What Straight-A Students Get Wrong
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's perhaps better to have a few gaping holes in your resume. Probably it pushes you more. A relevant quote that I find inspiring:
"And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery."
- Apsley Cherry-Garrard, "The Worst Journey in the World" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World
Speaking from the interview side, I will say that if I get a resume from a recent grad with a 4.0 or greater (given the way some places grade nowadays), I will often subtly probe for the difficulty of courses taken. I could have easily scored a 4.0 in college, but I would have been worse for it. Unless you're 4.0'ing the hardest set of courses you could reasonably be taking, your 4.0 doesn't necessarily mean to me what you probably intend it to mean. It doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, it just... doesn't mean the good thing you would have expected most people to interpret it as.
(That said, there were also some courses I could have done better in, even so.)
Conversation I had when young comes to mind. Stranger and I are on a ski lift. I am bragging about having not fallen once all day.
He replies: "Not falling means you're getting better. But it also means you aren't taking risks. If you want to keep getting better, you can't be obsessed with falling."
It was a philosophy diametrically opposed to the one espoused by my parents. With the benefit of hindsight, it's right. Prioritising straight A's over taking interesting (and varied) courses, building deep relationships and trying extra-curricular activities is not a great long-term decision for most favored life paths.
While I sorta see where this is coming from, it still strikes me as BS.
Consider a student who went to school to get a degree, which is accomplished by taking a series of courses. In those courses, said student put in the effort to understand that material, and as a result got As in most of their classes. Why does it make sense to punish this person for doing too well in their classes? I don't see how there is a reasonable connection to be made between high GPA and poor "life skills."
We were expected to prepare reports and presentations weekly on different things, we had tests and quizzes, we had a large comprehensive term project worth a large part of our grade that required regular field work, preparing drafts and progress reports coordinating with our contact at the park we were working at, on top of spending 10-12 hours a day 2-3 days a week in doing field work or away to different places.
And I still had to find time to work a few nights a week to help pay bills and such.
Though I suppose it depends on what you take in school.
> Getting straight A’s requires conformity
we could equally easily reach the opposite conclusion with an equally bald assertion that "getting straight A's requires an ability to hack the system"
In my limited TAing experience, the actual explanation is much simpler: students who do very well in my class tend to do well in their other classes too because they're (as far as I can tell) smart and motivated. Go figure!
That's the problem right there.
You don't go to school to get a degree - you go to school to get an education and build a network.
Often, especially in the case of your interests not aligning with your degree program, effort put towards your degree detracts from your education.
I learned a heck of a lot more from leading a software team in Student Government than I did from any of the coursework attempting to teach those skills. SG doesn't count for shit in my GPA, took 20-40 hours a week, and really whipped me into shape.
I say it doesn't make sense to punish for having a high GPA, but it is a red flag in exactly the same way that a low one is - it indicates a lack of balance or a preponderance of extrinsic motivation.
Also, if the core problem is students setting out to get a degree, then the system is fundamentally broken - after all, the unique differentiator of universities is the ability to award degrees.
FWIW, I think college is significantly overrated, but treating a high GPA as a red flag and yet seeking candidates with a degree seems contradictory to me.
For some context, my own experience was that I had offers for employment before university, but I decided a diploma would be valuable, so I spent 3 years in school to finish a 4 year degree with a "high GPA." That's a red flag?
I think the core of the problem is people who never learn perspective or why you would do something outside of good grades - no one grades you at work.
I wouldn't say your GPA is a red flag without investigating the rest. If you have a GPA -and- other good qualities, then the GPA ceases to be a red flag.
That's good news. No need to waste time interviewing with such employers, and I certainly wouldn't want to get a job with them.
Who created a system where the wrong things are rewarded until it's too late?
Maybe the title should be:
"How society and the education system fails to prepare conscientious and risk averse people for the real world."
Because it shows you picked something and stuck with it for four years.
This is an American problem, not problem of university education or corporations per se. Maybe vote for politicians who want to make society better for all instead of just handing out loans for everything?
Why does everybody think you need a taxi license to drive a taxi? If this market is artificially distorted, then it will eventually be disrupted. A company could begin to hire workers with lesser credentials. They would have an incentive to pay less. The workers would have an incentive to accept lower pay due to being able to get their careers going sooner with less debt. A shorter path to a job might attract a more diverse candidate pool. Everybody wins.
Another possibility is that the education is of value after all.
I managed the self-learning issue in the following way. I majored in subjects that I would have had a hard time learning on my own for whatever reason. I taught myself other subjects that lent themselves to self-teaching. Then I actually blended all of those things together in my graduate degree.
