Does a good CGPA decide our career?

          “Education is not preparation for life, education is life in itself”.

Great personalities such as Abraham Lincoln, Bill Gates, Nelson Mandela, Narendra Modi, Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachchan, A.R Rahman, Mary Kom and many more did not have their success in life determined by their CGPAs. It is ultimately our work that makes us great.

What is a CGPA?

Educational systems have set some metrics such as marks, say 80, 90,etc. or grades (A, B, C, etc.)  as their scale of measurement to evaluate a student’s academic performance. “Cumulative Grade Point Average” is the average of grade points obtained for all the semester courses in an academic year. It is a process to figure out a student’s overall performance.

Thus, grading system makes it easy for institutes to judge good or poor performance of a student. This is also considered as an indicator of student’s hard work, time management, seriousness towards an exam, etc. In most cases better jobs are handed over to efficient students with good grades, and they are the ones who get an admission to the best institutes.

Having this piece of paper can open doors for you to hold a seat in your name, but the key to further success comes from experience and skills.

“Learning theoretical information is not sufficient, there is a need to gain practical knowledge and application, attitude, and making the right adjustments with the surrounding.”

The final forming of a person‘s character lies in their own hands and not in their CGPA.

Is this the right system for all students?

CGPA is considered to be the best parameter to get an appropriate resource for a job. In this highly populated world, it acts like a filtering mechanism, separating the ore from the precious minerals. Thus, from the very beginning a career is decided on the basis of CGPAs – a good CGPA suggests that one is intelligent and thus pave the way for success. But how can one decide a student’s career based on this one parameter? That is like deciding the future based on just past, historical records. Moreover, CGPA distribution is not uniform or standardized across the world. Likewise, private institutes and ‘deemed universities’ have their own syllabi and CGPA systems in place.

Two faces of a coin:

CGPA plays a great role not only in deciding one’s career but also his life. But this often leads to higher expectations from friends and family, which often results in frustration and unwarranted stress among students. Parents in particular over burden their wards with expectations, while discouraging their other hobbies, interests and extra-curricular activities. Many students owing to enhanced stress becomes highly irritated and this leads to unhealthy and bad habits formation such as drugs, smoking, drinking etc. Sometimes students even take the most extreme route and even commit suicide.

So what is needed?

To rightly establish one’s career, technical skills along with softer sills such as people and social skills are required; that is: developing one’s personality, having the right attitude, ability to work with teams, having the right emotional quotient, self-motivation, etc. But it is also important to understand that everyone is worthy: some maybe be good at studies while some in extracurricular activities. And we simply cannot judge one’s capabilities going by just one parameter – CGPA. Everyone should get equal opportunities, and should have the right to choose their own or desired career.