[MichaelZuo]

Based on their actual merit?

For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.

[throwaway314155]

You're talking about the way the world should be. Reality is different.

For instance, having graduated from Harvard is going to get you a fairly good job _regardless_ of their GPA.

Similarly, there is no objective way to measure "merit" that isn't unfair to _someone_ and also scales to dozens/hundreds/thousands of students. So people use GPA.

Life isn't fair.

[MichaelZuo]

Why does it matter if there is an ‘objective way’ or not?

Clearly peers do evaluate each other in any ways they choose, pretty much every day at Harvard I imagine.

[fnordpiglet]

When discussing percentile ranks of students and their admission to top schools the school needs some way of measuring the percentile according to some measurable metric. It’s not a vibe based process. GPA and test scores are heavily leaned upon.

I would note that students who depend on AIs to answer questions on homework will do poorly on tests. I am not really sure what all the fuss is about. Kids cheating on homework is nothing new and a machine doing it for your is little different than all the other ways kids cheat on homework. And cheating on homework doesn’t help you in your grades - it hurts you because you’re unprepared for exams, which typically dominate the weighting of a grade. Then once you take a standardized placement exam you’re totally screwed.

[MichaelZuo]

> When discussing percentile ranks of students and their admission to top schools the school needs some way of measuring the percentile according to some measurable metric. It’s not a vibe based process. GPA and test scores are heavily leaned upon.

How does this relate to the prior comment?

I’m clearly not an admissions officer at Harvard, nor likely are the other HN commentors here.