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"GPAs don't predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. "One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless - no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation,"" "After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different," he said. "You're also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they're conditioned to succeed in that environment. 

"I asked the lead tech  developers of several Cedar Rapids companies what they look for when hiring, and they all responded with, "The applicant's Github [open source] portfolio." Not their GPA. Not their test scores or transcripts. Their what-have-you-done files. The only way a student can have a Github portfolio is if they have a project worth working on, and the only way they can have that is if they've had generative interactions with the greater community; a community who has a plethora of problems worth working on."

"Of the seven groups identified, two polar opposites were the "disengaged" and the "maximizers." The average disengaged student scored well below the mean on all engagement measures, while the typical maximizer was well above average across the board. As a result, disengaged students showed significantly lower gains than maximizers on the four WNSLAE outcomes examined and had lower first-year GPAs, perceived learning gains, and persistence to the second year than their most-engaged peers."

The college ultimately denied the student admission, he said, because her academic record wasn't competitive. But had her credentials been better, those indiscreet posts could have scuttled her chances.