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

You know what they call the guy who...

[chinakow]

graduates last in his class at medical school?

Doctor. :-)

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: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.