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Comment by thomasahle | Hacker News Reader

> Anyway, all of that to say ... my SAT score would have said "admit him" but my GPA was a more accurate assessment of my grit. I think both scores are useful, but don't give up on GPA.

Do we care to measure grit? If someone can do the courses and pass the final exams, does it matter whether they did "sufficient grit" during the process?

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Grit is exactly what's needed to pass college courses and final exams. It's also one of the most important skills in the real world. It's easy to have a stroke of luck or be a genius for a day on a single exam. It's much harder to persevere and learn unfamiliar material that you don't want to do for many months, culminating in a final exam.

Finals exams were pretty easy, you don't need grit to just show understanding of material, you just need to show up to lecture, listen, participate in class

I got A in all of my stats exams despite not doing homework, I still got a B in the class because homework is part of the grade

But why should everyone be forced to do homework if some people don't need the extra time waste?

Because a job requires doing repetive work you already understand, so you shoul learn to do that. And because practice builds long term memory.

Refusing to do assigned tasks despite knowing it will be a factor in your final assessment score is probably something valuable to measure as a factor in predicting your future success at tasks. I had some college courses where the homework was optional, but this is not that, this is courses where the homework is required, but not completed.

I prefer to replace "grit" with "programs on my calculator". Turns out the calculator is still better at stoichiometry than the chemistry student with a lot of grit.

But in that case did the chemistry student actually learn the chemistry, or just learned the tool? What's the goal for taking that class?

His anecdote clearly says that his low GPA correlated to his inability to finish the degree (by doing the courses and passing the final exams), which is a real criterion to consider by admissions, and that relates to grit.

I think if you take "grit" to mean "discipline", it goes a long way.

In my opinion, it's better think of school grades as a measure of efficacy instead of intelligence. Given a fixed amount of time, how correctly could you perform the task? Discipline, or "grit" as it has been called earlier in the thread, refers to one's propensity to allocate larger portions of time towards accomplishing a single task, especially in the face of adversity.

Hopefully this perspective makes it more clear how "grit" is useful.

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