Graduate with Bad Grades or Repeat a Year?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm a CS Student within one year of graduation. Due to financial reasons, I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years, and I've worked on an open source project. This has brought me from the B's and A's of my first two years of college to somewhere in the mists of C's and lower. I now have enough money to sustain myself for two years of schooling. I've got two choices: repeat one year, repair all my bad grades and graduate with better grades but with a mark that I repeated one school year; or graduate with lower grades but with no repeated year. I'd like to know the opinion of recruiters out there: if you had two candidates which ranked similarly during the interviews, would you choose someone who repeated classes for higher grades?"

Don't bother repeating

[dave-tx]

The only time grades matter is in getting your first job. After that, references and a good resume will be all you need. I didn't have great grades when I finished school - it made getting my foot in the door for that first job harder, but since then, I've been offered every position I've applied for. What matters most is if you're good at what you do.

Do a Masters

[Colin Smith]

That's what they're for.

 

Ace Rimmer

[Anonymous Coward]

What was the difference between Ace Rimmer and Arnold Rimmer?

Now what you do depends on the quality of the place you are at, and what the spread of marks you have is. Certainly a lack of good marks in coursework due to time restraints is not going to look good, because that's valuable experience missing.

I'm certainly a fan of using popular TV shows dictate the actions one should take in life.

Re:Yes.

[Vengeance2001]

The ugly truth is that people right out of college don't know much about the real world. (They always think they do, though, so I'm sure the average /. reader will argue with me on this. :-) ) Retaking the year and "knowing the material better" is a waste of time. You will learn much more by working in a real job for that same year than studying the same stuff again. The GPA only matters in your first job search process--and that's only because no one can tell all of you recruits apart at that point. :-) Especially true at big companies that interview a lot of college kids at the same time. To me, hiring IT people at a steady but slow rate at a mid-size company, a very high GPA says you're brilliant, but all others from 3.5 on down basically all signify "not brilliant", which is fine. If you have mitigating factors like work exp or financial difficulties, you'll be able to explain your situation if anyone asks. Do not volunteer your GPA or attach your transcript to every letter. Once you have a job on your resume, I start to have things I can react to as a hiring manager looking for certain things. So think of this first job as "the job that will get you the job you want," not "the job you want" and it will help your mentality in the search a lot. Hope that helps...

Re:Yes.

[daeg]

I don't even check if they've graduated unless they make a big deal out of it, then I check it just to make sure they aren't overcompensating for being a liar. For me, the interview is much more definitive than some words on you resume. As s small company, we value workaholics more than those that sail through a degree. I'd rather hire someone who had to work every day of their college years and manage to pull straight C's than someone who didn't work and pulled straight A's.

But YMMV according to the types of companies you want to work for -- or help create.

Larger companies tend to get you stuck in a singular or very small set of roles. Small companies tend to give you a wide variety of job duties, albeit with longer hours. For instance, the other day I got to design business cards. Show me a big company where an IT guy gets to design business cards? Sure as hell was a nice break from programming.

from someone who hasn't finished a degree...

[Anonymous Coward]

...finish yours.

I studied physics briefly at the University of Chicago, then ran low on money and went to a Big 12 school to study engineering physics and mathematics. I was never a particularly good student, but that didn't mean that I didn't understand the material or that I didn't learn from my courses. If anything, the coursework encouraged me to explore more and more, and my grades suffered as a result of my extended exploration in the subject matter. By the time I found what I really loved, it was too late. I took my senior design lab course, learned a ton, performed phenomenally well, only to be accused of cheating by the associate dean of engineering. He could only back it up with my transcript, and judged me despite the the corroboration of my work by my peers and professors. Long story short, I told the associate dean he could burn in hell and left. Now, my engineering senior design project was graded by real engineers in industry, and one of them knew that this cheating accusation was a load of bullshit and hired me regardless. A couple years later, I have brought several projects to completion successfully for that company and am one of two R&D engineers for aerospace systems. Additionally, I am a committee chairman in an aerospace industry consortium, a board member for the county committee on science and engineering education, hold a patent for a device I recently invented, will have my invention featured on a show on a widely watched informative cable television channel, and have papers published for NASA, NSF, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). By all accounts, things look like they are going well.

But you know what? I can't leave. I can't go anywhere. I'm stuck. Not a single other company that does the work I have _demonstrated in the real world_ that I am good at gives a damn because I had bad grades and haven't finished a degree. I have bombarded companies with resumes. I have talked to hiring managers. I've had friends who have worked at these companies drop my name. None of it seems to do any good.

