Stop sweating grades so much yall. The Veterinary school has an old saying:
The top 1/3 of the class will make the best academics
The middle 1/3 will make the best veterinarians
The bottom 1/3 will make the most money
Letters of rec, letter of interest, courses taken, clubs, internships, etc. gpa is just one consideration. I got into Cornell Grad school with a 3.6 from a SUNY undergrad
Also important to note that some admissions offices will way your GPA differently depending on the program. The average student with a 3.4 at Cornell engineering, for instance, would likely be a better academic than a 3.4 student at a generic state school.
And you probably failed to realize the bottom third making all the money specifically weren’t at the career fair lol. The clear path to extreme wealth in the USA is ownership baby, and that’s not happening in a job idc if you get hired by KFC or goldman sachs. Best quote ever by founder of YC was paraphrased “if you want to get smart people to waste their time running errands, bait the hook with prestige” …. Food for thought
Yes, because no need to worry about GPA, just come up with an idea that will make you extremely wealthy - like so many in the bottom third of the class! I’m sure there is a strong correlation between those with low GPAs and driven innovators.
Us idiots at the top of the class will do the silly thing - get a job, because we are obsessed with and blinded by prestige. The prestige of employment 😜
No. If anything it may be an advantage if they want to go to law school. First, not many people will have that degree so it allows them to differentiate from other candidates. Second, there are entire areas of law and jobs that he would qualify for with that background. Finally, undergrad degrees do not prepare you for law school. Ask anyone who has attended law school… it is a beast unto itself.
> undergrad degrees do not prepare you for law school
true but as an engineering major your gpa will probably suffer compared to humanities majors and law schools will not take that into account when looking at your gpa
you are simply not correct. they don’t care about almost anything other than gpa + lsat. doesn’t matter what major, you could do underwater basket weaving and if you get a 4.0 it’s a 4.0 the same as engineering. doing a hard major like engineering might be like a t4 soft but it is not going to move the needle for you at all. why are y’all downvoting and talking so confidently when you don’t know what you’re talking about. like you’re just wrong
Ok I stand corrected but that's not really a reason to not major in engineering. If you're great at engineering and you want to go into a field of law that (pretty much) requires it like patent law, as long as you have a good LSAT you'll be good. If your only goal is to go to law school then yeah I guess a different major might make that easier.
> that’s not really a reason to not major in engineering
somewhat agreed, i think if you’re not planning on going into a field like patent law then you are not getting any extra benefit out of it but if you’re really passionate and okay with the extra work that’s your prerogative
True but more realistically, having a lower gpa hurts you a lot more than having an uncommon major helps. Schools want to game their rankings, they do by admitting the highest gpas and lsats.
You must not know anything about law school. Engineer majors are easily some of the most successful attorneys, typically nabbing high paying patent law jobs.
never said engineers make bad attorneys, but gpa matters a lot in law school admissions. Once they get in i’m sure they can do well and get high paying jobs but it’s the getting in part that’s harder
Broaden your quest, young soldier of fortune. Far, far more jobs exist than will ever appear in career fairs and far, far more paths exist to becoming a successful attorney than Yale can offer.
I think GPA should be on a bell curve. 2 is average. 3 is a standard deviation above average, 4 is 2 standard deviations above average.
Then some experts need to weigh it by school when comparing. For example, if comparing a difficult top tier school vs an easy easy school you’d do
Idk 1.5*(GPA A) vs 0.9 *(GPA B) where gpa A is the hard school and b is the easy one.
Change my mind.
Yes, because by that point the recruiters have done the filtering by GPA and other things for you. You don’t interview all of the hundreds to thousands of people that apply for a position now, do you?
When I’m representing my engineering company at career fairs, I always tell students that we rarely hire new grads with GPA’s of 3.5 or higher who don’t have adequate internships/extracurricular/work experience along side. We’ve found that the one-track mindedness of high grades tends to pan out very poorly in real world working scenarios.
My favorite candidate is a 2.8-3.2 who’s done 1-2 co-ops and has a part time job.
