What does your CGPA mean? by Harriniya Sonal

What does your CGPA mean?

Google doesn’t care about your CGPA or at least, Laszlo Bock doesn’t. Laszlo is Google’s Senior Vice President in People Operations. He quoted,“One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different”. He distinctly states that CGPA isn’t everything and you definitely wouldn’t be leading a melancholy life simply because you didn’t score a decent pointer in college. Some go to college just for the sole sake of obtaining a degree and being a graduate while some are genuinely in learning and hope to be revolutionary.

All students would have gone through the suspense and pressure of finding out the exam results. Eventually, most of us would feel that acknowledging one’s results would be a scarier effort compared to sitting for the paper itself. Putting in those long sleepless night and gruelling hours just so to be able to satisfy the passing grade or a full A for all of the subjects does feel good when indeed the results are good. We study hard to get great results to help enter great universities and great universities lead to great job openings and a great job is great money and that is a definite great life. Who does not want a lavish and luxurious life and who doesn’t want to achieve it was early as possible as a fresh graduate? Grades and results are simply admissions to gain opportunities and knowledge that coincidentally make you successful.

A student’s success throughout college years isn’t potentially correlated to their success in the future. Truth be told, maintaining a good CGPA is indeed important to secure a decent job for any student. It is a reflection of the student’s academic potential and their eligibility to contribute to the company they’re bound to be working for. When sitting for an interview, an excellent transcript and a high CGPA does no harm but not forgetting professional skills, practical knowledge, communication skills and problem solving skills are primal conditions as well. When applying for a scholarship, a decent CGPA does have a paramount importance because one of the biggest hitches in a student’s life is the tuition money itself and making sure they have a secured job with them when they graduate.

There are many successful millionaires and billionaires today who never graduated college and some even high school. Everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Daniel Ek of Spotify, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple who all dropped out of college to pursue their own dreams and are successful prominent entrepreneurs today. If they are so successful now whilst dropping out of college, why can’t we do the same? Why can’t we have a change of mind halfway through our studies to drop everything and move on to something else? We can. At least some of us, if they have the right knowledge and gateway to start anew. Your results certainly doesn’t dignify and acknowledge you as a person. You can’t determine how successful a person can be based on their results in college. As they say, a student with a 4 pointer might not perform as well as a student who scored a 3.5 or lesser. The latter might have attained more soft and practical skills compared to the former during their studying days.

I can’t say that getting a good CGPA is pointless or that getting a bad CGPA helps claim yourself to be an outstanding person in other aspects. It’s a conflicting issue, depending on an individual and it is up to you to decide what you want to do with what you’ve learned. Like they say, you probably wouldn’t be able to remember what you scored during high school and how those results were pivotal to determine which college you would be entering. Likewise, in the future, your CGPA will end up losing its clout and it’s up to you to how big of an impression you would want to create before losing it or making it last forever.