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Comment by gcv | Hacker News Reader

I love this quote from the article: 'The coach of the Yale rowing team has a saying about high school recruiting: "7:20 2,000m time, 720 SATs. 6:20 2,000m time, 620 SATs."'

In other words, it pays to be a winner.

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Hmmmm, I read it as it costs to be a winner, as in the faster rowers have a lower SAT score (presumably from training more than studying).

wrong. the idea is that if you have a good time, yale will look the other way when it comes to your academics. the better your time, the less the school cares about your SATs. the idea is extremely applicable to everything in the real world, where excellence in one dimension compensates for mediocrity in another in the eyes of others. think attractive girls or star football players. a valuable life lesson.

This is correct.

"a valuable life lesson."

It makes sense though. I never understood why classes you fail are averaged into your GPA as a 0.0 instead of just ignored. After all, the amount of stuff you don't know or can't do is always going to be effectively infinite. So how is getting an A in one class and failing 99 others any different from getting an A in one class and not taking 99 others? The current system is just an attempt to punish people for wasting university resources, it has zero to do with actually assessing the abilities of a person.

That's what dropping classes is for.

If you try to do something and fail--especially something that the median undergrad in your school can do successfully--it says something about you.

That sounds backwards though. If you try to do something and fail, it should be more positive than if you don't try to do it at all.

For some pursuits, yes. For a corporate job, which is the default next step from a university education, no: a company would rather hire someone who knows their limits than someone who tests them, especially since the former has a more established market price.

How does one know his or her limits without testing them? I'd much rather hire the kid that attempted 99 failed classes.

the way you're thinking of classes is very romantic and idealistic. another way to think of them that may better model the way employers think about your GPA is to think of your GPA as a signaling game in game theory. your GPA is less of a reflection of what you know and more a reflection of your ability. if you have a high GPA you've demonstrated yourself to be a high ability intellectual, whereas if you have a low GPA you've demonstrated yourself to be a low ability intellectual. in this model the content of the class is completely irrelevant, but some employers may just be trying to employ based on potential ability, rather than on specific knowledge base or content exposure. for this reason, a kid that failed 99 classes has "signaled" that he is a low ability type. while this kid has great resolve and has probably been exposed to some interesting things, it is unlikely that his ability is very high, and therefore employers would not be psyched about hiring him.

obviously this kind of model gives a very bleak valuation of education, but i think its a thoughtful one that probably is truer than we'd all like to think.

That depends on how you're going about taking your papers. For instance, I took a little over double the maximum course load my second year at uni. As part of that I ended up failing a paper that turned out to have some more time intensive portions than I was expecting, but I also graduated a year early as I got B's or better for everything else. I was much better off enrolling in more stuff and then ignoring one when I found myself swamped towards the end of semester, too late to drop the course, than I would have been if I'd just taken a normal course load. I saved a years worth of living costs in student debt as well.

People fail things for all sorts of reasons in Uni, they're also often going through Relationships 101 which is great for knocking people for a loop.

You should have gone to Brown :)

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