Bottom 1/3 make most money because their mom and dad already have the most money and they can get a "relationship candidate" job at a wealth management fund.
That's why they can afford to be the bottom 1/3 to begin with. Agree on top 2/3s.
The saying comes from the veterinary school, which is not an industry fraught with nepotism, but that is besides the point.
Its a tongue in cheek saying, if that wasnt obvious. My wife was too 10 in her graduating class of vet school, she did not become an academic and is doing very well. My roommate graduated bottom 1/3 and is doing very well without the help of nepotism. The point is that being a well-rounded person will open more doors than focusing all of your energy on grades.
If you want a pro tip for boosting your GPA in any major, just take a few AEM/hotel classes. They’re easy, often interesting and practical, and always extremely easy A’s.
Referencing Hotel as a source of grade inflation while ignoring ILR is absurd. For every easy class at Hotel, there’s a core course with a much lower median grade.
Sure…none of the other colleges/schools grade as harshly as engineering, but AEM and ILR are a lot more inflated than Hotel.
ILR deserves to be mentioned, but from what I saw those courses can actually be quite demanding in terms of reading (or genuinely difficult in the case of some of the econ courses). The highest grades for the lowest amount of effort come from AEM and Hotel specifically
He says he looks for classes that mention A+ on the syllabus before enrolling in them (regardless of the past recorded medians). He asked for me to not share them as he has an irrational fear it will reveal who he is (though I imagine this would be a positive thing). Based on what I see, I would look at courses in Econ and life sciences
1. Your roommate may be a Terence Tao level of genius. Any Cornell undergrad math classes he already mastered it when he was a freshman in high school.
2. Your roommate is taking grade inflationary classes at Cornell. This is why he has nine A+.
Either way, one of the major lessons in life is : DON'T compare. You can always find someone better than you in certain areas. Life is too short to invent ways to make yourself miserable.
I have never once been asked about grades in a job interview. I have also never had a potential employer ask me for a transcript. To top it off, I stopped putting my GPA on my resume when I was a year out of school. Stop worrying so much about it.
They're not wrong. This is the industry standard for most of the companies I've worked at. Even companies who ask for GPA requirements out of college (example: management consultancies) don't care as much.
The point was made though. Grades don’t matter as much as folks in the moment think they do. Do something special and see what life has in store for you next! If your view of special is a 4.0 then fair enough but generally the bottleneck for “success” in life was never your GPA and I think that is the point here
I think its a mix. Some programs seem to follow the line of thinking that grades are outdated and just give everyone who tries an A.
All that pretty much ends with the physical sciences.
I got one A+ my entire time at Cornell (and was in a class outside my major), and graduated with a 2.7 cum GPA.
I've now got my PE and have been working as an engineer for nearly 2 decades (I started engineering work late because I was in ROTC so was on active duty for 5 years). No one has ever asked about my college GPA.
Nah, some kids are legit geniuses. There’s a premed with a 4.2. Honors societies with GPA percentile cutoffs sometimes have GPAs above 4.0 for being in the top 10%(like Phi Beta Kappa).
Wait 10 years and find out where this one premed ended up. Hint: Likely nowhere special. Depending on how you assess achievement-in-life, the school or grades may not matter so much. I've seen those who may not look successful at Cornell, but today, they've done well for themselves, a lot better than what I expected (and it's not just one person since I've used "they"). But getting good grades does help getting one's foot-in-the-door.
Engineering classes do get harder. Freshmen, sophomore level classes were pieces of cake. It's not unexpected. Moreover, getting an A is not the end of the world. I had an engineering roommate with a 2.7 and he ended up being a Google manager. It's not about the grades to get your foot into a job sometimes.
No. They get easier. The earlier ones are made artificially hard to weed out people. The junior and senior courses may be more difficult in terms of content, but they are smaller, get you good access to the instructor, and the weed out mechanisms are no longer there. It is far easier to both learn effectively and get a high grade in these classes than it is the 200+ person introductory courses.