I don't think everybody needs to attend college with the same purpose. Despite the image of paternalism, there is a fair amount of flexibility. One student might want to get a credential with minimal effort. Another might want to spend some time while they're young, learning interesting or hard subjects. A third might be looking for a breadth of social experiences. A fourth, networking. All of them graduate, and maybe they all get similar grades.
Conformity with respect to what? As an A student, I can tell you that the conformists are in fact the A students, not the C and D students, and that would be true in a certain light. If we're preparing robots for the world, then the A students definitely make the best robots.
Although it ended up working out for those I knew who went into medicine, for those who went into other fields I can't help but think that they would have been better off spending time actually learning something else, whatever it may have been, as opposed to trying to please their teachers without really learning anything.
Being a hard worker is a great virtue, but effort needs direction otherwise it might be wasted, or worse, destructive.
If they got an A without learning anything, they took courses taught by incompetents. That's not an indictment of schooling in general.
It's not that he had to spend that much time to learn the subject for the test; he probably could have dropped half or more of his homework and still done fine on the tests. The trouble is, if he did that, even if he got perfect scores on the tests, he would have gotten Cs or worse in the overall grade, because of the portion that is homework. This friend decided he wanted to play the game and max out his grades because he wanted official recognition (he did get into Harvard later). Another friend, probably equally intelligent, did drop a bunch of homework, did get Cs, and had a rough time with college admissions (through a string of luck and outside intervention involving setting up a meeting with a Fields Medalist professor at Berkeley who then advocated for him, he managed to get into Berkeley). Both friends are now doing math PhDs.
I, myself, also dropped a bunch of homework, also got Cs, and left high school after 10th grade, and never went to college. I subsequently studied programming on my own, and have been employed doing that for nearly four years.
There were students who did that (google Hal Finney), but alas I did not have that kind of wattage upstairs. I could not do well on the finals unless I mastered every last homework problem, which often involved getting help from my ever-indulgent roommate (thank you, Mark!).
If you didn't answer the 10 homework problems designed to make you practice the law of cosines, but you correctly applied the law of cosines on a quiz and a later test, how is it justifiable to take points away? It seems to me that a student's grade should be the best available estimate of their ability in, knowledge of, and perhaps interest in, a subject. If a teacher knowingly gives a C to a student in the above type of situation, that seems to me like lying.
And if the tests aren't enough, in total, to make a decent stab at measuring all relevant aspects of the subject matter being taught, then that seems to be a deficiency in the tests. Maybe some subjects need take-home projects because a timed test simply isn't a good format to demonstrate some skills, but grading down for the lack of regular drill-type homework seems indefensible to me. (I wouldn't make all the students switch over to being graded solely on tests, because some probably do like the current system, and because there are reasonable arguments that a high-pressure timed test is especially bad for some students and isn't a good reflection of how well they'd do real work. Similar arguments may be made about coding interviews.)
Another, possibly more important, reason to oppose required grading of drill-type homework: It basically forces everyone to follow the same study program. (Well, they can study more on top of it, but they can't follow any study program that doesn't include doing all of those problems.) Given the range of human variation, this single study program is going to be suboptimal for lots of people. That's a problem in itself, but moreover, it gives students no incentive to try out different studying approaches and learn what is best for them. Then, when they go to a more unsupervised environment, where the problems are hard and studying really is important, they may be totally unprepared. Some may rapidly seize upon decent studying methods, others may just fail miserably. (I've heard this is a classic failure mode of smart kids who go to college.)
> careless mistakes
You haven't really learned the material if you keep making careless mistakes. I wouldn't want to hire a person who was so unreliable. I wouldn't want to fly on an airplane with a accomplished pilot who kept making careless mistakes. I wouldn't want the best surgeon in the world to work on me if he was careless.
Would you?
In case it's not clear what "careless mistakes" means, this would be something like taking a physics problem where two rigid balls of a given mass and given initial velocity and momentum collide, and correctly carrying out the steps to determine their final velocities, except you forgot to carry a 1 or flipped a sign somewhere along the process.
Given that the student showed his work for each step of the process, I think this can be clearly distinguished from, say, a student who didn't know how to apply the laws of conservation of momentum and energy. I'd agree that it makes sense to take a point off, because there is a correlation between mastery and a lower error rate, but I don't think it makes sense to say "well, you're not perfect, therefore we'll take 20% off your grade for not doing homework".
If you took a bunch of physics university professors and gave them a quiz with 10 problems of roughly that level, how many of them do you think would get perfect scores?
Er, I assumed that the phrase "aced the final" meant "got a perfect score". Was I wrong? If it's more like "got 90+%", then forget everything I said about it.
> How can you divine that a person has mastered the material when they fail every test you can concoct?
