Thread: How your grades effect your income

Originally Posted by LuckY

It seems evident my original point has been missed by most. I'm not at all asking about getting hired for a job. I'm completely confident that with my knowledge and experience I won't have any trouble being hired for another job (should I elect to leave my current place of employment). What I'm really curious about is how much your grades may affect your pay. Were any of you employed right out of college? What were your grades? How much did they start paying you? Did you have any previous experience? I'm not necessarily looking for explicit answers to these questions, but just the general idea. Thanks.

I know you didn't ask for explicit answers, but I'll do that anyways.

I was employed shortly after leaving college (the market sucked, so it took me a couple months to get something in my field). My grades in college were decent, nothing great. My overall was a 3.0 and my major was a little higher than that. And my pay had nothing to do with my grades. I held an internship (read co-op) with the same company all through college. When I got my current job, I was started at the normal starting salary for an incoming engineer. There was no negotiation.

I recently had my 1 year review, where I was given a promotion along with a bump in pay equal to the new position. Again, nothing to do with my schooling, simply based on my performance and my degree.

And as far as what I'm being paid, let's just say it's a little above average for what I do for the community I work in (especially for my age, 24).

None of my employers have ever seen any of the grades I got anywhere.
Those grades are none of their business (even if they're pretty decent most of them) and irrelevant anyway.
Exam grades are momentary values, at least for most students at most times.
I've failed an exam because I had a splitting headache that day, I've flunked another because my mother was in emergency surgery which occupies the brain I can tell you.
Many students also cram and cram for exams. That knowledge may pass them the exam (even with good grades) but it's gone a few days later.

Originally Posted by jwenting

None of my employers have ever seen any of the grades I got anywhere.
Those grades are none of their business (even if they're pretty decent most of them) and irrelevant anyway.
Exam grades are momentary values, at least for most students at most times.
I've failed an exam because I had a splitting headache that day, I've flunked another because my mother was in emergency surgery which occupies the brain I can tell you.
Many students also cram and cram for exams. That knowledge may pass them the exam (even with good grades) but it's gone a few days later.

I have a teacher who says that the knowledge you got for the test goes away with it on the end of the exam. Men, no one will ask you how much you got on a dumb math test you got on your 1 year. They will know if you call make that solaris system work in parallel with a mac network whose the master is a AMD. So maths counts nothing, 99% of the crap you learn in College counts nothing. Like Bill Gates, famous for miss classes to play poker...

Of course employers don't care about grades on specific exams. They often do care about overall GPA, though. If you have a 4.0, then chances are you are either very smart or a hard worker (or both). If you have a 2.7, you are either not as smart or somewhat lazy (generally speaking). You will generally get more and better offers with better grades, and it is foolish to assume that you can get poor grades and not have it affect your employment. Of course, it is also foolish to assume that poor grades automatically means you won't get a good or well paying job.