Given that students are almost always graded on how well they do on assignments/exams rather than how long they studied, your strong-man competition analogy doesn't make much sense.
Kind of like hours spent in a gym, actually.
So, when you look objectively you find the most highly paid author has zero relevant accolades. in academic terms, gave the appearance of doing what was necessary".[18] Rowling recalls doing little work, preferring to listen to The Smiths and read Dickens and Tolkien
Interesting, do we have any explanations for this phenomena?
"Even prodigies who avoid burnout and resist social pressures are unlikely to make a big splash as an adult. The problem, notes giftedness researcher Ellen Winner, is that to make a major contribution in the arts, and even the sciences "you need a rebellious spirit and the type of mind that can see new things." Most prodigies, however, are acclaimed not for their innovation but "for doing something that's already been done, like playing the violin in the style of Itzhak Perlman." Only prodigies who can reinvent themselves as innovators, she says, are likely to leave a lasting mark during adulthood." https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200511/why-prodigie...
High school valedictorians and child prodigies (especially the former) are disproportionately likely to hold positions of societal power. Just read the bio of any president of the IMF or the World Bank or the Federal Reserve. Essentially all of them graduate university summa cum laude or magna cum laude.
Innovative scientists and people who move the world forward? Perhaps less likely to come from this group, for a variety of reasons.
It's the difference between getting funding, and not just having an IPO but actually pay real dividends for significantly more than total investments.
There was a Boston College study awhile back that tracked a group of valedictorians. The were almost all successful and satisfied with life, but were more likely to be in professions. (Doctor, nurse, accountant, etc)
In this forum, entrepreneurs are on a pedestal. It's a different personality type -- when people with entrepreneurial instincts are in an environment that doesn't support them, they tend to do poorly.
My sister was a valedictorian. She's smart and creative, has a great career in a great company, is in a good marriage and has a happy family. Success by any measure that I can think of. There are people on HN who know who she is, but she is unlikely to be a billionaire tech mogul, which seems to be the standard of success in this particular story's comments!
PS: I also had a valedictorian sister who went on to Disney and is now a solid cog in their profit machine. The trap is she never really had a need to strike out on her own. Another sister was salutatorian and became a nursery school teacher. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Until recently where startups have turned into a strange variant of hedge fund, many successful entrepreneurs were frankly oddball types who needed to work for themselves.
One of my cousins is a prep-school/Harvard MBA/Columbia Law school type who is flipping goofy startups instead of closing factories or doing investment banking things. Startups aren't startups anymore when organization men are attracted to it.
I honestly think that having As in subjects that don't matter much, shows a form of mental illness like OCD or a lack of self-identity. It may be a grim and rather crass outlook so if you have a counter-example, I'd love to hear it.
I skipped a lot of boring lessons, read the books (yes, practical and visual type) and got really good grades.
It's like if we wanted to test someone's ability to run a mile but had no way to measure time. We'd still test them to see if they could complete it, and if they can't, well they certainly can't do it quickly. But anyone competent can most certainly pass that basic test.
Grades aren't an opportunity to show off, they're an opportunity to express basic competence.
Obviously someone clever can figure out how to get away with putting in less effort than the average student while still scoring well, but that’s more about learning to play the school game than learning how to think according to the methods of inquiry whatever field is ostensibly being studied.
It makes sense that school takes this form: instructor time is much more scalable to many students when assignments and exams are simple and uniform. Mentoring students who are working on real research problems takes much more time and effort.
The objective is for students to gain and demonstrate basic competence in fundamental concepts of their field, and straightforward answers to straightforward questions suffice. There's not a lot of room here for novel arguments, and the objective is not to solve novel problems; that comes later.
This is time consuming because, for most of us, learning a new concept and applying it takes some time. It's not a sinister plot by the system to waste our time.
Regarding mentoring students to work on real research problems: yes, this doesn't scale to huge number of undergrads. But most undergrads don't yet have the drive or the fundamental knowledge required to tackle real research questions. That said, if a student does well in a class and shows interest, a lot of professors will give an undergrad a chance to work with their research lab.
The best (most time efficient) way to learn factual knowledge is using some kind of spaced repetition.
The best (most time efficient for the student) way to learn mechanical or conceptual tools to mastery is to be presented with a problem which needs the tool, struggle with it for a while and develop some personal familiarity with the problem and personal ad-hoc methods; then have the standard tool presented, then go back and struggle some more using the standard tool to solve various types of problems and combinatorially trying the new tool out with various old tools to see what it can do and how they all relate. Then after basic competence is achieved, continuing to occasionally apply the tool to new problems over the course of months or years, including problems which require unusual uses of the tool or unexpected combinations with other tools, generalizations of the tool, etc. This is all generally much faster and more effective with some amount of 1-on-1 tutoring/mentorship between the student and a subject expert than with any other known arrangement, whether the tool in question is a pair of scissors, argument analysis, google search, rhetoric, regular expressions, or complex multiplication.
The best way to learn methods of inquiry or creative work which characterize various human endeavors (history, journalism, physics, graphic design, ethnography, mechanical engineering, pure mathematics, philosophy, literary criticism, acting, technical illustration, sales, ....) is to spend time actually doing real or realistic work, watching experts do real work, and looking at lots of finished work.
Unfortunately it’s hard to make 1-on-1 tutoring or research project mentorship scale to a classroom. Strategies like putting the students into groups to solve project-type problems of a variety of scopes, “flipping” the classroom by presenting lectures via video outside of class, mixing up assignments to include a mix of easy small-scope problems of the new material combined with harder problems highlighting past material, and so on can help, but there is a huge gap still between (even average quality) 1-on-1 tutoring and the best alternative method, which educators and education researchers would love to know how to fill.