposed to those who improved their inventions, and he would objectify the concepts of original thought, abstract thinking, and critical thinking with various exercises and comparison. Although we are talking about college level stuff here, one thing that I have realized is this "going beyond" type of thing is not generally appreciated or encouraged throughout grade school. I think this puts students at a disadvantage particularly if they are interested in the maths and sciences for undergrad and graduate levels. In fact this is one of the major problems that I have with my current physics teacher...she is not open to questions and does not listen enough to follow your thoughts but interprets questions to be at a fundamental level and responds in an insulting manner. Anyways I am starting to ramble lolol But thanks for posting this :) Although I'm not going to MIT, it is good to know that they embrace this ideology.

 

[lsaldana]

Also I've heard of perfect A students speaking of a pressure vector. High grades doesn't mean you know everything, it just means you know how to pass a test expertly.

Well said, I know many students like this. Just working for the high grade but have no general knowledge of what went on in class all semester.

 

[thegreenlaser]

Well said, I know many students like this. Just working for the high grade but have no general knowledge of what went on in class all semester.

This may be true occasionally, but it doesn't mean that every A student just studies to pass a test well. I do know a few A students who don't seem to understand what's going on in a class. However, I know more B students like that, and I know significantly more C/D students who have no idea what's going on. (I'm talking proportionally; it's not just because I know more B students than A students)

 

[twofish-quant]

Something to point out here is that the standards of evaluation and selection are very different in industry than in academia. In academia, GPA's, course work, and recommendations are important, whereas in industry (at least in my experience), they are irrelevant. I've never put in my GPA, coursework, and and recommendations in my resume, and there has only been one company that has asked (DE Shaw, if you are wondering). The reason these are irrelevant is that it is widely believed (and IMHO correctly believed) that GPA's, coursework, and recommendations don't provide much of an indicator of the hireability of the employee.

Conversely, there are things that will help. Actual business experience. Someone with a 2.8 GPA that has been an intern has a much stronger resume than someone with a 4.0 GPA that doesn't. Projects. If you *done* something useful or tried, this is also something that will help you. Also certain sports and hobbies. If you've finished a marathon, are a rated chess master, or are a champion bridge player, that will help. The important thing is that you have be able to demonstrate something. I jog or play chess, is pretty useless, but "I've finished the Boston marathon" will be looked on positively or "I have an ELO rating of 2100" If spending time preparing for the Boston marathon pushes your GPA from 4.0 to 3.6, it's probably a good trade as far as hiring goes.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I think you are lumping "industry" into too big a category. Maybe GPA and coursework doesn't matter in finance, but it is commonplace for these to be important considerations in entry-level engineering hires.

 

[Sankaku]

Interesting. As a business owner who contracts Engineers for land development design, asking a professional their GPA is right up there alongside asking how big their private anatomy is. Granted, though, they are not 'entry-level' if we are hiring them.

That said, the GPA effect is probably more commonly seen with big firms. For the professionals that we hire (and we are fairly small and rural), single-person outfits are quite common. In this case, Land Surveyors, Engineers, Foresters, and Lawyers tend to be just as successful in 1 or 2 person firms. In fact, there is a huge need for good Land Surveyors in rural Western Canada (although I can't speak for the oil patch).

 

[twofish-quant]

I think you are lumping "industry" into too big a category. Maybe GPA and coursework doesn't matter in finance, but it is commonplace for these to be important considerations in entry-level engineering hires.

Also one shouldn't lump "finance" into one big category. D.E. Shaw cares a lot about GPA. When I interviewed with them, they wanted my transcripts, and I had to dig up some old report cards, because they wanted to know what my graduate GPA was, and I had no clue what it was. The other thing is that I haven't worked exclusively in finance.

I also worked in oil/gas. Oil/gas is interesting because a lot of the people in positions of power are people in rural Oklahoma and Louisiana that started as roughnecks driving trucks and pouring concrete, and so "book learning" isn't very highly respected. There are some companies on Wall Street that started more or less the same way.

The other thing is that when I talk about "finance" I'm talking about the "parts of finance that hire physics geeks." MBA hiring is a totally, totally different world, but that's a different forum. One of the big differences is that working in an investment bank is pretty much the first choice of careers for an Ivy League MBA, whereas its low on the list for physics Ph.D.'s, so most of the physics Ph.D.'s that you meet in finance are drop outs that are in finance for lack of anything better.

One other interesting thing is to see a mix and clash of corporate cultures. A lot of the megabanks are mergers of places with very different cultures, so it's interesting to see what happens when a "white shoe" firm that was started fifty years ago from prep-school blue bloods gets merged with a firm gets started with a "boiler room" firm that was started fifty years ago with high school dropouts who are proud of having little formal education.

I think most places won't care what your GPA is, and in some places and some people, high GPA is a negative. However, it still is different from academia. How important your GPA is in graduate school admissions is something we can talk about, but I don't know of any admissions committee that thinks that's it's so unimportant that they would rather you not mention it. However, this is common in places that I've worked for.

Also, there is a selection effect here. I'm more familiar with places that don't care much about GPA, because any place that requires stellar GPA's wouldn't have hired me. :-) :-) :-)

Also, if you are giving an application to a grad school committee, you can be reasonably certain that the person reviewing it did well in school, whereas this is not the case with industry. It's unlikely that Microsoft or Dell would have a "no college dropout" policy.