How much marks matter in your career?

Now this is one of the most important and commonest (this word exists- check your dictionary) problem students face during their college life. I can understand their anxiety for this thing because once I used to have same kind of anxiety. Now let me come straight to the point. No more beating around the bush.

I will start this article with a small hypothetical situation (indeed, it is hypothetical for the time being).

Let us say you are an interviewer (Ohh. WOW!! I wish if there is any way of making it possible now). You interview two candidates. Both of them have similar kind of profile. Both stand on the same ground in terms of interview, communication skills and everything expect marks. Now you have to choose anyone of them. 

Whom will you choose?

I guess the answer is pretty clear to you. So in these kinds of situations marks matter and this generally occurs in technical companies. This is just one instance where marks provide you an upper hand over others.

Now let me come to second instance. Many companies have minimum percentage criteria i.e. they allow only those students to sit for placements who have marks more than cut off percentage (this depends entirely on the company’s policy). So, you can lag behind in such a scenario because if you have lesser marks than the cut off criteria then you won’t be allowed to sit for placements (Now this is the time when you will shower your senior with your blessings (and so called kind words) because he said marks don’t matter in placements).

Now the other instance where marks provide you the desired edge is in the case of PSUs. Although they have stopped recruiting directly from campuses but still they give value to marks. In campus recruitment, they used to select top rankers from each department and call them for interview and then make the final selection.

You will realize the value of marks when you apply for higher studies, be it in India or Abroad. Now every college has started giving importance to graduation marks and few colleges give lot of importance to college marks. Sometimes having good marks can make all the difference. If I talk about Indian scenario in particular, 79.9% will weigh far less than 80.1%. So, here also having good marks provide you an advantage over others.

Now let me come to internships. I would say that marks are not that much important in your internship because most of the time you go for internships through your contacts in the corporate world. In that kind of scenario companies provide you internship because you were referred by some senior employee of that company. If you are going for internship through college, then again marks matter. In this case situation is similar to placements.

I would suggest you people to work hard on your academics because you will find lot of seniors who will say marks don’t have any value in placements. Don’t listen to such advice (I could have used harsh words here but anyways…). Marks will always benefit you. I am not giving any particular number and considering above that as good marks and below that as bad marks. Good and bad depends entirely on the context in which they are talked. So just study and try to score as much as you can and believe me it is not at all difficult to score above 70% in college.

I would conclude by summing up in one line, “Having good marks will not harm you even if they don’t benefit you. Having low marks will never benefit you even if they don’t harm you”.

Now, I think that this article is bit aggressive and students reading it might get worried (those don’t have good percentage) but you need not. I will come up with the next article in which I will share few tips (which were used by me) to score better and what else you can do to compensate for your grades.

P.S.: These are my personal views and can differ from you.