'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.

Comments

Academic grades are what you can parrot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, they have little bearing on the real world, where you need to actually achieve, rather than regurgitate words at the professor.

Stupid logic

[shilly]

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.

Good ol' selection bias

[melted]

>> 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.

Re:Do companies even care about grades that much

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and no. They don't really care in terms of doing the job, but especially in STEM, it's common to slap on an arbitrary GPA cutoff for graduate positions. So if you don't have 3.7, you simply cannot apply for a certain percentage (HR literally throw applications away without reading). At 3.5 there's another cutoff. At 3, another.

None of that is really relevant to the job, it's just "more efficient" for HR. They "need" someone with a degree, because that means they can grind the handle and meet deadlines for four years. And they "need" the best, so 3.7 must be better than 3.5 ....

It's ridiculous, but yes, it happens. After the first job, no, nobody cares. But for that first position, absolutely.

Re:I got 3.98 at University over4 years in..

[StormReaver]

...theoretical physics and have had a very successful career for over 20 years.

You are probably the type of person who loves what he does, is capable of independent research to solve problems, and whose University grades have no bearing on his ability to do his job.

You could probably have lived life more, studied less, gotten lower grades, and still be perfectly able to do your job.

In short, you are probably just the person the article author had in mind to prove that University grades are meaningless beyond the hiring process.

Re:What the hell are they teaching students?

[fermion]

It says it right there in the article summary Some people think it is more important to solve the problem you identify rather than the problem that needs to be solved to create the product.

Now, to be clear sometimes when creating a product, like the iPhone, it is useful to think about the problem from a different perspective. Likewise, pulling the real problem client wants to solve out of them is an artform. But it is important to work the problem, and not jjust redefine it to suit your needs.

For instance about 20 years ago I was working on a roll you own web server. There was some data visitation code that broke for certain cases of data that were outside the arbitrary parameters the original coders set. These people redefined the problem to one they knew how to solve instead of solving the problem that needed to be solved. I have the education and the skills to actually do the research and coding to solve the real problem,

This in fact is why people fail tests. They are taught in school that they can work an easier problem that they know and they never are going to have to go through the effort to create a solution to a novel problem,. We ate training people to work in factories or scripted technical support.

The problem with the straight A student, in fact, is not that they are necessarily better or worse prepared to push papers or sell widgets to widget buyers. The problem is that they, unless they are very organized, focused, and precocious, likely earned their A by taking the easiest classes, by crying to administrators about how mean the teacher was anytime they got a b, and by having their parents threaten to sue. This means that why they do get a challenge in the work place, they are going to be unable to deal with it, or feel like the challenge is unfair.

I am thinking about the devil wears prada where the protagonist has a job, and is unable to do it without constantly whining.

A student with a low to mid b average is probably going to be a better employee.