My school recently instated an opt-in pass/fail system for this semester due to COVID-19. If I opted in pass/fail to all classes, would that come off as lazy when recruiting for IB? As a banker, how would you view a student who has opted in pass/fail for classes?
Currently, a sophomore with 3.9+ GPA so going pass/fail would allow me to retain a good GPA going into the recruiting summer.
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A couple of the kids from my alma mater I'm mentoring have asked me this question.
The simple truth is that you're worrying over nothing. There is no person, whether in a business role or in HR, who is going to comb through your transcript looking for P/F letters with a maniacal cackle hoping to be able to throw you out of the process.
Here's how it worked back in my day.
You submit your resume to the people you've networked with, you submit it through OCR and sometimes through the bank's own website as well, and you get invited to interview. You perform well and receive an offer, and you're asked for a transcript as part of the process for them to provide official documentation for you to sign. A human goes through and reads the transcript for each candidate that's getting an offer; the goal is solely to confirm that the candidate didn't lie about the GPA on the resume.
Here's how it works today.
All the same as above, except there's now ML/OCR software that can scrub the file and take the grunt work out of it for the HR lackey.
The only cause for concern here would be graduate school applications. Again, people tend to overreact here. HBS is not trying to throw you out of the applicant pool because of a couple P's on your transcript. What they're looking for is an indication of your academic and intellectual ability. If you had a 3.4 GPA, a non-analytical major, and the two quantitative courses you took as part of the gen-ed requirements both showed up with a P on your transcript, that would be a negative. If you're sitting on a 3.84 from a good school and you have a bunch of P's from the spring 2020 semester when corona was rampaging the earth, no one is ever going to blink.
Signed: a guy with a P and a W and a bunch of other letters that weren't A on his transcript.