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I agree that exams don't always do a great job of measuring actual competency, but I'm not sure they are worthless either. > This correlates well with the obse

I agree that exams don't always do a great job of measuring actual competency, but I'm not sure they are worthless either. > This correlates well with the observations made by Google and other large companies that analyse how to identify valuable hires. Turns out that there's no correlation between grades and workplace performance. These observations probably suffer from a confounding effect known as range restriction. Basically, if Google generally only hires people with a GPA of 3.0 or above, they may have some idea of how GPA variation above that level correlates with job performance, but they don't know about it below that level. So they won't know if people with GPAs of 1.5 will do just as well at Google as people they normally consider. Suppose Google started hiring people with much lower GPAs than they do today. Anyone want to make a bet what the outcome of that experiment would be? Well, Google knows, and that's why they don't do the experiment.

Scandiravian 5y ago
Google has no requirements for GPA - here's a quote from 2013 by Lazlo Bock who served as Senior vice President of People operations at Google for several years: "One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- civilized 5y ago
  This says nothing about whether Google has a range restriction effect. It just suggests that their HR doesn't know or care what range restriction is. Google probably filters out low-GPA candidates based on their poor performance by other criteria. It doesn't mean GPA isn't predictive of how such candidates would perform at Google. If this is untrue, let them bring out their parade of successful low-GPA engineers.
  - Scandiravian 5y ago
    Where's your evidence that they do have a range restriction? Seems to me that you're moving the goal post without providing any justification for it. There's plenty of sources online stating Google doesn't have a GPA requirement, that you're welcome to look up on your own time. Besides those I can also tell from my own (and a couple of friends) experiences, interviewing with Google, that indeed they do not care about GPA - which is a plus when you consider, how many potential hires are not American and have used a completely different grading scheme. The quote literally states the opposite of what you're claiming, according to Google - GPA does not in any way predict job performance, so why is it so important to you find a narrative, where it does? What seems more likely - that several Google engineers all made an erroneous conclusion based on the available data or that they found that GPA has zero value in real life?
    - civilized 5y ago
      Ignoring range restriction is a very common and very consequential statistical fallacy. I'm not going to blindly assume that Google engineers are above statistical fallacies. Especially ones that embody universal human cognitive biases, like thinking that what you see is representative of everything that's out there. There's plenty of evidence that grades matter in other contexts, so I'm not going to throw all of that out because some Google guy made a vaguely general claim based on his limited and very biased sample. As I said, all Google has to do to refute my doubts is point out its huge population of very low GPA, very successful engineers. If GPA is meaningless, this should be a trivial thing for them to do.

Scandiravian 5y ago

Google has no requirements for GPA - here's a quote from 2013 by Lazlo Bock who served as Senior vice President of People operations at Google for several years: "One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything."

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
civilized 5y ago
This says nothing about whether Google has a range restriction effect. It just suggests that their HR doesn't know or care what range restriction is. Google probably filters out low-GPA candidates based on their poor performance by other criteria. It doesn't mean GPA isn't predictive of how such candidates would perform at Google. If this is untrue, let them bring out their parade of successful low-GPA engineers.
- Scandiravian 5y ago
  Where's your evidence that they do have a range restriction? Seems to me that you're moving the goal post without providing any justification for it. There's plenty of sources online stating Google doesn't have a GPA requirement, that you're welcome to look up on your own time. Besides those I can also tell from my own (and a couple of friends) experiences, interviewing with Google, that indeed they do not care about GPA - which is a plus when you consider, how many potential hires are not American and have used a completely different grading scheme. The quote literally states the opposite of what you're claiming, according to Google - GPA does not in any way predict job performance, so why is it so important to you find a narrative, where it does? What seems more likely - that several Google engineers all made an erroneous conclusion based on the available data or that they found that GPA has zero value in real life?
  - civilized 5y ago
    Ignoring range restriction is a very common and very consequential statistical fallacy. I'm not going to blindly assume that Google engineers are above statistical fallacies. Especially ones that embody universal human cognitive biases, like thinking that what you see is representative of everything that's out there. There's plenty of evidence that grades matter in other contexts, so I'm not going to throw all of that out because some Google guy made a vaguely general claim based on his limited and very biased sample. As I said, all Google has to do to refute my doubts is point out its huge population of very low GPA, very successful engineers. If GPA is meaningless, this should be a trivial thing for them to do.