Slashdot Mirror
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?"
As an employer, grades really aren't a top concern. I graduated with 2.85, I know skills go beyond grade. An interview is really where I'd make my decision.
Many large companies won't talk to you if you have under 3.5 GPA or some such bs ...
... The same companies are often not considered good employers.
You are misinformed. Many large companies do have flexibility on GPAs. Specifically, GPA "minimums" are often waived if the student was also working more than 30 hours per week. Note the person asking for advice wrote "I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years".
I believe this statement is about as accurate as your first.