The GPA system has been a bit of a mystery to me since I discovered its existence. As a European from a country that has no such system, it seems like a bit of

The GPA system has been a bit of a mystery to me since I discovered its existence. As a European from a country that has no such system, it seems like a bit of a rat race, where people giving grades have bad incentives to pad them. Where I'm from, you graduated from a program or you didn't ; the only distinction was "with merit", or "valedictorian" and that's it. Your distinction comes from the institution you receive the sesame from, and the ranking it receives from random industry rankings and simple reputation. Not a perfected system, but a bit more straight forward. Now in Canada, I receive resumes from new grads who have either >3.8 or no GPA posted. I'm yet to see a correlation between those GPA numbers and superior performance, but the university they come from is a stronger predictor of fit and effectiveness. Therefore I tend to ignore the GPA (or worse, consider the boasting as a negative) and put emphasis on university. I'm dubitative what the value of the score actually is.