Do Your Class 10th And 12th marks Impact Your Chances Of Getting Into Good Tech Companies ?

I often see resumes mentioning the marks of class 10th and 12th. For whatever reason, It is a well accepted practice to put our school marks on the resume even after a few years of work experience. Does something which you did many years back and have no relation to the skills required at a software job impact your chances of getting that job ?

In this post I will answer this question using my experience of interviewing 100+ candidates while working at big tech companies like Google & Adobe.

Before we can understand the answer to this question, it is important to understand what do goo tech companies look for in a candidate when they are hiring for the role of software engineer. While I was training to interview candidates at Google, we were strictly asked to measure the performance of the candidate based on how they have answered the questions given to them in the interview. All the interviews would fall in one of the 3 categories:

1. Coding round involving data structures and algorithms.

2. System design round.

3. Behavioural interview to judge cultural fit.

None of the interviews involve questions related to your performance in school. So your school marks are not relevant at all for interviewing at good tech companies.

If you can ace the questions in the above interview rounds, the company will be more than happy to hire you.

So the next time when you are applying for a job position at good tech companies, do not worry even 1% about how you did in your class 10th or 12th.

I would even go so far as to suggest you remove these marks all together from your resume, as they are nothing but a waste of space.

Your school marks are useful only till your admission in engineering college. After that, what matters is your coding skills, your college performance and the network you build.

If you are struggling to get a job out of college, and wanted to understand what went wrong, do read this next post below.