ACT/SAT is more important than GPA
This might be a hot take, but a candidate's ACT/SAT is a far more reliable indicator of how intelligent and successful they will be than their GPA.GPAs are almost impossible to compare because different schools have different curves and standards. Some of the Ivy leagues are notorious for their grade inflation, while large state schools can often be much more harsh because of the sheer number of students in a section. It also doesn't help at all when comparing candidates with different majors. A math major getting a 3.3 is way more impressive than a 3.9 finance or econ in my opinion.Standardized tests level the playing field significantly because everyone is forced to compete at the same level. If I saw a nontarget with a 36, I'd take that any day over the target with a 33, given they both have relevant experience.
Comments (52)
I don't think that's a hot take at all - ACT/SAT is a universal standard, GPA varies significantly. Bankers don't really care about GPA as long as it's above the minimum of 3.7 or so.
This might be accurate with regards to intelligence but in IB recruiting, GPA is 1000% more important. Every time. I agree a 3.3 math major is more impressive than a 3.9 GPA... but IB is well known to only care about GPA, so someone aiming for IB who is bombing their grades with a hard major is not being very smart about their path.
Personally I did poorly on the SAT (<1300) because I was immature at age 16, which is pretty common. I grew up after that and then went on to get a 3.9 in a difficult major.
There's also huge socioeconomic differences here, parents paying for 2 years of tutoring certainly helps some kids get higher ACT/SAT scores than they would otherwise.The GPA part at least you have to put in consistent work. Also fwiw on the scientific end, GPA is more indicative of success in college and beyond than SAT scores
Why should candidates have to "be smart about their path"? Recruiting is so accelerated these days and some people don't know they want to do IB the moment they set foot on campus. You're overlooking so much talent if you only look at candidates who did the bare minimum in all the right things from the fall of their freshman year.
I agree it sucks that recruiting is accelerated, but that is what it is. Totally agree banks could have a wider talent pool, but as a lowly associate running recruiting at a BB I don't really control that. I have to work within the given constraints. My MDs are not happy interviewing a 3.3 even if their major is quantum physics.
Freshman year is a bye and you really should have IB in your sights by the start of soph year to be competitive. No one is taking junior or senior level math classes as a freshman, you have time to figure out your major if you decide on IB early in your sophomore year.
SAT and ACT scores are going away because they are so inequitable and incredibly skewed towards rich kids who have the resources for years of $$$$ prep. Why reward that even further?
Editing to add source on correlation. Per UPenn, "High school GPA and class rank each have weakly positive correlations with household income, falling between 0.06 and 0.07, whereas SAT scores, especially on the math section, have correlations with household income roughly 3 times as large" (Source)
I don't understand the tutoring aspect. If parents can afford SAT/ACT tutoring then they can afford to tutor for basic classes. At least with SAT/ACT it's 4 hours or so alone by the student. It cuts through any bias/grade inflation a school might have. And there's numerous online free resources (Khan Academy helped me a ton) to study for the tests that are as good as tutoring.
^^^ this only applies to high school, college GPA is a different beast ^^^
Silly…I took ACT during COVID. Only got 1 try as all my others got cancelled. I had to drive 1hr 15 minutes away. Had a locally-televised rivalry high school football game the night before. Off 5 hours of sleep, I scramble to find this high school in the middle of nowhere, rush in, and take it. Oh yea, I got a 34 too, with a 32 on English as I was still waking up.
But you would blindly take a 35 or 36 who could've taken it 5 times superscored over a target school GPA which shows a track record of success.
But most people will have their superscored scores, or they will have taken it multiple times because of how important they are in college admissions. So if you still have a low score even after opportunities for multiple retakes, it probably suggests that you didn't care enough or didn't prep hard enough
Lol dude I had 4 straight tests cancelled from March 2020 to September 2020
Dude you cant complain about not getting enough sleep when you were up watching a football game lmao you just didnt care enough
Dude I was a senior playing in the game and had to wake up bruised and tired and drive.
Neither are important now. What matters are your demographics and pronouns.
So true. 3.8, target, M&A internship, corp dev/strategy internship, but me and the other white boys at my school can't gain any traction at the top places.
Asian male @ high semi-target w/ 1570, 3.9 GPA in STEM, can't get an interview. Such bullshit.
