What's the Deal with GPAs?

I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of time as an undergrad doing GPA math. That is, I spent a lot of time figuring out how a specific grade would affect my GPA and by how much. (Surely I wasn't the only one who did this... wait, was I?)

It was a skill I had to relearn this past weekend when I was checking for my grades. The structure of the MBA program I'm in complicated the matter because each six-week session is worth 1.5 credit hours instead of the more standard 3 hours.

Then there's the +/- scale. Depending on when you graduated college, you may or may not be familiar with how the +/- scale can wreak havoc on your GPA: A plus brings you more points than the standard letter, but a minus drops you down. For example, a B+ average would be a 3.33, but an A- average would be a 3.67 -- not the 4.0 you might expect from getting all As.

So why did I spend part of my precious weekend trying to figure out my GPA? I mean, anyone will tell you that GPAs don't matter in the real world, right? Everybody knows that years down the line, no one asks about your GPA or whether you got an A in econ.

Throughout this fall, I swore that all I cared about was getting a B in econ. In grad school, Bs are the new Cs -- they ensure tuition reimbursement, and they keep you off probation.

And really, that was all I cared about when it came to grades. At least, that was all I cared about until I saw my econ grade. I got the grade I needed, but I was .7 points away from an A. And it was all I could think about that morning. (.7!)

Isn't it funny how, years after being in college, we still revert back to the same issues? No one cares about my GPA. I shouldn't even care about it -- it's learning the material that matters, not a letter grade. (But I was so close!)

And I promise you that I'm not the only one. Looking around the classroom, I've got a good idea which of my classmates care about their GPAs and which ones don't. We all know better, but some of us can't seem to shake the mentality that grades matter. After all, it is a statistic of our success, and many of us deal with statistics at work. Why wouldn't we want to measure our own progress as well?

What about you? Do you (or did you) care about your GPA, or have you already written me off as a total geek? Has your GPA ever come up in a post-college setting?