> As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5,
GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC.
Any one of these measurements in a vaccum is going to have problems. The GPA without the school and curriculum is like knowing that something is 25% off without knowing the original price.
That being said, the lottery is probably a better method than people give it credit for. It's guaranteed to have the fair distribution over time people want if the lottery is administered fairly.
> GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US
Didn't Google do some hiring study and find that grades didn't matter as long as they were above a 3.0 or something? I know there is a lot of noise in grades, but there's probably some threshold.
The actual underlying phenomena is probably that as GPA increase, there is "diminishing returns" to skill. With this in mind, you can improve the lottery by assigning probability of winning relative to ln(x) or 1-1/x, which awards additional hard work, but doesn't give undue credit to the very top performers.
Not exactly sure where the real cutoff might be, that too probably varies with the curriculum, but generally yeah. Either someone gets something or they don't, and if someone gets how to do the work they can be taught and thus will at least do OK learning most other things they care about.
If someone doesn't get how to do the work, but does care, that's probably a medical defect. Hopefully we can treat that someday, if not today. Getting lead out of the pipes and similar efforts would sure help.
If someone doesn't care, that's entirely another matter and we should be more introspective as a society about how to fix it. That's more a political problem than a science problem.
GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC.
Any one of these measurements in a vaccum is going to have problems. The GPA without the school and curriculum is like knowing that something is 25% off without knowing the original price.
That being said, the lottery is probably a better method than people give it credit for. It's guaranteed to have the fair distribution over time people want if the lottery is administered fairly.