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'What Straight-A Students Get Wrong' (nytimes.com)
From a story: Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A's. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers. I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a 4.0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.
Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem -- it's more about finding the right problem to solve.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.
Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem -- it's more about finding the right problem to solve.
Obviously, they have little bearing on the real world, where you need to actually achieve, rather than regurgitate words at the professor.
Which problem do you devote yourself to when so many are so pressing. Nuclear proliferation, or the rights of the poor? Clean drinking water, or stopping human/animal trafficking? AIDS or Lung Cancer?
Just growing up is hard in this world. Picking among all these major issues we face to find one that is most important, that we can achieve something meaningful in and accomplish some milestone for.. I think it's rarer now.
When there's just 1 war, you know where to enlist.
It is wrong if all you learn is to recite things and become a living database. Learning is all about fundamentals, like the right approach to any given task.
Problem solving is apparently not taught anymore? What kind of courses were these students aiming for A in?
Apparently gets you into the NYTimes, though.
Do any companies even care about grades that much? I’ve never seen any that insist on anything above a 3.0, and I suspect it’s because GPA is useless for comparing applicants across colleges. I’d probably be leery of anyone with a particularly low (say sub-2.0) GPA, past a certain point it doesn’t matter.
At one point, the article says, in effect, that it's unhealthy to obsess over getting straight As -- and that it's ineffective, because people like Martin Luther King and JK Rowling didn't get straight As. If it's unhealthy to give yourself a hard time pursuing straight As, it's even more unhealthy to give yourself a hard time trying to be Martin Luther King or JK Rowling -- and it's wildly less attainable.
It depends on where you are working. What this person describes is political BS. That is needed at old monopolies, or none-technical companies, that have a small amount of ppl.
In a large go-getting start-up type company, you are much better off focusing on solutions and not how you can BS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Unless you get straight-A starred grades in your school final exams and top grades in your BMAT, most medical schools around the world, including many one in the less developed countries, will not accept your application.
Is the very high entrance standards of medical schools creating better doctors than would otherwise be the case if they also accepted "B-grade" students?
I found the critical reasoning section of the BMAT is very difficult to do to a high grade within the available time of 100 seconds per question. I have an uncorrectable vision defect (corneal abrasions give monocular diplopia, which slows down my reading speed). I am also almost certainly more stupid than when I was younger.
I've worked in a company where GPAs strongly influenced hiring decisions (yes, even after years in the workforce). At that company myself and most of my colleagues had 3.5+ GPAs from top universities. I've also worked at companies where GPA and school meant zero towards the hiring process.
The difference in the quality of personnel was stark. At the high GPA company everyone was incredibly smart, hard working, and overachieving. At the anything-goes companies, *some* people are smart and hard working, but most are just there to clock in their 9-5, get their paycheck, and put in the minimal amount of effort along the way that they can without being fired.
>> at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance
Sure, if they can pass Google interviews, their grades are unlikely to have much bearing on their performance. They have a pretty serious bearing on being able to pass interviews, though, I can tell you that.
Those grades only grade, how good you are, at being a robot. As in: Memorizing data, and blindly applying algorithms to fixed patterns.
So why would you hire them? They are literally just expensive flawed robots. They can't do creative or self-thinking tasks, nor come up with anything by themselves, and if you want robots, you just get literal (machine) robots.
Nah, they try to fill the area that bosses already fill with actual robots.
For the real professions, that require real humans, the drop-outs, who always enjoyed a thing, and mostly dropped out because they were following their passion instead, are usually the best candidates.
theoretical physics and have had a very successful career for over 20 years.
Please don't show this article to my dumb C grade students, because those dumb asses will say that grades are not important and just flunk everything.
As a former A student, the biggest thing I got wrong was never asking Peggy Blair out. She was smoking hot and she looked like she would have been a lot of fun, but I didn't think I had a shot with her. All these years later she becomes my friend on Facebook and asks me why I never asked her out, and that she liked me back then.
I realize that there were so many times I didn't take a shot because I was a little shy and caught up in my own head and I could have been fucking like crazy if I'd only had the confidence of a guy like Kenny Jaworski, who was a jerkoff and had nothing going on but was always macking on the girls.
That, and I wish I'd spent less time studying and more time getting high.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Self sabotage disguised as integrity.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
but even more important is having valid work experience in your field of study.
