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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.
It depends what the exams are like. I've had questions like "given this system, if you replace part A with a component of type B instead of type A, how will the behavior of the system change under X and Y conditions. Really forced you to think, since the functions of the systems and components were mentioned in class, but how a system with DIFFERENT components would work was up to the test-taker's imagination.
Another fun question in an engineering dynamics class. [Picture of a male elephant walking with a sinusoidal urine trail.] "The average elephant is 8 feet tall at the rear and walks at 15 mph. From this picture, calculate the approximate length of the elephant's penis."
Haha. Length at the time, not fully extended length :D
Ok. Thanks for straightening that out.
Haha. Length at the time, not fully extended length :D
Ok. Thanks for straightening that out.
I see what you did there.