Yall are definitely exaggerating this lol. I have a 3.9 at a high-semi target(Vandy, Emory, Northwestern, UVA, UCLA) with a couple of internships and clubs and I've gotten a bunch of interviews as an Indian male.
at the end of the day they're both bullshit. you can get a bullshit "adhd accommodation" and get 1.5x time for every test you take in college and the ACT/SAT. Also, saying ivy leagues have inflated grades is, for lack of a better word, retarded. Most kids at ivies would get a 4.0 without breaking a sweat at their own state schools. If the average Harvard kid is getting a 3.7 at Harvard, that's actually deflated considering he'd get a 4.0 at any non-peer institution
Lmao that is absolutely not true. I knew a few kids who got into an Ivy league because of athletic scholarships while being absolute duds academically and having shit ACT scores in my public high school. But somehow they were able to get A's in the best universities in the country? Get out of here.
idk, at my ivy most the athletes w low test scores are sitting with a sub 3.0 gpa, guess it could vary by school? Also, wasn't rlly talking about athletes/legacy donors etc.
People are missing the main point here. SAT/ACT is a single test whereas GPA is a track record across a multi-year period. The latter is a much better indicator of consistent work ethic which is far more relevant for finance than mastering one exam or measures of raw intelligence.
Regarding the argument of a 3.3 math major, I disagree with you because if someone got a 3.3 that means that person did a major that was too hard for them. A skillset desired in finance is being able to appropriately manage your workload. Nobody wants the analyst who volunteers for everything and then burns out or delivers substandard work. Someone who is reliable in the deliverables worked on even if it isn't the maximum amount an analyst has volunteered for is of tremendous value.
Outside of maybe hft, the skills above matter much more than raw intellect.
Array
a 3.3 in a hard major isnt a burnout that's just a wild take. the kid who somehow knew he wanted to be in IB in HS then tailored his college major to get a 3.7+ to get a JPM internship seems more likely to burnout and be a less fulfilled person over time. maybe youre young but i cant think of worse advice to give a teenager than to settle your academic development to target a gpa for a job you probably dont fully understand.
With a 3.3 in Math you aren't getting into IB and you aren't even getting into bank quant jobs. Plenty of 3.9+ in Grad Stem degrees from China or South Korea to fill those roles.
I'm not telling people which career path to choose, but there are implications for how you have to set up your degree if you want a specific job. The 3.3 in CS from a target might be good for a software engineer role at FAANG, but it will get you autodinged if you apply to IB. Similarly a 3.9 in Accounting/Finance would be seen as desirable in IB but of little use in software engineering.
Array
don't disagree but also want to add that you can learn how to take SAT and ACT in ways that help achieve higher scores, and practice to get higher scores.
Yes there is a point where intelligence comes into play, but I would say that most people applying for Finance jobs do have typically above average intelligence levels
I took 2 ACTs, got a 26 on the first one with no practice and then I just took practice tests weekly for 2-3 months and got a 33 my second time.
Work Ethic: GPA
Sheer intelligence (unless ur parents funneled money into prep): ACT/SAT
What do you think banks care about given the job is just excel/ppt for the most part with 80-110 hour weeks?
You're largely right in an ideal world, but GPA is just too different among schools. A 3.8 at Harvard indicates nothing whereas a 3.8 in an engineering program is much more demonstrable of work ethic. SAT is just the best standardized metric.
College is a better reflection of IB's work nature. Maintaining a 3.7+ GPA during 3 years of school means that you'll be able to deliver in 92%+ of cases what is expected from you for the next 2 years.
Unless you're recruited for BX TacOpps, a quant HF, building the next Tesla, or just writing research papers, my question is why I should care about your raw intelligence?
No matter how high your ACT/SAT or GPA is, down the road, they mean nothing if you're not able to help someone else become richer, add value to someone's life, or just seize opportunities to enrich yourself (and if it's not obvious, you won't be doing those 3 in a corporation - much less in your 20s - so no one, including recruiters, really cares about raw intelligence).
The workload of a business major in college is just laughable though, so you can't extrapolate that to how they will do when working 80+ hours a week
Unfortunately, you can't extrapolate much from someone's resume besides (1) relevant experience or (2) transferable skills; only when that's missing you take a shot on someone based on a holistic approach (GPA + school + major + achievements + referees + extracurriculars + etc.).
That's why down the road GPA and school don't matter, hopefully, you proved you have one of the first 2 so there's no need to take the other approach.
