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For any college, as long as you meet your diploma requirements and graduate, will anyone subsequently really care what your grades were?
if you apply to grad school, yes. Typically they want a GPA (which was a problem for me since I went to a school that didn't give you grades, just "narrative evals").
Yeah, I'm graduating soon and all the jobs I'm looking at "require" a 3.8 or above. And these aren't huge rockstar companies or anything, just local/regional CRUD shops or basic web dev companies. I guess I should have played the game of taking all the easiest classes with the easiest professors rather than attempting anything with more challenge. Sorry for the rant.
The whole GPA thing never made sense to me. Did you grasp the material? You should get a diploma. Were you extraordinary academically? You should get a diploma with magna cum laude (high praise). Were you a top student and your peers voted you best mate / leader? You should get a diploma with summa cum laude (highest praise). That should be it.
The issue that many schools face is that companies complain the grads - even with PhDs - are not able to do anything useful in the workplace. When my wife did her PhD more than 10 years ago (in the UK) she was required to take a stack of ungraded workshops under the label “professionalizing the PhD” it was totally annoying waste of time for her. The stuff was “basics of Excel”, “Research poster making”, “ intro to Adobe suite”, etc this was done because the university had received feedback that PhD grads could literally do nothing useful when hired.

From the article. “About 60% of the grades handed out in classes for the university’s undergraduate program are A’s, up from 40% a decade ago and less than a quarter 20 years ago, according to a report released Monday by Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education”

Harvard is currently under a lot of pressure from donors , courts ( loss of case on admissions), and political pressure from US administration.

Awarding 60% A’s does not help them make the case that they know what they are doing and should just be allowed to carry on.

Consider stack ranking to ready them for the workplace!