Er... you decide that they probably haven't mastered the material? I haven't talked about anyone who fails tests, just those who make a few math mistakes and don't do most of the homework.
> I wouldn't want to hire a person who was so unreliable.
I think there's a lot of time in between high school and becoming a pilot or a surgeon. Once you're pretty close to knowing your career path, it certainly makes sense to practice a lot and lower your error rate a great deal—and if, for some reason, you can't do that, then it would make sense for people to refuse to employ you in that field. However, when students are taking classes in 4 completely separate subjects, and there is no way any career would cover more than 2 of them, then intense practicing is very premature—most of the work would be wasted.
Also, by the way, pilots and surgeons are two examples of professions where your work is direct and has immediate effect, and mistakes can be catastrophic and hard to fix. In fact, it's hard to think of professions that are more extreme in that regard (drivers and other operators of heavy machinery—but airplanes are some of the biggest and most dangerous machinery out there). There are plenty of professions where all your work can be looked over by a peer before it goes into production / otherwise has a real effect. That is a cost, but if you're good enough in other ways, you may more than compensate for it (and I think it is common for sufficiently large tech companies to require peer review for all changes before they go into the master branch, let alone production).[1] So I would say it is inappropriate to apply the standards of pilots and surgeons to all students of all subjects.
[1] Come to think of it, I know two programmers who have some form of dyslexia; one is my coworker and his pull requests are full of typos, the other is a friend and keeps mixing up words. Both of them also spent lots of time studying CS on their own—one focusing on data structures, the other on programming languages—and are quite valuable engineers. They're also fans of programming languages that do advanced compile-time type-checking.
And flipping a sign? One thing to be learned in solving problems with math is, once you have the solution, working the problem from solution back to the initial conditions is a check. Another thing to be learned is to recognize when your solution is "unreasonable", like momentum not being conserved. Not doing these checks means you've got more learning to do, or are lazy. Neither is acceptable. And partial credit doesn't mean jack when you've got angry customers.
> If you took a bunch of physics university professors and gave them a quiz with 10 problems of roughly that level, how many of them do you think would get perfect scores?
I expect them to not make excuses for getting the wrong answers.
> dyslexia
When I began programming, I discovered I was prone to making certain kinds of errors. I learned to use techniques that minimized the risk of those errors, and learned to specially check for them. I.e. don't make excuses, find ways to compensate. Your example of using a programming language to help compensate is along those lines.
> it is inappropriate to apply the standards of pilots and surgeons to all students of all subjects.
You might change your mind next time you pay someone for a service, and they carelessly botch it up and present you with the bill anyway.
Ok. Do you think it would be good to fire all the professors who made more than zero mistakes on the quiz? I agree that mistakes are bad. I don't think all policies of the form "inflict punishments on people who make mistakes" are a good idea.
It's easier to fix stupid mistakes on homework, when you have plenty of time and can consult the textbook and such. Therefore, if, as I advocate, students are permitted to base their grade solely on test scores, then, to the extent that they do this, this will actually increase the degree to which students are punished for stupid mistakes. So if you hate mistakes that much, you should support such a policy and encourage students to make that choice.
I submit that, at least for seriously-sized tests (like a final, usually at least an hour long), for a student to become practiced enough to expect to get a perfect score, with enough confidence to make it worth jeopardizing their grade if they did make a single mistake, is a difficult enough task that almost no one would do it. Therefore, the "perfect score on test => homework doesn't matter" would do very little to incentivize students to take the "tests-only, harsh punishment for mistakes" option. Therefore, my proposed "anyone can choose tests-only" option is better.
You didn't clarify whether "ace a test" meant "perfect" or just "really good score". I'm now guessing it's the latter. That is much more achievable, and certainly would have covered most of the scenarios I'm thinking of.
I don't think that.
I think it is unreasonable and unfair to take someone who gets, say, a 93% average on the tests and didn't do most of the homework, and give him a 78% score in the class.
I also think it's unreasonable to have a policy of allowing someone who gets 100% on the tests to get 100% in the class regardless of homework, but if they only got 99% on the tests, to instead give them 84% total because they didn't do homework.
Did Hal Finney make a single math mistake on his final? If he did, would the professor have said, "Whoops, guess you haven't mastered the material, now we're going to give you a C because of the homework you didn't do"?
https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/2017_AIME_I_P...
Putting time pressure on solving the problems is a good way to differentiate (!) different levels of mastery.
