“GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring,” said Laszlo Bock, Google’s Senior Vice President of People’s Operations in a recent New York Times interview. But it wasn’t only GPAs that Bock publicly maimed. He also claimed that test scores are useless.
Bock stated that Google will no longer require a student’s GPA or test scores on job applications as long as the candidate has been out of school for more than two years.
Surprisingly, Google is not the only company trying to ditch GPAs. Shell, the gas station chain, and Youtern, a site that connects interns with employers, also do not ask candidates for their GPAs, according to Cnet.
Daniel Dooghan, an English and writing professor at UT, praised these companies’ shift away from the traditional GPA-focused interview system.
“‘C’s still get degrees,” said Dooghan, who claimed that GPAs are a meaningless indicator of work ethic. “If an ‘A-’ means that you’re a bad student,” he continued, “then anything less would make you a failure. It doesn’t make sense.”
Students have “the ability to perform” or can give “the illusion of performance” with their GPAs, according to Dooghan. This makes it impossible to gauge how much a student learned during their education and whether he or she will be competent completing tasks for employers after graduation.
However, Dooghan believes the real indicator of worth lies in a student’s ability to see education as a means to learn something new as opposed to simply “jumping through hoops” to get a higher GPA.
Even with all of this encouragement to disregard GPAs, many students still see worth in those three numbers.
“I place a lot of emphasis on my GPA,” said David Niepel, a UT graduate student seeking his masters in finance, “because it provides me with feedback about the work I am putting in.”
Niepel believes that a higher GPA makes it easier for students looking to attend graduate school, but it isn’t the defining factor for admittance.
He notes that work experience, reference letters, application essays and test scores are some of the other important factors students should consider.
When it comes to success after college, Niepel said GPA would only matter if “someone does not have work or internship experience.” He said that employers do look at GPAs but rank skills and job-related experience as more important.
Morgan Decker, a senior communication major at UT, agrees with Niepel’s standpoint. “A high GPA is never a bad thing,” Decker said. “But it isn’t essential to all employers when applying for jobs.”
Decker noted that she has had six internships while being a student and considers a solid portfolio with relevant job experience as more important to employers than a GPA.
However, Decker believes that GPAs should not be completely ignored. “If you are competing against someone else for a job who has just as much experience as you do, a higher GPA could give you a more competitive edge,” Decker said.
For Google though, the most important qualities in a candidate are learning abilities and creative problem solving skills. Through Google’s database, the company found no correlation between people who possessed these traits and a higher GPA, leading them to ignore the latter in interviews.
In response to whether Google’s elimination of the GPA will change the traditional education and hiring system today, Dooghan hopes for the best. “I would have far more trust in Google’s measuring ability,” he said. “They are the masters of data analysis. The GPA is an easy but useless metric.”
Danielle Carpenter can be reached at danielle.carpenter@spartans.ut.edu.