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[quote=Anonymous]Some do, although usually it's buried somewhere on their website.  My undergrad SLAC likes to pride itself on no grade inflation and academic rigor.  We have literally had 10 4.0s in the history of the college and the average GPA has stayed around a 3.0 for decades.  Phi Beta Kappa is like a 3.6 cumulative GPA.  There have been a lot of concerns that it hurts people in grad school applications, especially as programs try to game the US news and world report rankings, though.

A lot of people whine about how it hurts them in grad school and in the workplace.  It certainly can--and it's especially a problem for medical and law school applications.  There is one med school and one law school that are located in the same city that tend to be more forgiving of lower GPAs because they are familiar with the curriculum--but they are definitely the exception to the rule.  Kids with mediocre GPAs usually kill the MCAT or LSAT and sometimes end up being the exception to the rule...or they are screwed.  For PhD programs, the placement is actually far better than you would expect given low GPAs, in part because grad schools are familiar with the program and how rigorous it is.  Kids coming out of that SLAC tend to have strong letters and everyone is required to do a senior thesis, so they tend to have very strong research experience and sometimes publications.  I have even heard of some people getting into top PhD programs with GPAs as low as 2.8-2.9 coming from our SLAC.  So I tend to think what is lost in numbers advantage is gained in alumni network, strong reputation, and strong preparation.  But the average workplace environment is not populated with academics, so it can be a disadvantage in that regard.

Given how competitive the work place is, and how numbers driven people are, it's definitely something to think about.  My low GPA (3.2--which I worked my butt off for, even in the classes I got Cs in) has come up when applying for fellowships in graduate school and in applying to graduate school and for jobs where HR sees my GPA--and some opportunities haven't manifested due to it.  So far I (and most of my friends) have done well anyway, and I very much appreciated how rigorous my education was, the strong alumni network.  At times I wonder if a higher undergraduate GPA would have opened some doors that were closed though, but it's water under the bridge.

My good friend who went to MIT said that she had similarly mixed feelings about the rigor of her school vs. the low GPA.  She said that MIT students in a lot of ways are at a real disadvantage to Harvard students when applying to medical, business, and law school, even if they are both, say, chemistry majors just due to the differences in grade inflation.  Of course the MIT name has really opened up doors for her in other ways (far more so than my SLAC which is well regarded among a much smaller subset of people), so it is what it is.[/quote]

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