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Comment by jdmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Grades don't matter. They matter if you really want to follow the beaten path. Sure, go ahead... join McKinsey or something like that.

Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at leading matters.

Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for status not for wealth and even much less for creative and fulfilment. It's a losers game. I played it and it was stupid I will never allow my children to play that game.

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Grades are an easy way to communicate your value. They stop mattering when you have alternative way to show your value (e.g. work experience).

Finding non traditional ways to demonstrate your value can be hard and is a skill that isn't really tought. If you're going to not care about grades you better be sure you know some alternative way to show your potential value.

> will never allow my children to play that game

I can see not forcing them to play the game, but "will never allow my children to" always struck me as a weird tone.

I will also never allow my children to gang up on and beat homeless people in the streets.

Sounds like a weird tone?

Yes, still sounds like a weird tone. Do you think that other people "beat homeless people in the streets", because their parents allowed them to do that?

Beating up people is immoral and illegal. Grinding for grades is neither. I don't really see the connection.

For most people the beaten path is how they get on the ladder towards building wealth. You can always hop off the well worn part of that ladder but you can’t easily get back on it once you’ve fallen off.

You can feel that way regarding status vs talent if you want. Reality to me indicates that learning and execution are only important if you can get yourself into a position where you can use them. If you are a peon it’s quite hard to make a difference in the world even if you have those in spades. The way you find yourself in such a position might vary but going through the well worn path is tried and true.

Grades correlate with learning ability, executive function, and communication skills.

Good grades aren't the goal. Good grades are an indicator other people can use to gauge your preparedness for a job or opportunity.

Good grades are also an indicator of being able to optimize for grades. Being able to optimize a metric is a good thing, but the problems is that typical students spend 20 years learning to optimize that one and only metric. Therefore it's no surprise out-of-school students are often only good at optimizing similar metrics, and suck at the general creative + critical rational thinking that's required in life.

(I think I'm basically paraphrasing another PG article here, but this opinion mostly comes from my own experience working with both people from higher education and early drop-outs)

They are an imperfect indicator for sure but i fear we don't have anything better.

Is this not just an argument over terminology? I think most people realize that grades are just an approximate measure of learning ability. I doubt many parents would prefer that their kid cheated on every test to get straight A's rather B's from honest studying. When most parents tell their kids to get good grades, they mean "study hard and show me you learned", not "go get good grades by any means necessary".

If there was a better measure of learning, executing, communicating, and leading than "grades" at the pre-collegiate level, then I'm sure we would've found it by now and used that instead. For me to be convinced that grades don't matter, I'd have to see proof that there is no correlation between successful people and good grades at a population scale.

It is downright wonderful that you think “when most parents tell their kids to get good grades, they mean "study hard and show me you learned", not "go get good grades by any means necessary".”

That’s simply not true in many cases. There are tons of parents out there to whom the grade matters more than the learning. Those aren’t good parents, and mine weren’t like that (I would’ve been destroyed, frankly), but many of my friends’ were. I suspect the proportion is much higher than you’d suspect.

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