Some technical schools require a year of Co-op blocks with paid employment at external companies. Some additionally require a senior project for graduation.
If you're a pre-med student, or pre-law student, well that's another kettle of fish.
>"Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence."
I can tell you that when I hire (which is rare, but still relevant), I don't care about grades AT ALL. I really don't care which University either (as long as it is not mail-order). It does matter which degree, depending on the position, but not as much as most people would expect.
I am far more interested in things like: Where they have worked and for how long, what experience they have, their personality, their interests (in or out of the field), what projects they have worked on (in or out of the field).
Technical competence is nowhere near as difficult to find than a well-rounded, devoted, "good" person, who can work with others and communicate well. Getting all "A's" doesn't necessarily even mean technical competence, it means that person is good at performing in the school "system", which, generally doesn't map to the real-world of employment. Any technical info you learn for the I.T. field will go stale quickly... but the methodologies you learn will not.
My advice to young people- going to college/university is fine. Pick a field that interests you, has hiring potential, AND is something that you have some natural talent for. Focus less on grades and more on variety of applicable experience. Make sure your coursework includes anything that will help with your communications and verbal skills (English, writing/composition, speech). If you can't verbally utter a sentence without the word "like" or if you can't write an Email without confusing "their" "there" and "they're", or you can't write a report without messing up verb/subject agreement, you are in trouble.
Also include anything that will strengthen your critical thinking (debate, logic, reason). If you can- work part-time, take internships, participate in clubs/groups both in and out of your field... even if that means it will take longer to get through school.
One more thing, and it relates to what I already said, above. Landing a good technical job is one thing, but if you want to move into management, people will judge you not just by your past results, but how
GPA is only marginally about intelligence. It is mostly about being able to identify and fulfill expectations, combined with a decision that grades matter. In hiring, I want someone that I think could get a 4.0 if they decided it was important, but honestly when doing recruiting, I haven't always looked at the GPA on the resume; what matters is having skills that go beyond the basic curriculum to make the candidate stand out. My favorite interview question for programming positions is to ask about projects done for fun outside of work and school to try to assess technical passion. But back to GPA, one candidate that stood out had a really low GPA, but they listed their GPA for just the last two years separately, which was much higher. They had some other interesting relevant experience, so I recommended hiring.
Mainly so that when the straight A students bomb out and get a B they don't jump off the roof because they "failed."
That's what I was told back in the 80s by my B student friend who got a commission to Annapolis.
I actually have a lot of respect for US military academy grads and the academies. They might know something the rest of us don't.
So what is the author's advice? Do not seek good grades?
See subject & "Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan" per the film ROLLERBALL (original one) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... where the BOGUS phrase "It's not a world of GREAT MEN but now a world of committees" really shows itself as a "portent of things to come"!
Yes, & in the REAL world?
1 of my heros in LIFE had the same crap happen (Marcus Allen vs. Al Davis (scumbag)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... went thru EXACTLY that!
* ... & I can't HELP but root for men like him (a TRUE Jonathan who overcome just about EVERYTHING that Davis could throw @ him & he GROSSLY underestimated Allen, bigtime - thought he could "age him out" or "break his will" via the great Bo Jackson, or Eric Dickerson & Roger Craig - Davis, FAILED).
Problems PRESENT THEMSELVES - you beat them, this is all you can do... take on the ones you KNOW you can (provided you have sufficient domain-knowledge of said area, & if not? GET IT 1st, then attack issues) & win.
(Just like I've beaten DOWN my competition via hosts files in INFERIOR bloated, crippled, security-issue riddled 'competitors' OR alternate means that are STUPID illlogic-logic "Bolt-on-'MoAr'" bullshit - along w/ the TROLLS on /. I annihilate "trying me" nigh-constantly on it... why? MY NAME's ON IT... that's why - unlike their UNIDENTIFIABLE ANONYMOUS stalking me (due to them trying to 'wear me down' & it only makes me stronger/more resolute KNOWING they'll have to TRY 'downmod hide' their defeat vs. me as always? I'll override & RUN THAT GAME too, lol!)
