the 'relevance of grades' argument never seems to die here. like any other measure of ability, the use of GPA has its limitations. the reason the debate continues, i suspect, is that a lot of people here got bad grades.
Anecdote: I went to a $40,000 / yr college and got a GPA-based "Presidential Scholarship" every semester. A friend of mine, who didn't really know what to do with college, got a 2-year degree in general ed from a state college. I can tell you that he's at least as smart and about 3x wiser than I am. He gets more out of his job, has a better social life, is in better shape, etc etc etc.
So from my perspective, GPA is about 95% useless in real life.
:)
I did say "in my experience"! I also called the story out as an anecdote, not anything statistically useful. The 95% figure is an estimate based on lots of people I know, not just the one story.
I think we agree completely that the use of GPA as a measure of ability is limited. To be fair, though, I never asserted that GPA would predict who would 'have a better social life' or who would be 'in better shape.' In fact, I might predict that these would be negatively correlated with GPA. Also, I'm not sure I understand your story: did your friend actually have low grades, or are you just saying he was highly successful after attending a less famous school?
In any case, I hesitate to offer my own examples: I don't have a sufficiently large sample size, as I don't hang out with people who had low GPAs.
So from my perspective, GPA is about 95% useless in real life.