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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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