APK
P.S.=> I suppose SELF-BELIEF (know thyself & thy enemy - be it people OR situations) is the best thing to have & DRIVE/desire above all else - it's MORE than God-given talent imo... apk
Well alrighty then. But you do meander a bit
What is this nonsense, and what does it have to do with the misplaced obsession with grades? Is this just a bunch of incoherent offtopic nonsense? Please explain to me what this has to do with the topic of the story.
e.g. her 300 level courses. There were 400 qualified kids (3.8 GPA or higher, not sure how many more below that) and 200 slots. It was a minor miracle she got in even with a 4.0 because she didn't have much volunteering and no sports or job experience (she had a job lined up sophomore year but couldn't take it because she had to take extra credit hours of classes to qualify for her grants and loans).
Kid's aren't fighting for a 4.0 for top schools anymore. 30 years of nonstop state & federal funding cuts mean they're fighting for spots in regular public Universities. This is what happens when you've got a winner take all, survival of the fittest economy. What pisses me off is how few people acknowledge it. There are literally tens of thousands, if not millions of parents with kids in college. Do you all just not talk to your kids?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What is "illlogic-logic "Bolt-on-'MoAr'" bullshit" and the other incomprehensible nonsense in the parent post? I feel like I just read the ramblings of someone who's high as a kite.
See subject & I'm glad you "caught my drift" & PRETTY SOON (as of New Year's + whipslash/Logan Abbott's taking over /.)? I'm going to use that ROLLERBALL & ROLL ALL OVER whipslash again as I did last year (except using Thanos "You will know what it's like to LOSE" that time as my analogy, lol) - why?
Quote the Marcus Allen story here https://www.youtube.com/watch?... & this line:
"I could TUNNEL my way thru OR power my way thru" (which I have to here as whipslash the PROFITEERING webmaster tried to stop me & FAILED, lol, as hosts cut his profits (well if you & your GOOGLE advertiser pals didn't SLOW, TRACK & INFECT US? I'd never have come out w/ the MOST efficient NATIVE solution vs. your shit, lol)) & "THEN? I COULD SCORE BY AIR!"
APK
P.S.=> ... lol, & I'm ramming it back down his THROAT lmao - rightfully so (& you ALL know it)... apk
Why would you make the magic leap and assume that kids who get straight A's are any less creative than those who don't. There are people in each academic bucket who are either creative or aren't. There are people in each academic bucket who are stressed out or aren't. There are people in each academic bucket who work hard or don't. I personally didn't play the academic game. I graduated with a degree in chemical engineering. But had a low 3 grade average. My oldest child didn't play the academic game. However my second child's did play the academic game. Got 4.0s and high ACT scores and has offers for full rides to several colleges. So straight A's may not equate directly with being creative or smart I can tell you which of my children just got a lot of free money
See subject & funny OTHERS got my message: Oh, I think YOU did too WHIPSLASH (lol, anniversary's coming up & you LOSE 2 yrs. straight)... while I drink a beer celebrating a good laugh here!
* :)
"Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan" (Especially registered /.ers liking/using/praising my work here https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... by the DOZENS (& that's only the start of them) + 100k users worldwide...)
APK
P.S.=> Now, IF that's NOT the case? Again - others understood me PERFECTLY - it's not MY fault you're DUMB as a BOX OF ROCKS & can't grasp comparisons like I did... apk
It's even worse than the abstract makes it out to be.
After three to four years at Google, people with PhDs (outside of the research orgs, at least)... ...are indistinguishable in performance reviews from folks without any degree.
Once you've had a sufficiently challenging few years in industry, and sustained required performance, degrees do not matter.
See subject & this whipslash (our 2 yr. anniversary of your FAIL vs. me is coming SOON, lol) https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
* :)
APK
P.S.=> RoTfLmAo - couldn't have put it ANY better. & your dull-brained responses say it ALL for me - you're "ReAcTinG", lol.. apk
No, you evidence you're obsessed w/ me & STALKING, harassing, LIBELING me etc. by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts like now.
* Don't worry Loge "ole' boy" - I'm establishing a "/. TRADITION" that on the anniversary of you taking over /., I show how EASILY I take over YOU & blow YOU away, lol... nothing STOPS me, but me.
Get that thru your HEAD boy!
APK
P.S.=> ... & you KNOW it boy (everyone does), lol... apk
"...career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem -- it's more about finding the right problem to solve."
Finding the right problem?
The very capitalism that drives careers thrives in pimping materialistic shit products packed full of features we never asked for and didn't want, to fill a need that doesn't really exist.
Consumers buy solutions to non-problems all the damn time. If someone ever did find the "right" problem, they would probably be fired.