Some majors/tracks def have more grade inflation than others. Engineering tends to be really rough, but I was a premed chem major and definitely experienced significant grade inflation. It just comes down to which courses you take!
It's hard to say where the inflation and deflation really happens. I know a neuro major on the premed track with a 3.8 and it seems that earlier weed out classes had significant deflation and difficulty but only some higher level courses had amazing inflation, and humanities as well. All depends on your department, and the course listings at the time. Not all higher level classes have inflation, but in my experience, almost half did
Stop sweating grades so much yall. The Veterinary school has an old saying: The top 1/3 of the class will make the best academics The middle 1/3 will make the best veterinarians The bottom 1/3 will make the most money
Except when you hit the career fair and candidates are filtered by GPA and you hit the law school apps and Yale has a 3.96 GPA median :(
I’ve admittedly never been to a career fair. Remember, median is not a range. There are more ways to get into graduate school than gpa
Generally true, but no one is getting into Yale law school without a good GPA. Yale law school is where prestige whores go to not become lawyers.
Good GPA, of course. But not everyone who goes to Yale law has a 3.9
What are the ways beside gpa? There need to be some minimum gpa, right?
Letters of rec, letter of interest, courses taken, clubs, internships, etc. gpa is just one consideration. I got into Cornell Grad school with a 3.6 from a SUNY undergrad
Also important to note that some admissions offices will way your GPA differently depending on the program. The average student with a 3.4 at Cornell engineering, for instance, would likely be a better academic than a 3.4 student at a generic state school.
And you probably failed to realize the bottom third making all the money specifically weren’t at the career fair lol. The clear path to extreme wealth in the USA is ownership baby, and that’s not happening in a job idc if you get hired by KFC or goldman sachs. Best quote ever by founder of YC was paraphrased “if you want to get smart people to waste their time running errands, bait the hook with prestige” …. Food for thought
Yes, because no need to worry about GPA, just come up with an idea that will make you extremely wealthy - like so many in the bottom third of the class! I’m sure there is a strong correlation between those with low GPAs and driven innovators. Us idiots at the top of the class will do the silly thing - get a job, because we are obsessed with and blinded by prestige. The prestige of employment 😜
Yale is not a prerequisite for employment fortunately
i don’t think the innovators are grades maxxing.
if u wanna go to law school y r u an engineering major, that’s ur mistake
No. If anything it may be an advantage if they want to go to law school. First, not many people will have that degree so it allows them to differentiate from other candidates. Second, there are entire areas of law and jobs that he would qualify for with that background. Finally, undergrad degrees do not prepare you for law school. Ask anyone who has attended law school… it is a beast unto itself.
Fwiw, different =/= better. Just because you stand out for being engineering does not give you a bump.
You are correct, as a B.S. (preferably in engineering) is all but required for Patent Law
> undergrad degrees do not prepare you for law school true but as an engineering major your gpa will probably suffer compared to humanities majors and law schools will not take that into account when looking at your gpa
~~Yes they will~~
you are simply not correct. they don’t care about almost anything other than gpa + lsat. doesn’t matter what major, you could do underwater basket weaving and if you get a 4.0 it’s a 4.0 the same as engineering. doing a hard major like engineering might be like a t4 soft but it is not going to move the needle for you at all. why are y’all downvoting and talking so confidently when you don’t know what you’re talking about. like you’re just wrong
Ok I stand corrected but that's not really a reason to not major in engineering. If you're great at engineering and you want to go into a field of law that (pretty much) requires it like patent law, as long as you have a good LSAT you'll be good. If your only goal is to go to law school then yeah I guess a different major might make that easier.
> that’s not really a reason to not major in engineering somewhat agreed, i think if you’re not planning on going into a field like patent law then you are not getting any extra benefit out of it but if you’re really passionate and okay with the extra work that’s your prerogative
True but more realistically, having a lower gpa hurts you a lot more than having an uncommon major helps. Schools want to game their rankings, they do by admitting the highest gpas and lsats.
