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Comment by byrneseyeview | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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