My name is Josh, and my GPA is 6 on a 12 GPA scale.
Based solely off that information, you know that my name is Josh, but you may also think that I am a slacker or aloof. You may also think that I do not care about my education.
You may think nothing of it at all, or you may think that there is an underlying reason that my GPA isn’t higher than it is now. Regardless of what you think, my GPA tells you “something” about me.
Officially, the number is a representation of academic performance over any given timeframe, but in actuality, the path to that number is more about the journey than the destination.
The information that GPA gives you about a person is faulty. It tells you nothing about the trials and tribulations of the person’s life earning the degree, nor does it tell you about any underlying factors such as a physical or mental illness.
It doesn’t tell you about the extracurricular activities or internships that person did either. It doesn’t tell you about the lessons you learned from failed relationships, platonic or romantic, and it doesn’t tell you about whether or not they truly learned anything in the course anyway, or whether or not they could recite the info in the course back to you if you asked them about it.
You cannot even compare GPA’s across majors. As we can see, a flawed metric for information gathering. But GPA is important right? Yes, it is, but its not the entire story of your university career. University at its very core is meant for you to pursue the personal discovery of universal truths, as well as introduce you to a breadth of perspectives that are not your own in order to make you a more well-rounded person.
The medium in which that happens does not always take place in the classroom. University is a place that attracts people from all walks of life and are of the same age range roughly.
I have learned a vast wealth of knowledge from my peers, and I hope that they have learned from me in kind. Whether its interactions with fellow students, professors, academic researchers or the people who inhabit your city, the learning will always continue.
[GPA] tells you nothing about the trials and tribulations of the person’s life earning the degree, nor does it tell you about any underlying factors such as a physical or mental illness.
This type of learning makes university life incredibly variable and inconsistent, which directly contradicts the whole idea of a GPA, which seeks uniformness.
So why do people, especially employers care about it?
Because it is a herculean effort to check the intangibles of all applicants to make truly objective hiring choices. It is rarely the case that a university skillset lines up exactly with what employers want, but yet they demand increasingly higher requirements.
It is easy to generalize people, and no company has the time or money to delve into the personal lives of applicants. All of this is not to say that this type is a learning is a justification for having bad grades. You come to a degree to learn about the subject you are majoring in, and in theory, university should be your full-time job.
I can personally say that my bad grades are a by product of not putting my studies first.
What I am saying is that it’s only a part of the whole picture, and just like university, try to keep a nuanced view on why you are here and you should have a good time.