Caveats:
Science related degree related to the job
Highly ranked college
The GPA may not say much about success, but in order to be successful, having a high GPA means you at least get to try.
> For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.
How many 2.0 GPA hires do you think Google has?
My company hires a lot of "kids" right out of engineering school. These kids are smart, don't get me wrong, but they come out looking for more grades as school is all they've ever known. There is a transition from this to the real world and the academic community fails to prepare many of them (if any) for this. A quick "A+" and closure to whatever challenge they just met, while the rest of us know things aren't that simple, may take years of work, and even then the overall, multi-faceted success may have some facets of failure. So many don't seem to get this.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
... because everyone is taught the same shit.
That's OK for elementary, but by middle school (junior high), it's time to recognize people's passions and aptitudes and steer them down that or those lanes.
A friend with kids asked me if the kids should learn code. I said, absolutely not. Expose them to it and see if that take the bait. If not, try different bait.
As an analogy (not car), I told him that some parents force their kids to learn how to play the piano. Know how many good pianists there are? Not many.
Forcing kids to take code is a good way to piss them off and never forgive you for being stupid.
And if a kid like the violin, buy them one and the lessons to go with it.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The author is real asshole. Straight A students didn't create the game, they are just playing the game. The real question is "what are administrators and employers get wrong", by opening more doors based on GPA. Don't blame the victim.
I don't know where you went to school, but in my alma mater the amount of information was far in excess of what anyone could memorize. You had to understand, and be able to derive things to do well on the exams. Memory does help, but that help is very limited without understanding.
Only to nullilfy an effete DOLT like you who ADMITTED you wrote a bot to IMPERSONATE, libel me 1st https://science.slashdot.org/c... dimwit - my work RAN ALL OVER YOU & ran you DRY of "downmodpoints" chump!
You shit yourself on that one, lol!
* Against me? You CAN'T WIN - accept it!
(Besides, "KNOW YOUR ROLE" boy! All "your kind" KNOWS how to DO is lose in life, lol...)
APK
P.S.=> "It's your DESTINY luke PUKE" (especially vs. me), lol... apk
yer mom.
That was my undergraduate GPA. Once in graduate school, one of the older department secretaries complimented me by saying that she remembered the time when all the students were as good as I was. Peer approval is nice, but popular acclaim is even nicer.
See subject: UNLESS, as I suspect, you ARE "Loge 'ole boy'" that is. I had to PROVE who's boss bitch & I did easily (you start it? I finish it & YOU TOO https://science.slashdot.org/c... , lol).
* CHUMP...
APK
P.S.=> Unbelievable, lol... apk
"Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence"
And yet, the country is being run by people from Harvard and Yale. Run badly, but they are still largely in power. No one has been appointed to the Supreme Court in over 35 years who didn't excel academically enough to go to Harvard or Yale Law school. And we haven't nominated a Democrat for President who didn't attend Harvard or Yale since 1984. Its not surprising we are having trouble when leadership is limited to such a narrow group who has defined academic excellence as the primary qualitification for success.
Did the adults who were responsible for them tell lies?
Something to chew on before deriding new humans who only have a few years of pubescence behind them.
To sum it up, A students "know" the discovery I am trying to make will fail and thus they are paralyzed. Because even though I may fail, I discover other valid inventions while *trying*.
I am one to tinker and enjoy the extremes outside of practicality. A students seem to only pursue "sure things" and settle for "good enough" when others would have kept going.
Smart A types seem oddly unable to take on something silly or pointless, even if it requires engineering feat and invention to accomplish. They also fail to see value in small building blocks unless enough blocks exist to build something useful.
They seem to have an answer defeating every interesting pursuit I have undertaken, usually with some obviously true short reply as if it validates not trying at all.
Just neutered really. Only able to work within academia.
It shows that straight-A students really aren't all that smart.
"The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence."
It's a *fabulous* predictor of economic and and job success. When your definition of "career" is employment based on your thesis, "revelation of male patriarchy abuse in the editorial pages of my community college newspaper", then no. Your career excellence is unlikely.
But hey, as long as you *identify* as career successful, that's all that really matters, and you can pass laws that we must address you as having the doctorate you identify with. And actually having to do any of the work of learning your subject matter won't matter. You can even replace your "Western Science" with "African Science", to replace your energy sources and chemistry with with-doctor powered lightning. No, I could not make this one up, see the "Science Must Fail" video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... /
It's usually more productive to just not react to idiots. After all, just when you thought the world had reached peak idiot and that you've solved that problem, you invariably find out you are wrong with the world throwing up an even greater idiot.
