05/14/2016
"In contrast to all this concern about grades, here is what Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, had to say in a NYT interview about Google’s hiring practices and experiences: 'One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that GPA’s [grade point averages] are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless…. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and GPA’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.'”
"In the same interview, Bock went on to explain, 'I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.' Bock went on to point out that the more experience Google has with hiring, the more inclined they are to hire people with no college at all. At present, he said, they have teams where 14 percent of the members have never gone to college."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201604/inverse-relationship-between-gpa-and-innovative-orientation
The more students focus on test scores, the less creative they become.
