I mean that there ' s evidence that you ' ve done or learned what ' s considered necessary for you to be successful in the future . Academia and industry have different expectations . GPA is a fairly meaningless metric there ' s so much variance between programs , courses , and instructors . Furthermore , the farther I get from school I ' m a fair number of years removed , now , the less respect and relevance I assign to academic grading . Most students are rather clever about finding exploits in the system I certainly was . Where would a 3 . 6 put me ? Depends on who you ask , of course . To me , personally , anything beyond a 3 . 0 B average or equivalent is good enough , which is all that matters , and I ' d happily overlook something worse if it was clear the candidate had developed the right skills regardless through workinginterning and so forth . A 3 . 6 is beyond good enough . Curiously enough , I don ' t have a particularly positive impression of candidates with 4 . 0 or just shy GPAs , because I have a sense that their priorities were too narrow , and I personally favor more rebellious and creative types . Graduate school is different , because there ' s an obviously direct correlation between how well you do in classes and how well you ' re going to do in future classes . The additional component is research potential , which is why academic references , lab experience , REUs , and so forth are so important there . FWIWI graduated cum laude from a respectable program . No sour grapes here .