Grades are an integral part of our school life but do any of us expect them to affect our careers as well? How about the opportunities we receive? Our salary?
Studies have confirmed pay gaps between people with higher GPAs and people with lower GPAs and not only that it has also been researched that the majority of employers don’t even consider resumes with lower GPAs. This is a problem since our grades don’t tend to reflect beneficial qualities in advancing our careers and because of that many of us lose opportunities we otherwise could have had if not for our GPA. Although grades are looked at so widely regarding employment, we should be allowed to prove ourselves rather than letting our GPA decide for us.
Why are grades unreliable?
To put it simply, grades do not reflect our individual capabilities and characteristics that employers should be looking at when hiring. While grades do capture personality traits such as perseverance, diligence, and self-discipline, these aren’t the traits that are making a difference when it comes to the quality of employees. Most employers fail to realize that grades don’t measure leadership or comfort with risk which are traits that lead to success at the highest level of business. Not only that, but grades also don’t measure emotional intelligence or interpersonal skills like networking and these are traits that become essential when it comes to progressing far into someone’s career. Don’t get me wrong, while grades do provide some insight into someone’s personality, the traits they measure aren’t the ones achieving greater success in the future and GPAs are still not a reliable measure of someone’s potential for success.
Even ignoring what grades reflect, they are still affected by factors outside of our control and can make us lose motivation for learning. Not everyone can maintain a high GPA with the same amount of effort, some of us can maintain a very high GPA without ever trying while some of us can keep on failing. This disparity isn’t just because we are worse students and in some cases far from it. Some of us simply do not enjoy studying wherein most people with high GPAs do. grades actually Moreover, grades cause us to become more focused on rewards and punishments by getting a higher number rather than actually being interested in the subjects we study. Demotivational issues concerning GPAs cause their reliability in determining our worth to come into question.
What negative effects are there?
When we enter the workforce, employers will filter out the majority of our resumes using our college GPAs. Screening this way will leave out many of us that had the potential to climb up the ladder in the future if we were given the chance to prove ourselves. Relying on grades so heavily is ultimately detrimental to not only us but also the company. Companies moving towards analyzing us through individual traits will have a leg up in the competition since others would have only screened through GPA. But sometimes even after managing to get hired. GPA can also dictate the salaries we expect from our jobs. And this can negatively affect our motivation when we would be putting in the same amount of effort for less pay. To acknowledge talented candidates, employers should be moving away from screening strictly through the use of GPA and paying them a fair salary based on their efforts.
In the end, although grades are an important part of our student life they shouldn’t be depended on to determine our individual success in the workforce. GPAs can only reveal arbitrary personality traits that may or may not even be true while never being able to point out our emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. There are also many factors such as the enjoyment of studying and sleep that have a significant impact on grades that are outside of our control. Relying too heavily on grades can cause qualified people to be overlooked which can lead to a less efficient workplace. Throughout the research conducted on the effect of GPAs, many agreed that grades are hindering our motivation for learning as well as making us less creative and independent. GPAs are the cause of a lot of controversies and rightfully so, and we have to strive towards a better evaluation method that is focused on nurturing students for their and our future while acknowledging their talents outside of a number.
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