I'll admit that I've never seen a 4.0 average for anyone I interviewed, except for schools that grade on a 5.0 scale. If they received poor grades in subjects we were hiring for, I did ask why. If they were constantly on the edge of flunking out, and didn't have an _amazing_ excuse, I'd turn them down on the basis of having poor task management skills. Conversely, I made a job offer to a recent graduate who got a C in object oriented programming courses because he kept looking at lower levels of abstraction for performance improvements. When I asked to see one of the homework examples, i found that he had done the work _both_ ways, correctly, and been marked down for "ignoring the lesson".
I was _shocked_. The student had clearly mastered the material. I was very saddened that he didn't accept our offer, but instead took a better one of more interest to him.
if they're talking about diff between 3.x and 4+ students... maybe this is valid. but compared to numskulls that barely pass or don't pass - ummm no.
even memorizing and preparing for tests show DEDICATION and DISCIPLINE and CONSCIENTOUSNESS.
would bet on that horse any day.
A number of companies will not hire someone with a GPA of 3.0 Some won't hire if less than 3.5. Some base a starting salary on what your GPA was in college - even when you change jobs 30 years later. Until you can change the HR focus on grades they are important.
See subject: & such "courage" from a troll like YOU that lives under a bridge as trolls do (if that). I own my home & improved it (@ least 35k more into it & FAR MORE THAN THAT by now in taxation alone in 10 yrs. (a high tax state & highest utilities afaik in the nation)).
* What home do YOU own scumbag? Prove it IF you do (this ought to be funny seeing you "flail" like the cunt you are).
APK
P.S.=> Answer that question punk - No, you'll keep HIDING behind UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous like the punk loser you are..... apk
My Junior year English teacher in High School has a mental breakdown in the middle of the first semester. For several days she broke down crying at the start of class and would walk out of the classroom and leave the campus without telling the Principal. Eventually the school board forced her to take a leave of absence for a month to sort herself out (she had tenure.) When she returned she asked students to turn in homework that the substitute never assigned. Upon hearing that no students had done the work she decided to drop everyone's grade down a level. There was one Asian student that dropped down to a B. Her parent's came in to school with her the next day and started threatening the teacher and the Principal in the middle of the classroom. The teacher wanted to hold her ground, the Principal tried to offer a compromise of giving the girl a B+, the parent's refused and continued causing a ruckus so the Principal took them back to his office for private negotiation. She ended up receiving an 'A' and the advanced placement class was forced to take her into their class even though there were no seats free.
I simply retook the class over the Summer at the adult education center that shared the campus. However, the counselor responsible for getting me signed up at the adult center assigned me to the wrong English class, she assigned me the Senior year curriculum. I ended up loving the challenge and it was a self-taught learn at your own pace class where you simply had a folder assigned to you in a filing cabinet with all of your assignments inside. I finished the class 2 weeks early but was still required to attend the class, the instructor said I could read a book and listen to music with headphones if I wanted to but instead I asked her if there was anything I could help her with. She was so shocked since no student had ever asked to assist her before that she ended up giving me an A+. It made my Senior year of English a breeze since I had already completed the first semester's curriculum. I simply changed the date on some reports, corrected any errors the adult ed. instructor had found, and then turned them back in during the regular school year. The notes on my report card from that teacher were glowing the first semester than dismayed the 2nd. ;)
This article reads like yet another call for participation trophies. While I totally agree that perfect grades alone do not predict future success, there is certainly a correlation, if not a causation, between people with the work ethic to put in the study time to get good grades and people who have successful careers. Citing anomalous anecdotes such as "look at Steve Jobs" just tells me the article author did not get a good grade in statistics.
EE here.
I drank beer.. slept with women, and learned practical stuff, like that new fangled Linux thing in the early 90s when I went to school. I worked part time, had a new car, got lots of good experience.
Solid B- engineer. I called it the path of least resistance; why kill myself as long as I passed, and as long as I passed, I got the same engineering credential as everyone else.
20 years later (time flies), I have never been unemployed in my life, have a great job, a great wife, lots of toys, and time to enjoy them.
