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?"

Comments

Yes.

[The Living Fractal]

Showing that you had the drive to go back and do better, scoring higher, and learning even more, would be enough to show me that you had motivation which could translate to the job. Of course, the problem is I probably wouldn't even look at your grades -- I might just check to see if you graduated and choose to check into other qualifications. In which case you might be wasting a year by going back, because that's one more you could've had either looking for the right job or already being in the right job and making money.

Sorry I couldn't be more help :)

TLF

Re:Yes.

[dshaw858]

I think it's worthy of note that by repeating these classes, you'd probably get more than just higher grades--you'd get a better education and actually learn the material in these higher-level (300 and 400) computer science classes. Remember that it wouldn't just be you with good grades and another year vs you with bad grades minus a year competing; it would be you with good grades, another year, more knowledge about higher-level theory and software engineering and more time to work on open source/passion projects vs. you with bad grades, no knowledge and less time.

I'm definitely not a recruiter (just an employee), but I think that this seems to make the most sense to me--especially if at your time in school you'd be able to get into some undergraduate research with a professor there.

Good luck with whatever you decide,

- dshaw

Re:Yes.

[AuMatar]

As s small company, we value workaholics more

Translation: they want you to work 12 hour days til you burn out, then they'll replace you with a fresh grad.

Re:Yes.

[Seumas]

It honestly doesn't matter what he does. Your college performance and experience will not have the long term effect on your career and life that you might currently think it does. It's no different than highschool. When you're in highschool, everyone goes out of their way to convince you that every mistake and misstep and every action and accomplishment will have an impact on the rest of your entire life. In reality, nobody cares. Once you are out of highschool, the grades you got in highschool won't ever matter. How many days you missed will never matter. That you took an elective in basket weaving will never matter.

Don't get so stressed out about it. There are people who haven't even gone to college (and some who didn't even go to highschool) who have very successful careers. Probably more successful than you will ever have. If they can manage, then I'm sure you can, regardless of your grades.

I've been an adult for quite some time now. I make six figures and have been in the same professional industry for a decade. Nobody in my entire career has ever asked me ANYTHING about my background, except for the little line on the application I once filled out when I was about twenty-one that asked me what highschool and college I attended and what degrees I pursued or acquired.

It is in the best interest of academic professionals to convince you that every little thing you do in their institution will mean the difference between you living in a mansion and owning a yacht or eating cold cans dog food and buying your children's clothes at Value Village. Relax. Take a deep breath. Jump into the job market.

Re:Yes.

[TheLink]

If they hired smarter+competent people, I bet you could get the same amount of work done with the smart people working normal work hours and the _computers_ working 24 hour days.

And the resulting code would be a lot better.

After all a good programmer is supposed to be making the computer do the "stupid + hardworking" stuff.

How many geniuses are you aware of who can work 12 hours nonstop at genius level, _day_after_day_.

Whereas there are obviously too many people who can work 12 hours at "stupid/incompetent".

Re:Yes.

[honkycat]

In my experience, this is not true of small companies, or at least less so than larger companies. If your whole workforce is 20 people, you can't tolerate swapping any of them out with any regularity. On the flip side, you are likely to need long hours occasionally since you can't spread unexpected critical tasks over as many people. Long hours are pretty hard to avoid for start-up to small companies and don't necessarily indicate exploitation.

don't repeat, get a graduate degree

[hazem]

You'd be better served by spending that 2 years focusing on a graduate degree - if you can get into a school.

The masters degree will most likely trump the bachelors degree, even if the guy with the bachelors has better grades. And in many places you'll automatically start at a higher salary.

Plus with the masters program you should be able to tailor your coursework to focus on the things that truly interest you.

On the other hand, few recruiters are going to ask you how long you were in school, and on top of that, so many people these days are doing a non-traditional route to completing a "4-year" program. Don't put your GPA's on your school lines of your resumes. They're not needed.

Where I work (a Fortune 500), merely having the degree will meet the education requirement that will get you through the automated screening system. At that point, it will be your experience and the way you present yourself that will matter.

So, only repeat if you really really want to. The GPA is probably not important. And if you must keep going to school, consider a graduate degree.

One last caveat, if you have specific employers you want to work for, contact people who work there. Schedule "informational interviews" with people who do the kind of work you want to do. Find out from them what is most important.

Good luck.

Re:don't repeat, get a graduate degree

[pmadden]

I'm a CS prof (I teach both grad and undergrad, with my real job being research).

So... be brutally honest with yourself. Do you *really* understand the material, and just couldn't get it together for the exams? Or do you just think you understand the material? The number of people who are clueless to the point of being unaware of their cluelessness is staggering. Grades are an imperfect measure of what someone knows, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong.

If you know your stuff, then grades don't matter. If you don't know your stuff, high grades won't help you. If you've got a year left, and are confident that you actually are on top of things, then knock your last year out with straight As and by being the top student in every class. Recommendations from your professors will carry more weight than a GPA. And I'll agree with the parent post; a grad degree will get your foot in the door in many places, and gives you a clean GPA slate and the opportunity to gather a bunch of useful skills.

Trust in the Peter Principle. Your skills will determine how far you go.

Focus on the Open Source project.

[khasim]

The degree is good, but it isn't worth any where as much as the demonstration of your coding skills and how well you can work with others.

Just graduating is sufficient IF you can show solid code, good practices and the ability to work with others on that project.

I'd lead with the project and just leave everything else as resume filler.

Just a resume item

[Herak]

I just graduated with a pretty high GPA. In my experience, the high GPA is helpful to get to the top of the resume stack, but by the time you get into interviews they don't really care what your GPA is. If you have other eye-catching things on your resume that will get you to the interview phase (it sounds like you do) you might not need the GPA.

However, grad schools DO care about GPA. If you're ever planning to go back, it might be worth it to retake the classes.

You know what they call the guy who...

[chinakow]

graduates last in his class at medical school?

Doctor. :-)

Graduate with Bad Grades or Repeat a Year?

[Hognoxious]

Graduate with Bad Grades or Repeat a Year?

There is, of course, the risk of doing both. If you redo stuff there's a possibility you'll be bored & demotivated. Then there's the risk that you'll be complacent because 1) you've done it before and 2) you've (compared to when you were working) got loads of time.

Re:Yes and no, it depends

[Coldmoon]

I have interviewed quite a few potential hires and can say that I spent little time looking at the education other than to see if they had the right skill set. The grades tell you nothing, what is important is that you prove to the employer that you are the right person at the right time with the right skills. Everything else is window dressing.

If you think that your current knowledge is insufficient then by all means repeat the year. If you would not learn anything that would justify the extra year, then go on and put your focus on getting better scores in the coming year...

Girls

[nyquil superstar]

Easy, repeat the grade. There are a lot more attractive girls at college than in the real world!

Re:Don't bother repeating

[Voice of Meson]

I agree with this, but I would even take it further. All you really need for an interview is to have a degree, once you are in the interview your skill and personality will get you the job.

I have crappy grades (a couple of fails in there) and in my first interview I was asked about them and I told the engineers straight up that I was distracted that year and didn't put in the effort that I should have. Then I explained that I had worked hard on the last year and my results proved that. Grades were the topic of the interview for less than a minute, then it was all about what I knew.

Also, to the people saying that you may not know the material well enough all I can say is that as a graduate you know nothing anyway. 80/90% of what I know and use now as an engineer (working for some of the biggest companies in the world) was learnt on the job. If they focus too much on grades they are doing themselves a disservice. The best programmer I know has a fucking Accounting degree!