1. they'll feel a real sense of accomplishment from mastering the honors, rather than "meh"
2. the other students in the weeder class won't be of much help if you need help
3. the weeder prof will be a low status prof who got stuck teaching weeds
4. you'll get the good prof in the honors class
5. the honors class will be more work, but it'll be much more fun working with other students who want to be there and a prof who wants to be teaching
6. the fellow honors students will be the ones you'll want to associate with later, as they'll be going places
Engineering formulae have assumptions built in and if one doesn't know that, one is apt to misapply them to cubical cows.
I can remember history, science and math tests from elementary through high school that were nearly 100% memorization. Even the math tests.
In the higher level math classes, the formulas vanished and it was all derivations / proofs.
The problem with physics class was that the derivations were impossible without calculus, so the non-calculus students were actually handicapped and it was kind of an anomalous situation.
First, I feel I can speak anecdotally as an "in-between" academically. I was a "straight-A student", though never unwavering, through about middle high. I still did very well in senior high school, but my effort level wasn't high. I did pretty terribly in college, and I dropped out once I got employed writing Cold Fusion web sites. (I've been coding in one way or another since then, and have not had trouble being employed locally, but I am not your typical MEGACORP software engineer.)
Having said that, I think the thing to learn here is that grades are just a mediocre indicator of anything at all. They can be achieved, but they shouldn't be a goal because they aren't an achievement in and of themselves. Your goals in education should be to "learn how to learn", "gain broad, reusable skills", and, yes, demonstrate that you can fit into organized environments where you're given a task and can work towards achieving your objective. (Some may say that our education system leans too hard in that direction.)
If you're trying to learn how to learn, school is a reasonable medium for practicing that (and other) skills. Grades are not perfect, but they'll give you a rough indicator of your competence. Do not prioritize them so much that you sacrifice the other important elements of education and personal growth.
In contrast, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all graduated at the top of their classes in high school. So much confirmation bias - and that too from a psychology professor!
Despite all of this, when I got to my freshman year of college, I didn't see myself as someone who would be interested in math. My grades plummeted to an average 2.0 because I had no interest in the cookie-cutter mandatory classes I was essentially forced into. I decided it would be better to hang out, get high on drugs and party all year instead.
In the summer between my first and second year, I grew to resent college culture and decided it was time to focus on learning useful things. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I felt that math and physics, being pivotal to everything else, were the best choices for someone who wanted to defer making a choice.
At that point, I was in the straight-A mindset, but I was someone who was very familiar with bad grades. I took an advanced mathematical physics course during that second year while I was taking Introductory Physics 1. About half way through the course, I was set on getting a 2.0 and realized that maybe taking a senior-level math class while I was still in Physics 1 might have been a shitty idea. I told the professor that I'd probably drop the class if I couldn't manage a 4.0.
I never dropped the class, and ended up getting a 3.5. Over the next three years, that would be one of the two 3.5s I got. The effort it takes to improve from bad to great is much lower than the effort it takes to improve from great to perfect. At one point, I thought I could be perfect, and eventually realized that perfect isn't worth it. Trying to be perfect at something will prevent you from being great at dozens of other things. I know this first hand and I missed out on a lot of experiences because I cared way too much about being the best in the silly little grading system.
Assume that having an intrinsic interest in the specific areas related to your work leads to better work than simply being motivated by other external rewards such as salary or title or prestige.
From these assumptions it follows that you would actually prefer the B/C average student to the straight A one.
It is far more likely that straight A students are simply someone who is motivated by good grades and will work hard to get them, than that they are an "all-around genius".
Compare this to someone who gets a couple As and a bunch of Ds. These individuals are less likely to be motivated by grades or else they wouldn't have got Ds. They are more likely to have an intrinsic interest in specific areas, or else they wouldn't have got As.
Sure, they're not perfect, but everything else is fraught with bias.
In England, A Levels have gotten to the point where each year more people get an A for a subject than the previous year. This is analogous to the Soviet harvests beating each preceding years. Not they have A* grades or some such derivative to say that it's a "real" A grade.
that's incredibly inaccurate and naive
Creativity and teamwork can't be gamed. But they can't really be tested either.
Grades are generally not achieved (in the US) by taking exams. The whole point of grades is to produce a different set of results than standardized tests do; your grade is a composite of exam scores, homework completion, the amount you talk in class, and the amount you press the teacher for a better grade, all weighted at the teacher's discretion. The weighting applied to you may be different than that applied to your classmates. It is very much not the norm for low test scores to translate into a low grade as long as the student asks for more credit and is willing to complete makework assignments.
I'm a student at University of Waterloo in Canada and I've frequently seen (and taken) courses where exams (midterm and final) make up 90% or more of your grade.
Once I received an exam back, saw that a question had been marked wrong, and went to ask the professor about it. He explained to me how I was wrong, and then changed my score as if I had been correct, even though I wasn't.