Re: GPA on Resume: School versus the World

[Richard Mateosian <srm -at- C2 -dot- ORG>]

>Richard Mateosian wrote, as far as I can tell, that a high GPA from a good
>school indirectly implies that a person will make a good employee.

Yes, that's approximately what I wrote.

I understand all the arguments about how one ought to take courses to learn
about interesting new subjects, not to get good grades. That's how I got my
two Cs in college. My roommate blew his 4.0 in his final semester (he got
his only two Bs), because he stopped going to all his classes and sat at his
desk day and night trying to work out a theory of gravitational waves.
Another friend, a brilliant mathematician, flunked out because he refused to
do assignments he considered stupid or irrelevant.

I also understand that employees can sometimes put out better manuals by
ignoring company objectives and deadlines and searching earnestly for the
truth. Employees who dare to do this are a great asset, but they can also
get you into a lot of trouble if you don't have a clear sense of when you
can or can't count on them.

When it comes down to the day-to-day business of running a business, you
want to feel that your employees understand and accept your goals and
priorities, and that they can get the job done. The last I knew, GPA is a
reasonably good (not perfect) predictor of this sort of employee behavior.
...RM


Richard Mateosian        http://www.c2.org/~srm/   President, Berkeley STC
Freelance Technical Writer     srm -at- c2 -dot- org        Review Editor, IEEE Micro