A Short Note on CGPA | AKA | How To Approach College in India
TLDR - Summary
The post emphasizes that while CGPA alone cannot secure a job, it is crucial as the first step in the recruitment process. In many universities, recruiters use CGPA to shortlist candidates, often setting cut-offs higher than the officially stated minimums. Therefore, maintaining a high CGPA is important to advance in the selection process. Students should aim for a CGPA higher than the common average in their college to stay competitive.
Much is said about the importance of CGPA or its lack thereof to new students trying to navigate college life and to hopefully get a good job.
The popular belief nowadays is that CGPA does not matter and it’s only one’s skills, specifically coding skills, that matter during the recruitment process.
However, this is only half true. What was originally meant by this sentiment was that CGPA alone cannot get you a job. But after it was repeated enough times, it sort of became axiomatic that CGPA itself is useless and the intended meaning was lost.
What students need to understand is that CGPA is like a ticket to the recruitment process, beyond which it cannot help you anymore and you’ve only got your skills to bank on.
In the context of on-campus placements, most private universities have thousands of students in just the CSE branch alone, so it’s impossible for recruiters to interview each one of them.
They use multiple elimination rounds to shortlist a handful of candidates whom they finally consider. CGPA is the very first elimination tool. Even here, the official statements and the advice of seniors are misleading. Even though the official criteria are usually set at 7 or 7.5, when the recruiter finally releases the shortlist, one often notices that all candidates have much higher CGPAs, upwards of 8-8.5. That is because many recruiters try to pick the top X students of a branch, which ends up increasing the CGPA cut-off.
Keeping all of this in mind, it’s advisable to maintain a high CGPA as it serves as your ticket to the later rounds of the recruitment process. How high you should aim for depends totally on your college. Some colleges are very liberal with their grading, so it would be risky to aim for the bare minimum of 7 or 7.5. One should instead pay attention to what CGPA is most common in their college and should aim to maintain higher than that number.