Obviously depends on the school, and how much grade inflation (or deflation) they've gone through. When I studied Electrical Engineering, class average was 2.8 or so. The few students that actually had anything close to a 4.0 were terrific students.

I remember in our real analysis class, the professor started with a comment (to the class) in the lines of:

"This is a demanding class. Top performing students usually spend 25-35 hours a week on the problem sets alone, and top grades are rarely awarded - some years there are zero A's. Please take the weekend to consider if you really need or want to take this class."

FWIW, this was no top University - but then again, grade inflation is not that bad in STEM, from my experience.

Hmmm. I took a real analysis class at UNC Charlotte and one at Oxford and the latter one transformed my understand of maths. I felt if I ever taught a “maths for humanities” class Lebesgue integration and measure theory would be key components. I think if they are taught well by a person that really understands it backwards and forwards, well enough to explain it like a physicist, it is accessible.

That's not true at all. When someone drops 200 resumes on your desk and says, "Find 10 candidates to interview by tomorrow", you need some initial sort criteria.

The truth, my criteria were: #1: university, #2: GPA, #3: keywords. Sure, I was bitten a few times (I hired an MIT master's student who was utterly helpless), but over the course of years doing this, some patterns emerge, and high-GPA absolutely correlates with good candidates.

Sure, there might be a 2.0/4.0 who is a whiz, but sorry charlie, I'm not gonna picky your resume, so apply yourself or start your own company, because a low GPA means you don't give a shit or have some other problem.

I agree that GPA is useful as a binary indicator—if it’s abominably low, like a 2.0 in your example, it’s a red flag. But a 4.0 is no more predictive of being a good hire than, say, a 3.3. It’s also very school-dependent. Some places inflate grades a lot more than others.

In my own anecdotal experience, I omitted my GPA entirely from my CV when looking for jobs straight out of college and got interviews at every single place I applied. It’s not nearly as important as a lot of people think.

> But a 4.0 is no more predictive of being a good hire than, say, a 3.3

Ironically I graduated with a 3.4, and I did feel guilty for not passing on resumes with GPAs as low as mine. But as I said, when I had many other tasks to do for work, and then had to stop them all to sort resumes (we all took turns), it was hard to justify excursions when there were so many 4.0s. It is a sad truth that new college grads almost all look the same on paper...