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allthislove · 6 years

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Lil banter about GPA, mine, and whatever.

For the sake of being kind to those who really don’t care, please blacklist the tag Applefart. (IDK, just something random enough to not effect your everyday blogging...)

I worked really hard for my final GPA, which was 3.9 and some other decimal points. I was a theatre major, so take that as whatever you want. But, I worked really hard and thought, and calculated, and created to earn it.

GPAs aren’t everything, no. But there’s this narrative that goes around the internet a lot, these days, that GPA means nothing, and that people who earn high GPAs don’t deserve any honor/respect for their hard work. And often, brilliance. IDK, I think it largely comes from people who don’t understand the way college functions.

I was a bit of an underachiever in high school, I must say. But I still had relatively good grades. But, I gotta say, high school education is a completely different animal than collegiate education. I definitely learned things in high school, but not as much as I memorized things to pass tests. Things that I often soon forgot. I don’t think that’s the case, in college. I feel like in college, I actually learned. I didn’t just memorize facts and formulas. I studied things about the world around me and how it worked. I learned things in history and science that I never knew before, even taking similar classes in high school. (Because high school tends to be “the shit you learned in elementary school, but with bigger words and longer paragraphs to read.” Like, IDK, how many times did we read about the Civil War, but never get any new information? I feel like in college, I got NEW information about history and science that I didn’t get in high school, and that I actually engaged with the content, and was encouraged to explore it myself, and research on my own, and form opinions and articulate it to my classmates and teachers, and so on.)

My point is, I think people with high GPAs in college certainly deserve to be regarded with respect for them. Not, like, other people should treat them like some sort of high-level genius, or cower under them. But, like, it should be recognized that most people in college with a GPA over 3.5 did the damn thing. They didn’t just memorize a lot of stuff for tests. Most of the time, they kicked ass. They wrote intelligent, engaging essays. They built functional projects that solve real-world problems. They designed something beautifully. They went above and beyond to truly shine in their classes. I mean, everyone who went to college can tell you how goddamn subjective some of this is, and how harsh many of the teachers grade. (I once had a teacher give me a 70 because my color matching wasn’t distinct enough, even though everything else was executed properly.) So, yeah, I didn’t earn a 3.9 because I just memorized things better than other people. I worked my ass off. I exercised my brain. I showed an ability to think, create, and perform at that level.

Also, people like to say “GPA doesn’t matter after you graduate”... but that’s not true. It’s true, in the sense that having a degree is enough and you’ll still get good jobs with a 2.8. But companies absolutely look at high GPAs as a plus. Especially if you’re trying to get that nice job right out of college. And if you want to go to graduate school, or law school, or med school- you better believe your undergraduate GPA matters. Your undergraduate GPA matters, and people do look at it.

I mean, I’ve mostly only gotten this from asshole trolls who are probably just envious. But, yeah, this idea that people who graduate from a university with a high GPA somehow just... randomly got it and aren’t hardworking or smart? That really fucking weird, and absolutely bullshit. I mean, it’s just more evidence of this anti-intellectual culture we have going on in this country, right now. Graduating from college used to mean something. And, I mean, we are the most educated generation (Millennials) of all the ones who came before us, but also, we are measurably smarter as a whole, because of things like better access to early childhood education, better nutrition, truancy laws, and a whole number of things. I mean, Millennials and Gen Z also graduate from high school at higher rates than previous generations, so more people are eligible and qualified for college/university than ever before, so of course more of us graduate from college. That shouldn’t take away from the fact that graduating from college/university AT ALL is a huge deal, and graduating with a GPA higher than 3.5 is a MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENT.

Which is why those GPAs are awarded Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, and Summa Cum Laude. Because it is, absolutely, a big deal and does, absolutely, mean something.

Stop undermining other people’s accomplishments. You’ll have many of your own. You don’t have to belittle other people’s accomplishments to prove that you are also good. (Although, most of the people I hear this from are not good. They are usually racist trolls telling me I’m automatically stupid and got into school because of affirmative action, because I’m a black woman. Affirmative action doesn’t work for GPAs, and when I point that out, they tell me GPA doesn’t matter “in the real world.” Which, I’m in. And it has mattered. So, yeah, whatever.)

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