'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.

Re:Academic grades are what you can parrot!

[ShanghaiBill]

From this picture, calculate the approximate length of the elephant's penis."

Bad question. When a male elephant urinates his penis is only partially extended from the preputial sheath. So a pendulum oscillation calculation would not give you the full length.

Re:Academic grades are what you can parrot!

[ShanghaiBill]

Obviously, they have little bearing on the real world

Indeed. In my entire life, this is the number of times an interviewer has asked about my GPA: 0.

The were mainly interested in what I had done (demo with source code listing) and what I could do (whiteboard + marker).

Even applying for grad school, an impressive undergrad independent research project will help more than a perfect GPA, especially if it was published.

In grad school, your GPA means nothing. All anyone cares about is your research and publication record.

High school is the only place where your GPA is really important.

Re:Academic grades are what you can parrot!

[ShanghaiBill]

Haha. Length at the time, not fully extended length :D

Ok. Thanks for straightening that out.

Re: Academic grades are what you can parrot!

[Anonymous Coward]

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 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. More money will not hire better teachers until the evil af teachers unions are destroyed. Those people could give less than a fuck about the kids or teaching anything.

You have kids? You pay property taxes? Both seem unlikely from your book standard whining about raising taxes and how wasting even more money on school administration and stupid policies will result in a better education for our children.

In short, you know not of what you speak.

Re:Academic grades are what you can parrot!

[TheRaven64]

Indeed. In my entire life, this is the number of times an interviewer has asked about my GPA: 0.

Why would they ask you? That information is normally on your CV, which will be filtered by HR drones long before you get to the interview.

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.

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?

[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.

Re:What the hell are they teaching students?

[The Evil Atheist]

The funny thing about rote, even for maths, is that kids with the propensity to be creative will think of creative ways to make the rote learning interesting. They'll find their own patterns and tricks. You can't test for that, and sometimes will act as a punishment for getting something wrong.

It's easy to say critical thinking should be taught. But how? Just like everything else, it ends up being taught to some test. Of course, those kids who do think critically will see through the absolutely non-critically thought-out education system.

Kids learn by example, and I fear the uncritical, uncreative, adults around them are teaching them to be the same by example.

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.

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.

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?

Re:I don't believe it

[mrbester]

I work 9-5:30 because that's what my contract stipulates. I don't get overtime, so I'm not working outside those hours. I certainly wouldn't get nebulous and meaningless "kudos" points for staying late,. If anything, there'd be eyebrows raised.

Whether I have a CS degree or not is irrelevant (and always was). What is important is whether I can do the job I am employed for.

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:Good ol' selection bias

[melted]

I actually wouldn't "guarantee" that. Some people get anxious and can't code worth a damn in an interview. That's just how the brain works: once fight-or-flight kicks in, neocortex basically shuts down. I know because I'm one of those people. I do very well if, for whatever reason, I'm not anxious. I did well in my Google interview only because I had 2 other offers from elsewhere. I spent well over half a decade at Google doing what I think is excellent work, and perf evaluations agreed.

I don't know how to fix this, but I can assure you that there are at least a few great coders among those who can't code FizzBuzz on the whiteboard under the stress of a typical eng interview.

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.

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.

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.

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?

School is wrong ...

[CaptainDork]

... 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.