Ajai Karthikeyan is Invictus

Having spent the past couple months looking for an internship for the summer, I am happy to say that I have accepted a position with Turner Broadcasting. While I hope to talk about that at a later date, today’s post is mainly about the inherent flaws of the GPA system.

In my search, I stumbled into far more than one job posting that had a GPA cutoff, (usually 3.0) which meant that I had no hope of getting the job even before I applied. This led me to think more about the whole GPA situation and how much it actually spoke about my abilities.

Firstly, I must say that having a fixed GPA cutoff is inherently biased against most Georgia Tech students. Due to the academic rigor, the average GPA at Tech is lower than that of most other universities. For instance, the GPA requirement to graduate cum laude from Georgia Tech is a 3.15 while at most universities it is closer to 3.5. This does not create a standardized GPA scale between different colleges and I am happy to say that many of the Atlanta based companies and most of the companies that come to career fairs at Tech are aware of this. But even still, GPA cut-offs seemed to be disqualifying a lot of eligible candidates.

Secondly, the GPA seems to fail at measuring your academic success and is more of a measure of your academic failure. Why do I say this? Well, the GPA seems to be based on not what you have learned at the time of graduation but more on what you didn’t know at another point in time. The easiest way to explain this is with an example: I have personally registered for Calculus III for CS Majors 4 times during my time at Tech. I dropped it twice and have failed it once and  by the look of things, will be failing it once again this semester. My GPA has been drastically affected by both of these ‘F’s but when I do graduate, I will have the calculus knowledge imparted by these classes as I won’t be able to graduate without passing this class.

Lastly, GPA doesn’t account for the difficulty of different classes nor does it account for learning styles of different people. For instance, I have many junior level and senior level classes during my Freshman year and have been taking graduate level classes throughout my time at Tech. Being the youngest person in these classes should definitely mean that I am ahead of the curve, but were I to make a B in one of these classes, my GPA is lower than my friend who is taking the same class 3 years after I am. Does a freshman taking a senior level class and getting a B show more ability or does a senior getting an A in the same class. Exactly my point!

As for learning styles, I earlier wrote about my bad luck with calculus. My personal learning style is oriented towards learning by applying what I learn in my day to day life. I am a very hands on person and love to get my hands dirty while I try to figure something new. This is quite difficult to do with a subject such as calculus. It is kind of funny how my being bad at calculus does not even demonstrate my ability with Math. I got an easy A in both Combinatorics and Constructing Proofs, two of the more difficult mathematically oriented classes at Tech and I plan to have a similar experience with Probability and Statistics.

There we go. My rant about GPA. I’m not even going to talk about how the GPA doesn’t say anything about extra-curriculars and work experience since I hope that goes with out saying. Please feel free to continue this discussion.