Have a goal. Do what is required to achieve that goal. Social smarts can be learned, those and good technical skills will hand you the world.
to go to the parties. Getting A's there is less important than networking. Actually in a lot of schools it's more important to network than to get A's.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I find your comment hateful (I know it when I see it!). You should be banned from the interweb.
Damn dude - You're sitting here whining about how the government isn't funding colleges and then spew, in practically the same sentence:
"There are literally tens of thousands, if not millions of parents with kids in college" - which means you're insinuating there's millions of kids in college - even AFTER 30 years of nonstop state and federal funding cuts MORE kids are getting a college education. Before that you're complaining that kids aren't competing for top schools anymore when you just stated that there are more qualified kids than available colleges (but millions of kids are in college) so obviously SOME fighting must be occurring for those top slots and 4.0 becomes the BASELINE - do you think she would've even gotten in without it?)
Hopefully you weren't included with those millions of kids who got a college education because you didn't seem to have gotten your money's worth.
Grades don't mean much if you are in a group where almost everyone has good grades and the few who didn't have proven themselves in some other similar way. It's called restriction of range. In other news, if you make two basketball teams where everyone is almost same height, then their height ceases to be a good predictor for performance, but that's not because height doesn't matter in basketball. The author of this article might have known about restriction of range if he'd have applied himself more in school.
Maybe if you're doing underwater basketweaving at somewhere like DeVry.
Perhaps for a handful of entrepreneurs & visionaries. Not for the majority of jobs. If I'm a plumber I need to solve the problem of finding & fixing the leak. If I'm an ER doctor I need to solve the problem of the patient in front of me bleeding out. If I'm a programmer on a stock control system that can't convert stones to kilograms I need to solve the problem of where & how to multiply (or is it divide?) by 6.356.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Prioritization is critical in any real-world project. You never have the resources or time to make it perfect. You always have some parts that need to be as close to perfect as possible and others that do not. And you have do deal competently with having a shifting situation priority-wise.
Prioritization is something that requires to many guestimates that it can only be learned by experience. Hence I submit that the straight-A people lose their edge and may even be falling behind when experience accumulates and becomes more and more important. Don't get me wrong. I was in the top 2.5% of my CS (MS) graduation year at university. It does say something. But straight-A was impossible in that CS course and it was a very good thing that it was. It did force you to prioritize and learn what comes with it early on. Programs that allow straight-A results are misdesigned and harmful.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unfortunately, we do not we do not teach what it is or how to get better at it at either school or university. http://www.forbes.com/sites/fo...
The problem with straight-A students is that they put a whole lot of effort into drilling tests and exams to perfection, but hardly learn more than B or even C students. It's still the same curriculum, just performed to higher standard. You'll get better results, if you put that above and beyond effort into learning things that actually go above and beyond the curriculum. You'll still get ok grades, just not straight A-s, at the same time you learn more things than your classmates, but you don't get grades for it.
This is likely true if you are getting a degree that doesn't provide any useful skills for the job that you intend to do. Or if you get a degree in a psudoscience like Dr. Grant (the author of the opinion piece), it will almost certainly be true.
The worst part of articles like this is the new culture that the press is constantly supporting of encouraging people to not take responsibility for their own success and to not bother trying. The message over and over again has been that if you fail it isn't because you didn't study hard enough or get a degree that leads to a job, it is because you were disadvantaged in some way. Don't worry about taking success into your own hands, society ows you a good job. They've repeated the lie so many times people don't even question it now.
I started coding on the Atari 800 when I was 12, dropped out of HS and worked right away doing games; I've worked on several of the main franchises and I think most people around me, in my age range, were also school dropouts. I've never asked anyone about their education when doing interviews; I'm curious about what they've done, how they solve problems and their personality. I believe that if you're interested in a topic, you will learn it. At the end of the day, if our field, we need continuous education and it's a very specialized education depending on your area, so no school can really provide it. Having a high GPA may just mean that you're good at passing tests in something you don't care about and having a low GPA may also mean you put your focus on becoming good at something not covered by the GPA. For these reasons, it is meaningless to me.
I was at the top of my class in high school, and I did quite well in college. I got a good job at a big company after school. But nothing prepared me for all the office BS and the politics of getting ahead in the workplace. I did great work, but was never adequately rewarded for it. I mistakenly thought that my work would speak for itself. It did not.
