Annabelle Chang is an undergraduate at Singapore Management University. In this op-ed, she argues that employers should be barred from asking for grades during hiring—a push Singapore might need to ease its obsession with academic results.
Top image: Albert Vincent Wu via Unsplash
Grades are supposedly not everything, until one applies for a job. Telling students—especially the ones about to enter the workforce—that grades don’t define their future is hard to reconcile with reality.
Getting a foot in the door with interviewers is hard enough. On Tuesday, Acting Manpower Minister Jasmin Lau told Parliament that fresh graduates are taking longer to secure full-time jobs, and the numbers revealed are even blunter.
Former Manpower Minister Tan See Leng said as much back in May when he acknowledged that fresh grads are taking longer to secure their first full-time job. Only 74.4 percent of 2025’s university graduates got one, down from 87.5 percent in 2022.
2026 doesn’t look encouraging. Retrenchments hit 4,620 in the second quarter, the highest since late 2020, and they hit young degree holders hardest. Essentially, the 23-year-old fresh grad is competing with someone with several years’ experience and a severance cheque.
Neither is having a good time in the job market right now. Somebody (or more likely, an AI bot) sorts the pile by Grade Point Average (GPA), and a 3.0 is booted out before anyone has read a single word of the cover letter.
Should companies in Singapore be banned from asking for your grades when they hire? If grades-based shortlisting keeps the rote academic pressure on—after years of the government trying to dial it down—who is it actually helping?
Good Grades, Good Hire?
I’d first argue that academic performance is a weak proxy for job suitability; it can cause firms to overlook talent that grades fail to capture.
A meta-analysis found a correlation of only 0.21 between academic performance and job performance, suggesting that grades provide limited information about workplace performance. Resilience, flexibility, and lifelong learning are among the core traits employers value. Grades, by contrast, primarily capture educational performance, not how effectively individuals apply these traits at work.
Ironically, plenty of employers in Singapore still use GPA as a screening tool. One recruitment firm reckons most organisations set a floor of 3.0 before they’ll look at your CV. As far back as 2019, former Economic Development Board managing director Chng Kai Fong mentioned how “there is no substitute” for grades as an indicator.
DBS Group’s ex-CEO Piyush Gupta noted that grades are still the easiest way to shortlist candidates. Grades are cheap and easy to screen with, so employers don’t have much reason to give them up, even if everyone would be better off if they did.
A high GPA doesn’t necessarily mean you lack the skills to thrive, but it’s an indirect, patchy measure of whether you’re right for the job. So the filter can knock out candidates who’d actually be better at the role, and the result is worse matches between people and jobs. And when things don’t work out after the probationary period, time is wasted.
Granted, Singapore is already shifting towards skills-based hiring. The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) says academic qualifications weren’t the main factor in hiring for 79.6 percent of job vacancies in 2025. The year before, it was 78.8 percent—that’s less than a percentage point of progress in a year. It illustrates the limits of relying on voluntary adoption alone.
Why this Shift Is Possible
Restricting grades in hiring pushes firms toward skills-based hiring, shifting recruitment toward job-relevant capabilities. This shift is feasible IRL: Google moved away from routinely using GPA and test scores in 2013 after finding limited predictive value for employee performance, instead relying heavily on structured interviews, cognitive-ability assessments and work-sample tests.
Take the grades component away and firms aren’t left with nothing to go on—they can test for the skills the job actually needs. MOM’s own numbers back this up: for job vacancies where academic qualifications weren’t the main consideration, 69 percent of employers said skills-based hiring had given them better hires.
A shift to skills-based hiring would also make better use of money the Government is already spending. Since 2019, it has put close to S$1 billion into training programmes with on-the-job components, like Career Conversion Programmes and SkillsFuture Work-Study stints, which more than 70,000 workers and 20,000 companies have “benefited” from.
If firms actually tested for job-relevant skills, those workers would have a clearer route from course to job. That’s a better return for the people doing the upskilling—and for the taxpayer footing the bill.
Keep screening by grades, though, and you get an absurd outcome. A mid-career switcher spends months retraining for exactly what the industry says it needs, then gets filtered out over a GPA from 15 years ago before anyone sees what they can do. Fix that, and the billion dollars has a better shot at turning into a more productive workforce.
The Social Cost
Every time an employer asks for your transcript, students get the message loud and clear: your grades determine whether you even get a shot.
So even those who know a GPA says very little about them can’t afford to coast and let their grades slip. Nobody wants to find out what happens if they do, and certainly not in this economy.
This creates a self-reinforcing incentive to prioritise grades. Simply encouraging students to “compete less” or avoid employers that consider grades does not address the underlying problem.
It asks individuals to bear the potential costs of opting out while the employment value of academic credentials remains unchanged. Rationally, students will then continue competing, reinforcing the perception that academic performance determines future opportunities.
This pressure can also shape how students perceive their ability, social status and prospects. Psychologists have reported adults who continue to view their PSLE results as markers of social position decades later. Youths similarly describe links between academic achievement, social status and future income. When academic performance becomes closely tied to students’ sense of self and prospects, such pressure has been linked to psychological distress and suicidal ideation among youths.
This challenges government efforts to reduce excessive academic competition to protect youth wellbeing. For example, replacing the PSLE T-score with Achievement Levels sought to reduce fine-grained academic ranking. But if students continue to see strong academic performance as necessary for future employment, the incentives driving academic competition remain largely intact.
Students won’t stop chasing grades, and employers have no reason to stop asking for them. Someone has to step in, and I’d say government intervention is warranted. What a ban gets rid of is the arms race—along with the burnt-out youths.
A Foot in the Door
A grade ban wouldn’t have to cover every job, however—some industries really do run on what you learnt in school. A university hiring a research assistant has valid grounds to check how a candidate did in the modules they’d actually be working on. The same goes for a quant department looking at a candidate’s statistics grade.
In those cases, the employer is asking about a specific skill the job needs. But sorting a pile of job applications by overall GPA is something else entirely.
None of this makes employers the villains. Sorting by GPA is cheap and fast, and when hundreds of CVs land for a single role, it’s easy to see why HR reaches for the numbers. The issue arises when no company wants to spend more time and resources on holistic screening.
It also wouldn’t be the first time Singapore has told employers what they can’t base hiring on. The Workplace Fairness Act, passed last year, already rules out decisions based on age, race, religion, and nationality, among other things. Asking for a candidate’s race or age on an application form already looks dated. It sounds radical, but GPAs could go the same way.
The obvious worry is that the race just moves somewhere else, and that’s already happening. Undergrads are internmaxxing their way through university. SMU estimates its students do anywhere from two to six internships during their degree, and some juggle two full-time internships at once until they keep falling sick. Others burn out after a summer break that felt like a full semester’s workload and watch their grades slide anyway.
That’s the bind: students have to keep their GPAs up to clear the filter while stacking internships to land an interview. Take grades out of the equation and at least one of those weights comes off. And if firms are made to test for skills directly through work samples and live assessments, another internship stacked on the CV starts to matter a lot less than how you actually perform in the room.
Then there’s the harder bit: us. Numbers and metrics are Singapore’s points of pride—grown adults can still recite their PSLE aggregate decades later; parents bring up their kids’ GPAs at family gatherings to one-up one another.
One ban won’t rewire the culture. But at least there’s a better chance for a fresh grad to even have a foot in the door.