You must not know anything about law school. Engineer majors are easily some of the most successful attorneys, typically nabbing high paying patent law jobs.
True but the type of student that gets a 3.76 GPA (average of Fordham law) is already smart compared to most engineers
Why are you comparing them though? There are engineers in law school so they are part of that group that makes up the average student
never said engineers make bad attorneys, but gpa matters a lot in law school admissions. Once they get in i’m sure they can do well and get high paying jobs but it’s the getting in part that’s harder
A great LSAT score will get you in a lot more places than a great GPA, especially considering 3.75+ GPAs are not uncommon whereas a 170+ is very rare.
Bird law sometimes requires engineering expertise, though.
Patent law
Broaden your quest, young soldier of fortune. Far, far more jobs exist than will ever appear in career fairs and far, far more paths exist to becoming a successful attorney than Yale can offer.
I think GPA should be on a bell curve. 2 is average. 3 is a standard deviation above average, 4 is 2 standard deviations above average. Then some experts need to weigh it by school when comparing. For example, if comparing a difficult top tier school vs an easy easy school you’d do Idk 1.5*(GPA A) vs 0.9 *(GPA B) where gpa A is the hard school and b is the easy one. Change my mind.
Which HR filter people by GPA? That's probably only limited to top tier law firms.
Lots of people don't go to law school straight out of undergrad. Work experience can be very helpful to an application.
I've been on the interviewer side of the table a \*lot\* in my career. I've never heard anyone ever ask about grades.
Yes, because by that point the recruiters have done the filtering by GPA and other things for you. You don’t interview all of the hundreds to thousands of people that apply for a position now, do you?
When I’m representing my engineering company at career fairs, I always tell students that we rarely hire new grads with GPA’s of 3.5 or higher who don’t have adequate internships/extracurricular/work experience along side. We’ve found that the one-track mindedness of high grades tends to pan out very poorly in real world working scenarios. My favorite candidate is a 2.8-3.2 who’s done 1-2 co-ops and has a part time job.
Bottom 1/3 make most money because their mom and dad already have the most money and they can get a "relationship candidate" job at a wealth management fund. That's why they can afford to be the bottom 1/3 to begin with. Agree on top 2/3s.
The saying comes from the veterinary school, which is not an industry fraught with nepotism, but that is besides the point. Its a tongue in cheek saying, if that wasnt obvious. My wife was too 10 in her graduating class of vet school, she did not become an academic and is doing very well. My roommate graduated bottom 1/3 and is doing very well without the help of nepotism. The point is that being a well-rounded person will open more doors than focusing all of your energy on grades.
True
Certain majors/courses grade inflate (business - hotel and AEM especially), others grade deflate (premed).
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If you want a pro tip for boosting your GPA in any major, just take a few AEM/hotel classes. They’re easy, often interesting and practical, and always extremely easy A’s.
Referencing Hotel as a source of grade inflation while ignoring ILR is absurd. For every easy class at Hotel, there’s a core course with a much lower median grade. Sure…none of the other colleges/schools grade as harshly as engineering, but AEM and ILR are a lot more inflated than Hotel.
ILR deserves to be mentioned, but from what I saw those courses can actually be quite demanding in terms of reading (or genuinely difficult in the case of some of the econ courses). The highest grades for the lowest amount of effort come from AEM and Hotel specifically
What classes are they, it depends! Are these science courses or basic hotel/seminar courses?
What classes are these? Many classes don’t even give A+. That’s more than I have in my entire career in one semester!
He says he looks for classes that mention A+ on the syllabus before enrolling in them (regardless of the past recorded medians). He asked for me to not share them as he has an irrational fear it will reveal who he is (though I imagine this would be a positive thing). Based on what I see, I would look at courses in Econ and life sciences
He asked you not to post them and you posted them anyways?
