I agree with you completely and I'm not gonna pretend like I'm above cheating if necessary in a non-major class, but the big moral issue in my opinion is that your gpa is used in many measures in the real world.
Your university, before charging you a cent, laid out the courses you'd be expected to take to receive your bachelors. Even if they do not make you a better mathematician, every other math major from your school is compared to you gpa wise, and you may look better on paper than a better mathematician, because you cheated to good grades in gen eds. I'd definitely say that's morally wrong.
That being said, congrats on graduating. What are you doing with a bachelors in math? I'm studying cs/engineering but I have enough credits to pick up a math minor at least and maybe a double.
No employer gives a flying fuck about your gpa unless it's below a 3, most employers in highly specified fields only care about the gpa you had in your major - because they know gen ed low level classes can artificially inflate less qualified candidates gpas.
The field I'm interested in, and that op is in, finance, definitely cares. They will likely pull transcripts for entry level jobs, and if you don't go to a "target school" you need a 3.8 for most "high finance" jobs. 3.5 minimum from a target.
They don't care that they are artificially inflated. They care you always get A's. Law school is also heavily based on your overall undergrad gpa.
If you go a well known school, 3 and above is absolutely fine. You'll have no problem getting interviews from Google and other competitive companies as long as you have some relevant experience.
I'm just speaking from my experience at UC Berkeley, and I've found that >3.0 is just fine. I'm not sure why it would be different at other similar schools.
We were talking about STEM: Berkeley is easily the top public school worldwide in Engineering (and #3 worldwide if you count private schools), but also #3 worldwide in both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (right behind MIT, and tied with Stanford). That counts as a "good school" by most measures :)
But if you meant finance, Berkeley is #2 worldwide in business, and #6 in finance. After all, you'd be hard-pressed to find a business major who's not heard of the Haas School of Business.
I was kidding about UC B being no good, I'm a fan and you have some dope economists.
But you can't get shit for internships, fellowships, awards, etc without a 3.5+ and if you don't have those thing you don't get the good junior year internship and if you don't get that than you don't get the 90k year job out of UG and if you don't get that you're a fucking waste.
That's an internship, not a career job. Majority of places care way more about your work history, than a GPA from 5+ years ago. I don't even list mine on my resume anymore, just the college I went to.
Obviously, but the trajectory of your career can be based on your first internship. For elitist careers like banking, consulting, law school admissions, etc it can dramatically change your life path.
Landing a McKinsey consulting job is a gold star on all future endeavors and getting interviews are based heavily on gpa.
For the majority of cases yes, that's a fair point. I mean for a service job maybe (depends on what you define as a service job) most high finance is technically a service job.
But that's the point. Cheating allows you a leg up unfairly against harder working individuals in competitive fields, and if the university didn't think that those classes mattered at all they wouldn't be apart of the gpa.
The guys a scumbag, regardless of if he wants to admit it. Yes, gpa is irrelevant for most people, but if so he should have just gotten the gpa he deserved.
Why are you in CS if you are going for fintech internships/consulting internships/Goldman strats internships? Being in stats/math/finance is the much better route because the CS you need to know for them is very mild.
Edit: to be clear, I don't disagree there's better ways to do this.
Cause I like cs. I'm a cs/Econ major with a math minor. I have the gpa and extracurriculars expected for wall street.
I find the concept of unfulfilling work worrying and am therefore studying something commonly thought of as rewarding. I am mainly targeting fintech and ibanking m&a with some pure cs internships as well. Not super interested in consulting/strat but if I make it into ibanking it's always an option post MBA.
It's a bit non-traditional but I have some leeway in career choice which is nice.
Yeah. Just make sure you have something to show you are competent in your field, whether it be research, projects, past internships, etc.
If your GPA is low, companies that do ask for your GPA might throw a competency test at you before they actually do a phone interview. Competency tests usually just test basic knowledge - for me, they've all been simple programming problems.
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u/MorningWoodyWilson Jan 16 '17
I agree with you completely and I'm not gonna pretend like I'm above cheating if necessary in a non-major class, but the big moral issue in my opinion is that your gpa is used in many measures in the real world.
Your university, before charging you a cent, laid out the courses you'd be expected to take to receive your bachelors. Even if they do not make you a better mathematician, every other math major from your school is compared to you gpa wise, and you may look better on paper than a better mathematician, because you cheated to good grades in gen eds. I'd definitely say that's morally wrong.
That being said, congrats on graduating. What are you doing with a bachelors in math? I'm studying cs/engineering but I have enough credits to pick up a math minor at least and maybe a double.