'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

What the hell are they teaching students?

[Quakeulf]

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?

Re: What the hell are they teaching students?

[TheRaven64]

Standardised testing is part of the problem. You want a test with high reliability that is applied over a large population. Unfortunately, you then hit practicality: you can't have one person mark all of the scripts (and even if you could, one person is not likely to be perfectly consistent if they mark even 1,000 tests). So you end up having lots of different people mark the tests. If you want consistent marking, then you must have very detailed mark schemes. If you want to produce a new test every year (which you do, or people will just find last year's one and memorise a good answer), then you end up with very questions that have only one correct answer and a lot of detail describing what that answer looks like. It is incredibly hard to write a good test that will be taken by tens of thousands of people a year, gives consistent marks, and measures the ability to produce creative solutions to problems.

One of my colleagues at Cambridge described the UK A-level system as training one-piece jigsaw puzzle solvers. He wasn't wrong: they teach you that any problem that you'll encounter has precisely one correct solution. Even in a subject like maths, you're given a handful of tools and then problems where you must apply the correct one in the correct order. For humanities subjects, there is one correct line of argument for each essay topic and one list of sources that you're meant to cite. At the end of it, students are not prepared for a decent university education or the real world, either of which expects people to come up with original solutions to new problems.

I don't believe it

[DrSpock11]

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.

Re:I don't believe it

[b0s0z0ku]

Did you ever work at a company where people were smart but still loved their work-life balance? Why do "smart" and "stays in the office till 8 pm" need to be tied together in US kultshah?

Regrets, I've had a few

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Perfectionism

[MrKaos]

Self sabotage disguised as integrity.

My kid just got into her major

[rsilvergun]

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?

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

[CaptainDork]

This.

I put out a job call and a hick from Fred, Texas came to interview. This was WAY back, OK?

I asked him what an autoexec file (and lots of other DOS stuff) was, and he looked at me and said, "I don't know.. Do you, though?"

I said, "Yes, I do.." He said, "Wow. I'd like to know what you know!" After a few minutes, I told him to go speak to the people out on the floor (about 25 users) while I printed some stuff.

I got coffee and waited until he returned. I told him to wait right there. I went out to the floor and asked people what they thought of the guy.

"He's so nice!" "Very polite and listens." "Very interested in what we do." "A great guy."

I told him he was hired. He asked me when he could start and I said, "Your call." He said, with a grin, "TOMORROW!"

My boss looked at the resume and asked, "Seriously? High school?" I said, "Yep. I can teach him all the techie shit, but I can't teach people skills."

Most of the college grads I interviewed were taught the disgusting mantra that they were somehow specially endowed to be systems pricks.

Re:Good ol' selection bias

[The Evil Atheist]

I think it's easy to fix - stop making interviews an exam.

If a candidate has a portfolio of work, then go through their work. This is about work and career, so judge candidates based on realistic conditions.

Re: Academic grades are what you can parrot!

[ranton]

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.

I find what you are saying very unlikely (although not impossible). Most areas in this country with high property taxes have very good schools. Often the exceptions are in areas with high private school enrollment, where public schools therefore have a higher percentage of troubled children which drags down public school quality (private schools can say no to students, public schools generally cannot). It is possible you live in this kind of area, considering you likely have a $750k+ home with only 3br/2ba which means you and your neighbors are probably at least fairly affluent.

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

Paying teachers more does not improve the quality of individual teachers. Research is clear that paying someone more doesn't make them work harder. But paying teachers more does help stop good teachers from quitting and going into the private sector. It helps good students decide to become teachers instead of other careers. A 2010 McKinsey report found only 23% of our new teachers were students performing in the top third of their class. That drops to 14% of new teachers in high poverty schools. There are countries where you are able to get better teachers without higher pay, but in a country like the US where money is worshiped I find it hard to believe we can improve teachers without paying them like valuable professionals. We pay teachers less than half what some high performing countries do as a percentage of per capita GDP. Literally doubling teacher pay in many areas is likely necessary (some areas do pay teachers very well, but still not quite enough).

But better teachers are only a very small part of any realistic solution. While yes we do need better teachers, ending school segregation strategies is a much bigger win for our students. I live in a school district with $600k houses and almost no affordable living housing, so we have among the best schools in the state because our teachers don't have to work with very many troubled students. But while every grade, middle, and high school in my district is rated a 9/10 by GreatSchools.org, there are two districts bordering mine with schools rated closer to 3/4. This is where the working class employees who keep my community running live. Zoning policies keep affordable housing from being built in our school district, and funding schools by local property taxes only exacerbates the problem.

Teachers unions may be a convenient scapegoat for those who have never put much quality thought into the issue, but even abolishing teacher unions tomorrow wouldn't bring us 1% towards solving the real problems hurting our schools.