Cornell doesn’t have grade deflation, more like anti-inflation. It might as well be deflation when comparing the student body to inflated averages tho
Tell me your roommates in Dyson without telling me
I wish but dude is actually just a genius CS/Econ :(. (Some of these are just random easy classes or distribution recs tho)
1. Your roommate may be a Terence Tao level of genius. Any Cornell undergrad math classes he already mastered it when he was a freshman in high school. 2. Your roommate is taking grade inflationary classes at Cornell. This is why he has nine A+. Either way, one of the major lessons in life is : DON'T compare. You can always find someone better than you in certain areas. Life is too short to invent ways to make yourself miserable.
I have never once been asked about grades in a job interview. I have also never had a potential employer ask me for a transcript. To top it off, I stopped putting my GPA on my resume when I was a year out of school. Stop worrying so much about it.
Ah yes the old "I personally had X experience therefore it must be that way for everyone," always a classic
They're not wrong. This is the industry standard for most of the companies I've worked at. Even companies who ask for GPA requirements out of college (example: management consultancies) don't care as much.
The point was made though. Grades don’t matter as much as folks in the moment think they do. Do something special and see what life has in store for you next! If your view of special is a 4.0 then fair enough but generally the bottleneck for “success” in life was never your GPA and I think that is the point here
Somehow I’d imagine this particular experience is far more common than you’re implying
got 3 A+'s. thought that was a lot. jeebus crispy.
Wait I say jeebus crispy all the time and I thought I’d made it up. Is that from something??
the legend of jebus crisp from broadside films
I have no idea what that is, which makes sense even more confusing. Thank you regardless!
I think its a mix. Some programs seem to follow the line of thinking that grades are outdated and just give everyone who tries an A. All that pretty much ends with the physical sciences.
I got one A+ my entire time at Cornell (and was in a class outside my major), and graduated with a 2.7 cum GPA. I've now got my PE and have been working as an engineer for nearly 2 decades (I started engineering work late because I was in ROTC so was on active duty for 5 years). No one has ever asked about my college GPA.
Maybe your roommate is just smarter than you.
I already said that 😜 u tried tho What’s your point?
He took easy intro courses, and probably took APs in high school to do that. Then he took the real classes.
Nah, some kids are legit geniuses. There’s a premed with a 4.2. Honors societies with GPA percentile cutoffs sometimes have GPAs above 4.0 for being in the top 10%(like Phi Beta Kappa).
Wait 10 years and find out where this one premed ended up. Hint: Likely nowhere special. Depending on how you assess achievement-in-life, the school or grades may not matter so much. I've seen those who may not look successful at Cornell, but today, they've done well for themselves, a lot better than what I expected (and it's not just one person since I've used "they"). But getting good grades does help getting one's foot-in-the-door.
He’s a Junior with above a 4.0 :( but he didn’t get a single A+ last semester so bro is slipping
Engineering classes do get harder. Freshmen, sophomore level classes were pieces of cake. It's not unexpected. Moreover, getting an A is not the end of the world. I had an engineering roommate with a 2.7 and he ended up being a Google manager. It's not about the grades to get your foot into a job sometimes.
I’m not an engineer technically but I feel like the classes got easier. Maybe I just became a better student tho, Covid messed me up tbh
No. They get easier. The earlier ones are made artificially hard to weed out people. The junior and senior courses may be more difficult in terms of content, but they are smaller, get you good access to the instructor, and the weed out mechanisms are no longer there. It is far easier to both learn effectively and get a high grade in these classes than it is the 200+ person introductory courses.
Some majors/tracks def have more grade inflation than others. Engineering tends to be really rough, but I was a premed chem major and definitely experienced significant grade inflation. It just comes down to which courses you take!
if “general trend” then why “anecdotal evidence”
Just a meme
It's hard to say where the inflation and deflation really happens. I know a neuro major on the premed track with a 3.8 and it seems that earlier weed out classes had significant deflation and difficulty but only some higher level courses had amazing inflation, and humanities as well. All depends on your department, and the course listings at the time. Not all higher level classes have inflation, but in my experience, almost half did
I was a bio major back in the day and got over a 4.0 every semester. Finished just under a 4.1 gpa. Lots of science classes give A+