Many of us harbor this doubt one time or the other, especially following a rough exam. The answer is Yes and No. As a matter of fact, this question has different answers for different career choices and different fields. Let’s explore it a little deeper.
If you choose Higher Studies, marks definitely matter. Whether you are from medicine/law/STEM marks are very important criteria to reach next level. Students with good academic record are preferred over students with low grades. Although you exhibit skills required for research, lower grades can hinder your chances to enter into prestigious universities. This also applies to scoring internships during graduation or MBA. Employers evaluate students based on their marks. But tech giant Google has changed the game. They started recruiting people with lower grades and even college drop-outs proving that GPA/Marks matters very less.
“One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different.” – Laszlo Book, Google’s SVP of HR.
Following this trend Ernst & Young, one of the most reputed accountancy firms in the world, knocked-off college grades as criteria for recruitment.
“Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found that screening students based on academic performance alone is too blunt an approach to recruitment. It found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken,” Maggie Stilwell, EY’s managing partner for talent told Huffington Post.
A good GPA can jump start your career but it not the important factor that determines your career. To add credibility to this opinion, Edmond Lau, author of The Effective Engineer, says “GPA is just one signal among many that feeds into a hiring decision. Other signals include projects you’ve worked on, open-source contributions you’ve made, awards you’ve won, impact you’ve achieved, and many others. The people who get jobs at great companies despite low GPAs are the ones who can demonstrate, via these other signals, that they spent their energy on other worthwhile endeavors”.
After seeing college drop-outs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg building billion-dollar companies, thinking that college GPA is stopping you from reaching higher levels in your career is just not true. Nothing matters if you have confidence that you can achieve anything. As Jordan Belfort says:
“The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.”