The people who moved up were the ones who could promote themselves the most to management (i.e. lie about themselves). In many cases they didn't even have to know what they were doing as long as they could rely on people like me to get the information they needed to blindside management, many of whom had been promoted to management because they too could not make it technically.
After a more than a decade working at the same company and going nowhere, I finally quit in burnout. In retrospect, however, even if I had had the skills to navigate through the office politics, I don't think I would have sold my soul to succeed. I am still damn proud of the work I did there, even though none of the management there was. I saw my quitting them as a bigger harm to them than it was to me. And this very large company has fallen on difficult financial times, I think due at least in part to promoting the technically incompetent to management throughout that very large company.
Good that he figured out. Success in school/college/good grades or even high QI or intelligence is definitely NOT a guarantee of any success in life. I am the living proof. One needs Emotional Intelligence. Add Networking and Relation with People. Everything in this world is about persons. It does not matter how much you know, if you don't know how to involve/treat/talk with people your chances are dim.
Yes, I agree. Especially medical students are expected to "learn" about 10000 pages of dense medical textbooks *per week* or something like that.
My argument was, that actual real proper understanding takes way more time than just memorizing it. ... but the day might already be over, if it's that one page with the key conclusions or insights on them that hold it all together, or just a very dense one.
For example, memorizing the pure relationships and concepts from a single textbook page might take parsing the page, and storing the ideas in there.
But understanding it, takes parsing, storing, then finding the deeper patterns behind them, and putting them in relation to each other and to the rest of what you know. Then you can of course forget the specific ideas, and have space for new ones
What I've seen was, that they just gave up on trying to understand it all, and just crammed as much in their brains as they could, to juuust make it through the tests without exploding.
The worst part is, that this problem mainly exists, because the explanations are so so bad.
But maybe that's all the average textbook author can manage, and by expecting Richard Feynman levels of explain-fu, I'm simply expecting too much.
(Disclaimer: Explaining things well is kinda my "day job", so i'm quite biased.)
Maybe we could have one organisation to rule them all and in the darkness bind them
I was to you loser & shut YOU up easily (prove you own a home @ all period - you can't) https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
* TROLLS LIKE YOU TRULY DO LIVE UNDER BRIDGES (with heroin junkies which YOU probably are OR some other type of reject failure in life due to your own stupidity).
APK
P.S.=> You DISGUSTING little punk - STALK me by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous as you do & why? Oh, I absolutely KNOW I've totally WIPED YOU OUT before on some topic & you're still "butthut" like the disgruntled WHIMP you are, lol (& you KNOW it proving all that for me, constantly, it's SO OBVIOUS)... apk
that's what you all asking for, accountability
you can only account for something, if it is quantifiable.
I got great grades in high school because everything seemed a bit too easy. I never needed to do any homework that could be done "on demand" in class the next day. I found social interactions far more challenging than the classes in high school.
When I got to college I found out that I had never developed the skills I needed to cope with classes that were actually a challenge. That led to dropping out of college and joining the military, which eventually led to a nice career (30 years and going) in software design, development and most things "IT."
So, rather than devoting every moment of every day to the pursuit of excellence in high school, I found excellence to be my default setting and ended up horribly unprepared for college. This is a very different view, but I believe that at least some kids are having the same issue.
It would seem that a straight A's school student these days is just an ordinary student. Everybody seems to be getting straight A's. Either that or else, statistically, a large percentage of parents lie. The fact is that, short of injuring your principal, being a straight A's student is not all that demanding.
The real reason straight a students succeed is the very simple fact that put forth the extra effort to come out on top. Grades have nothing to do with it. We know that we always need to challenge and compete with ourselves as it will make us better and improve our overall self worth. We are the ones working our asses off in the background getting sht done while, you morons talk politics and social bs. While you are reading this, you are probably thinking of the one in your work circle that fits this bill. They were probably that straight a student.
Keep fucking pushing your social bs and we will ghost Jonh Galt style. How is the actual work going to get done in all your meetings, team powwows and PC training sessions without your straight a slaves?
Over several years, I have formed the following conclusions (biases) from managing several staff / teams:
At companies started by the C students.
Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house. The schools nearby are mediocre at best on a good day.
Bullshit. I live in a place with pretty high property taxes and I pay about $6-8K per year in property taxes. If you're going to make shit up at least make the numbers believable. If you actually pay that kind of money in property taxes you are more than wealthy enough to afford a private school.
