Remember Trina Thompson? She was the graduate from Monroe College in the Bronx who last summer sued the school because she couldn’t find a job.
One of her arguments was that with a 2.7 grade-point average, or GPA, she should have had no problem landing a gig in a lousy economy.
Bloggers and the media mocked Thompson because many said a 2.7 GPA was really not that great. Well, turns out a 4.0 GPA might not be that great either.
According to a story in the New York Times yesterday, some schools are inflating their students GPA’s to help them land jobs. (Thanks to career coach and resume writer Miriam Salpeter for pointing out this story to me.)
In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month.
Law schools seem to view higher grades as one way to rescue their students from the tough economic climate — and perhaps more to the point, to protect their own reputations and rankings.
OK, maybe it’s just me, but this seems a bit disingenuous, dare I say, even dishonest.
It’s bad enough that some job seekers get the brush off if they don’t have a degree from a fancy school. Now the fancy schools are upping the ante by handing out gold stars to all their graduates whether they deserve it or not.
In the past, I’ve asked recruiters if a GPA really makes a difference when hiring someone, and most said it can if the candidate is right out of college. Other than that, it doesn’t matter if you had a 4.0 or a 2.0 if you were able to walk away with a degree. And I had one hiring manager tell me it actually worked against a candidate when he kept talking about his 3.9 GPA during an interview. It seemed like that was the only thing he was proud of and he had been out of school for a few years already.
That said, if you have a high GPA right now and you just graduated play it up and hope the hiring manager didn’t see the New York Times article. For the rest of you, you can always sue your school.
But alas, it still may not land you the job of your dreams.
I found Thompson’s LinkedIn profile this morning and it turns out she’s working as a sales associate at Macy’s. Not a bad gig, but I’m thinking with a degree in Business Administration she may be looking for something more managerial. I sent her a message to find out what her next move is going to be.
But the big lesson here is sometimes you have to pay some dues when you get out of college before you can get the big job. I know, it’s frustrating that things just don’t fall in your lap, but most of the successful people I’ve interviewed over the years had to, at some point, prove themselves. I devoted a whole chapter in my book, “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office,” to paying dues because so many CEOs had stories they were proud of.
Yes, it’s great if you had perfect grades in school, but alas that doesn’t mean you’ll have perfect grades in the work world.
Believe it or not, I don’t even remember my GPA. I guess I would have if it was 4.0. 
Do you remember? Did it help or hinder your job search?
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:30 am
I’ve found that GPA does mean something when looking at adult students who went to school while holding down a full time job and balancing other responsibilities (like family). So long as they earned the degree from an accredited school that doesn’t have a reputation for grade inflation (something that was a hot topic 10 or 15 years ago, too), it lets you know if they were able to perform exceptionally well while under a lot of pressure.
For the traditional student set (18-22), I think it matters less, unless trying to select between a pair of otherwise equally qualified candidates. Though I’m sure many hiring managers have their own stereotypes of people who earn good marks in school, so it might subconsciously influence some decisions. If the school confers graduation honors (e.g. cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude), I believe those are better than listing a numeric GPA. Besides, most who have those great GPAs likely earned some other academic honors or awards (e.g., scholarships, fellowships, honor societies) that can be listed in the appropriate category (when appropriate).
Once you get to the graduate level, I really don’t believe GPA matters at all–it is the achievement of the degree that matters.
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:34 am
Yes, you’re right HikingStick. Adult students can definitely play up their GPA, especially in light of the many other things they may have been doing while getting the degree. But again, there are only so many years you can tout your GPA.
Although, you can always talk about it at cocktail parties.
June 22nd, 2010 at 8:34 pm
I’m glad you blogged about this…Changing grades after the fact is like revisionist history — retelling a story in a different way after the fact based on details that usually differ from reality. I can’t imagine it’s ever a good thing. While I’m not convinced GPA matters once people have work experience, when information like this comes out, it makes the GPA seem like a joke. Maybe these schools would be better off offering their alumni resources to teach them how to look for jobs instead of artificially inflating their grades. Thanks for the shout out!
June 23rd, 2010 at 12:52 pm
As I recall, mine was just under 3.0 (guess: 2.95). But it was my experience while in college that helped me land a job right away, a week after final exams.
Miriam’s right in that GPA doesn’t matter much once you’ve picked up work experience. But anything recent - even if you went back to school later - can’t hurt if it’s a good number, say, 3.5 or better.
June 23rd, 2010 at 2:12 pm
I’ve been an advocate of not assigning grades in college. The types of things I got asked were to produce projects I worked on during school. For instance a branding project for a D-1 college athletics department or a breakdown for the P/L of a sports arena.
September 17th, 2010 at 11:17 am
I’m based in the UK, so we don’t have GPA here but I do know what you mean and there’s similar issues attached to our system. (So the rest of my post isn’t completely unintelligable, we have a first, which loosely equates to an A, an upper second which is B and so on so forth.) If you ask me, your grade isn’t one of the most important criteria when it comes to graduate jobs. There’s been quite a lot of coverage about how a lot of jobs are closed off to people with lower seconds (and that really annoys me but that’s a whole different rant) but I did look into it and I couldn’t find very many that even specified a grade. All they wanted was a degree.
I definitely think that experience is more valuable. If you ask me, the person with a high grade and no soft skills or experience won’t even get a look in if someone with a lower grade but strong experience and soft skills applies. Obviously, there are exceptions but I do think that the media puts way too much emphasis on high grades. A lot of employers won’t care.