For a business major I think it's easy to get in the 3.3-3.5 range. But for every .1 point after that the workload increases exponentially. A 3.9 is much harder to pull off than a 3.7 which is much harder to pull off than a 3.5.
Array
For me, it was far easier to go from 1290 to 1550 on the SAT than getting 3.80 + as an Econ major as a Freshman at a target. To be frank, U.S exams (ACT/SAT) are far easier than college entrance exams in India or China. Most of the kids who went to Ivy from my home country were wealthy kids who could not make it to the very top university in my home country (no offense though). Of course, there were kids who went to MIT or Caltech after gaining admission to the very top domestic school. My point is, anyone, especially if your first language is English, can achieve high scores on the SAT/ACT. Therefore, the SAT/ACT are not an reliable indicator of your IQ which I think only measures your mathematic ability as well. To be honest, it is hilarious how doing well on middle school level math and high school English is an indicator of your intelligence. I'd rather see AP Physics and Calculus scores as an indicator of not intelligence, but OK you did kind of work harder on the quantitative fields which I assume you are persistent. At the end of the day, observing people who placed very well, they were are very social and personable which matters a lot in finance. If you didn't win like an international Olympiad or some shit that is really sophisticated, intelligence doesn't matter for most of the exams.
This shit is so stupid - end of the day you are a logo aligner, and a slave to your deal team. You need someone who can follow instructions and has a strong attention to detail, not someone who can solve for 'X' better than the next person. This job is not hard, only time consuming and mind numbing. I currently work in PE (went to a target, had a 1590/1600 SAT) and can say none of that has made me a good analyst.
This is a pretty poor take when you realize how much tutoring helps you improve on your SAT. I was fortunate enough for my parents to afford to pay thousands of dollars for me to improve my practice score to actual score by about 200 points with the help of private tutors (and a certain level of personal commitment to my workbooks). There were kids I knew who were smarter than me who had no tutoring who were very close behind me in their score, even though I consider them to be far smarter than I am.
Plus, in recruiting they don't really give a shit about GPA. As long as you're above a 3.5 or a 3.7 depending on the firm they could care less about your GPA. If you go to a high target school they could care less about your major.
When it really boils down to recruiting the only two things that actually matter are your involvement with other internships / clubs / activities and how well you can communicate with others. Out of maybe 60+ places I recruited for maybe ~5-6 firms actually asked for my HS SAT score.
I see the even playing field logic and get that every school is different but I fee like putting in consistent effort over the course of years and performing throughout says a lot more than one 3 hour test. I went to a very challenging high school and there were plenty of people who had pretty average GPAs and did really well on the SAT and vice versa. I feel like the SAT says more about the knowledge you've accumulated and maintaining a good GPA in a challenging academic environment speaks to work ethic, consistency, elasticity, and the ability to learn new concepts and work on projects which I think is much more important in a work environment.
the only score that matters after college is your credit score.
806, getting ready for my SA. Do you think they'll dock me for dropping from an 810?
I'd agree if the SAT/ACT was controlled for outside 1:1 tutoring / prep courses that enable Rich kids who would've scored a 15 on their first shot to brute force their way to a 35. Nothing is truly meritocratic or equitable.
And before someone chimes in with the "But but but there's FREE options too" - it's like saying the guy paying $300 for a equinox membership with a private personal trainer is going to get the same leg up as the guy paying $15 for a planet fitness figuring out how to get fit on his own. Of course they can reach the same outcome, but one has a steeper hill outright for sure.
Lol this thread is funny…
T50-100 State School
Finance Major, 3.6 GPA
1410 SAT
Offer from BB(ish) I didn't network at (1 call after first round interview with a 1st year analyst from my school)
Just learn your shit and you'll be fine. Went into interviews and just talked about spreads in my product(s) and why/ what was happening with them.
You say a math major with a 3.3 is way more impressive than a finance/econ major with a 3.9. Do you think that would backtest well? Like if we went back 10-20 years and looked at 3.3 math majors vs 3.9 finance/econ majors, that the former group would be "way more impressive" in terms of where they landed in life?
If you test this of people interested in going into finance, yes. I'd bet that math/comp sci majors who went into finance out-earn both finance majors who went into finance and math/comp sci who didn't go into finance.
are you assuming the math/compsci that go into finance pursue the quant or IB/PE path
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