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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?
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.
You go to expensive international student programs in said "less developed countries" which are more than happy to take your money if your grades are halfway decent (say above a 2.7 or 3.0 GPA).
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.
You go to expensive international student programs in said "less developed countries" which are more than happy to take your money if your grades are halfway decent (say above a 2.7 or 3.0 GPA).
Or, if you're black, you go to med school in South Africa, where black students with C average all round are accepted over white students with straight As. It's the local policy of affirmative action in which the 90% minorities are given artificial advantages (one of many).
(No, I'm not white in case you were wondering)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
theoretical physics and have had a very successful career for over 20 years.
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.
Look at provincial city med schools in Eastern Europe, not just Budapest. Also, what's a 4.7 GPA equivalent to in the US? US GPAs run 0 to 4.
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.
Again, depends on the exam. What if the professor gives you a pattern that you've never seen before, but should be able to analyze using information learned in class? A good exam measures critical thinking.
>"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.
So what is the author's advice? Do not seek good grades?
In Argentina, med school is free (even for foreigners after paying an administrative fee), there are no minimum entry grades, Inscription consists either of entry exams or 1 year introductory course ( to pass an exam you need to score 4/10, which is (usually) somewhere between 75% and 70% of an exam well done).
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?
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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.
"...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?
Are you sure you're going into it for the right reasons? If you are, you still have options.
(1) Pass the BMAT. Do whatever it takes. Take time off from work, do questions to a clock for hours every day until you get the timing right. Take Adderall or other focus-improving drugs.
(2) Look north or south of Hungary. Why are you only mentioning Hungary? Some Eastern European countries allow for their own entrance exams (in English, too!), which are more organic chemistry, chemistry, physics, and math instead of critical thinking.
(3) G8 countries? US/Canadian schools don't really care about your high school grades, they care about your university GPA and MCAT scores to get into 4-year programs. Take some post-baccalaureate university classes to raise your university GPA if that's what's required.
(4) There's also Russia and Belarus if you're feeling adventurous.
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.
It depends on the nation.
Some nations have helicopter crews that can fly at night and get people to very advanced and well equipped teaching hospitals.
Every part of that nations medical system has to be very professional. From the skilled crews that fly at night to the experts on duty at at every hospital 24/7.
The best people a nation has tested for that are on duty in shifts, 24/7.
That ensures people transferred with conditions that need experts get seen by actual experts on duty.
Other less advanced nations just don't use helicopters at night, use only road transport.
The politics has an attempt to shape the medical profession.
Dont use merit. Dont use exams. Use the local demographics to accept medical students. The hospital has to be like the surrounding community.
Average, below average and mediocre students get a free pass on considerations other than academic ability.
Political leaders congratulate the new staff and medical standards slip.
The collection of data stops as to not show the results of such party political changes. The idea of an autopsy becomes political and the laws change so bad doctors can stay in place and advance.
Medicine is easy for any nation to get right. Hire on merit, make sure you university system only accepts the nations very best students who can learn.
Make sure your teaching hospitals only have the nations best staff on duty 24/7.
Follow every medical result and find the doctors who cant/won't work at that skill level.
Other bad methods of finding doctors are the political considerations from a Communist party. Nations that use politics, wealth, race to approve well below average students.
That adds generations of below average and mediocre "approved" students to a nations medical system.
Such nations go back to exams again and sort by merit again. Bring in medical exports to help their nations totally failed medical system.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mainly so that when the straight A students bomb out and get a B they don't jump off the roof because they "failed."
I've heard from a few companies that this is a real problem with fresh MIT graduates. They've never failed in their academic career and if you hire them for the kind of job where an MIT education is useful they definitely will fail at something. They have never had to learn the skills to handle recovering from failure. Some of them are fine, a lot of them end up handling it really badly and you have no way of knowing which it will be in advance.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's how the new Lieutenant gets himself shot in the leg and the enlisted grunts have to go and pull his stupid ass out of a ditch.
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.
I don't know what the BMAT is, but the MCAT is the test that is required to enter medical school. Perhaps you would fare better in admissions if you took the correct test?
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!!!
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.
(In the US). AC is obviously not in the USA.