Finish the degree.

Re:Repeat, Repeat, Repeat!

[dwater]

It might be useful to know in what way have you 'suffered'?

Re:Yes.

[FreeKill]

I've had the opportunity to hire a few dozen people over the years and I have to admit grades don't mean much to me. I remember a few people I graduated CS with who were really book smart and aced all the tests with great grades. I don't know if they had photographic memories or what, but they were really capable in that aspect. When it came time to course work or projects, they could do the work but they were not the best problem solvers. In fact, I remember one guy who basically had straight A's and never realized that he could make separate directories for his projects so he didn't have to uniquely name each file across all projects. My opinion would be that you'd be smarter to get out as fast as you can and continue working on things like the Open Source project. The grades may hurt you in your first job maybe, but after that it's experience that counts and your willingness to work hard and get the job done right.

Re:Spelling . . .

[CastrTroy]

Most universities have people that will help you with your resume if you're a new graduate, for free. They do a really good job. I've seen a lot of resumes come across my desk with really bad spelling and grammar, and it's an automatic no. Especially when you can tell the the applicant is just sending the same resume out to every company in the city, because they list every computer program they've ever used, even if it has nothing to do with the job. I don't care if programmers know how to use 3DS Max, and if you think MS Office is a skill, then I don't want to talk to you either.

HR person's opinion

[VTBassMatt]

For what it's worth, I ran this question by my wife, a HR person. She replied that most of the companies she's done hiring for would be more interested in someone who did whatever it took to get the job done right; repeating the classes would be better. Obviously the ideal case is getting it done right the first time, but she felt that the work history and OSS contributions would be mitigating circumstances for why the grades weren't where you wanted them the first time. She's done a little high-tech recruiting/hiring but her primary focus was industrial workers, so take this advice how you will. HTH.

Re:Yes.

[wikinerd]

They can just graduate with low marks, keep their books (if they have bought sany books) and read them. It is not necessary to have a professor over your head or be enrolled in order to learn, although it sometimes can be helpful. If they wish to prove that they know some advanced algorithmic stuff, they can simply write some open source code demonstrating their knowledge and copy-paste the code into their CV.

Re:Yes.

[innosent]

I have to say I don't understand your logic there. So you want people who struggled with the core CS material, and just barely managed to graduate by working harder than average over the people who were good enough to be able to skate through? I understand that you want someone who is willing to work hard for the company, but you want that hard work to actually produce something too. There are far too many people out there with CS degrees that can't keep up. I'd rather have the one who slacked off a bit in college because the coursework was too easy and boring to them, than five people who struggled but worked hard to get a degree. As for the original post, in my experience, both personally and from conversations with other companies' hiring managers, after you have worked for 2-3 years beyond graduation, your grades mean nothing. As for the rest of your post, you are correct that there is often a huge difference between working for a large company versus a small company. I have worked in both, and you're right, it is nice to have the flexibility (and power) of working at a smaller company, as it keeps things interesting, but the hours and budget can be frustrating (long hours, smaller/no budget for your projects). At a large company, it is just the opposite, it is no longer *my* department (though the management is very responsive to good ideas), but I don't get wake-up calls from users at 3 AM anymore, can actually take a vacation, and the department has a much larger budget. With the small company, design decisions often came down to "What do we already have that we can use for this?" for things like which database system to use, where with the larger company I'm at now, the question is "Which product is the best for what we need?" and if we don't have it, we buy it. A purchase that would have been more than my annual budget for the entire IT department at the small company is taken care of with a 20 minute meeting. Plus, salary negotiations are easier when your salary is less than a percent of the company's income.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more so, I'd say. If I were hiring someone in your situation, I'd be looking at the work experience you got while in school way before your transcript. If you want to change something, be sure the work you've done is in alignment with where you want your career to go. If your full time job was burger flipping, but you want to go into IT, you'd be better off getting a part-time IT internship while you finish school. In the real world (ie: outside academia), they're going to ask about the McJob before they ask about your classes. The only people who will care about your grades will be another learning institution.

And this part is just me: for the developers I hire, some pollyanna who got straight A's is not the best for my team. I want someone that smart, but who isn't so toe-the-line obedient. Someone with their own ideas and their own initiative. Those people don't necessarily do too well in school. A lap dog who needs to be spoon fed each individual task probably wouldn't be satisfied with the level of direction we work with. I tell my people what we need to accomplish; they tell me how we're going to do it.