I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now would only add further insult and injury to the insult and and injury I already (and my kid) suffer in the pubLic schools.
So clearly this is a lie/troll. I am on staff at my local high school and none of the teachers make anywhere near six figures. There may be a few that do in some parts of the country but most make FAR less than six figures. Furthermore it never seems to occur to anyone that you get what you pay for. Talented people tend to go where there is good pay and if you pay your teachers shit you are going to get teachers who are too shitty for other jobs and the people you want teaching your kids will go do jobs where they can make a decent living. Pay shit wages and you get shit talent. That's true in pretty much every industry.
More money will not hire better teachers until the evil af teachers unions are destroyed.
Right because better pay never attracts better talent. Better to pay peanuts and ensure that all the talented people go to other jobs instead of educating your children. Instead let's make it so we can fire teachers the moment they teach a topic that is unpopular with the religious nutjobs or some other fringe group.
You have kids? You pay property taxes?
I do and from your post pretty clearly you do not.
Merit and ability can be tested for.
Of course it can. The problem is that schools very rarely actually do this. The ability to memorize and regurgitate data is a useful skill but it is HUGELY over valued in academia and has relatively little to do with performance in most real world jobs. Merit and ability come in many flavors and academia only addresses a narrow subset of them.
My niece was a straight A student.
Which is good but it tells us that she learned in a way that was compatible with how academia generally tests. It says little about how well she will do outside of school.
She actually couldn't change a light bulb in her room without help. One time, she admitted she "didn't know how many ounces were in a pound".
Most people in the world don't know how many ounces are in a pound. Outside of a few niche tasks it's not a particularly useful bit of information. Outside of America it's utterly useless information. My wife is an MD and extremely smart and I'm pretty sure she'd have to look that conversion up.
She can't cook.
So what? Lots of people are shitty cooks including a huge proportion of men I know. I know people who are CEOs of large companies who would struggle to boil water. Cooking is a skill that can be learned. Not everyone gives a shit about it and not everyone needs to be good at it.
She's a math teacher in high school.
So clearly she's good at something. I would wager we could find some shit you don't do very well too. Someone who is good at math but can't cook more valuable to society than someone who can cook but is shitty at math.
Getting A's and academic achievement (and achievement in general) is BAD!
Be dumb! You'll be happier in the long run!
Jesus Christ people!
Is that REALLY where we are in academia now?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The best predictors of success are IQ and industriousness. Both must be present. Grades are subjective and can be meaningless, since they depend in the institution, and can be gamed by strategically choosing courses or by cheating.
did you read the article? I don't like the article, but that was not the message. The author is making the point that all A isn't beneficial and people shouldn't obsess over it. Getting A is not a measurement of understanding the material. Even in engineering majors, plenty of people graduate with 4.0 and end up being complete crap in the work place.
Have you ever had to try and maintain code written by a CS PhD ?
I have found just about every object oriented trick in the book whether it was needed or not. It might work for a specific case, but try and read and fololw the code path. Utter garbage. I would never hire such a "smart" person.
Not sure how this works, but I see grad school applications sometimes. I see a lot of 4.5 and so-on grades. Not sure how those work. But it instills even less trust in this system.
My wife is German, and their "perfect grade" is a 1.0. She says, if somebody's getting straight 1's, there's a problem with the teacher. That shouldn't happen. I tend to agree that "perfect" should be very, very hard to get.
But that's just number semantics. USA is this folded normal distribution, while Germany's a normal distribution. Seems stupid not to be a normal distribution.
Whether it be true, or not (and some good points are raised), I am not about to break 5 generations of educational attainment with my children. Maybe I'll let them be the ones to break that chain with their kids but it certainly won't be me.
I can say for a fact now, nearly 20 years after not actually graduating, that I have been asked exactly zero times about my grades. I just go ahead and disclose that I was headhunted out of school and never graduated so that is why there is a distinct lack of graduations on my resume...
In a math/CS faculty, I got an (almost) straight A. What I got from it: a good understanding of the matter at hand, which still serves me today, in non-obvious ways. My work is mainly revolving around compilation, parallelization, and real-time implementation. But when I work with guys writing specifications in Simulink it's really important to understand stuff about calculus (numerical methods, but also stability, etc.). So the differential equations courses which I absolutely loved (I really liked calculus in general) become important for me now, more than 20 years after I got graded. And I seem to remember quite a lot (hence the A at the time).