School grades are hopelessly broken

http://www.marco.org/55382197

by jseliger • 16 years ago

32 55 16 years ago

wheaties• 16 years ago

Great, I wouldn't hire you. I don't care how smart you are. Just on the basis of effort you're willing to put forward on tasks you deem unimportant to you means that I can't trust you to perform tasks that I deem important to me. I need someone willing to work through "bullshit" tasks just as much as I need someone to work on "gee-whiz-wow" tasks.

chanux• 16 years ago

This type is not the get-hired type. It's the do-things-different-and-change-the-world type.

sanj• 16 years ago

You'd be surprised at how many of the tasks are BS-y when changing the world.

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

Yeah, that's a nice thought, but not really reflective of reality.

First, the guy already has a job, which he clearly states in the essay.

Second, the majority of people who change the world have jobs at different points in their career. People like Gates, Jobs, and Dell who never really had jobs and just did their own thing from day 1 are so far an exception that they're probably worthless as role models in that sense.

Finally, the majority of people who bullshit their way through school and deliberately slack off because they're cynical about the system do not change the world. Some do, but so do some people who work hard, apply themselves, and get as much as they can out of the broken system. In fact, I'm betting that more of the latter do, but that's just my opinion.

dutchflyboy• 16 years ago

I agree. A guy who says "I just didn’t do my homework because I knew it was bullshit" just doesn't deserve any help.

Retric• 16 years ago

A Job is not help. I don't want to higher people with a 4.0 GPA because they don't know how to prioritize tasks.

cynicalkane• 16 years ago

Secondary education isn't really comparable to working in a capitalist society. It's more like the old Soviet system, where the expectations were arbitrary and meaningless, and the rewards meaningless and worthless--and everyone of sufficient intelligence knew it, even the bureaucrats. Especially the bureaucrats. The same is true of the typical high school, where either you know how stupid everything is or you're drinking the Kool-aid.

Fortunately I went to a school where there were enough good classes and teachers to make up for it, but apparently this guy didn't.

Anyway, at my job at a big important corporation, busy work and meaningless stuff happens--but it's not common, and the higher ups usually think they have a good reason for it. They're not just going through the motions of "assign work, evaluate performance". And if they are, you are free to--and should--find a job elsewhere.

holograham• 16 years ago

As an employer if you are handing out bullshit tasks then no one competent would want to to work for you.

If the tasks actually aren't bullshit, it is up to you to convey the importance of the task to your employees. Same goes with teachers and assignments.

hga6• 16 years ago

What if your customer or the government demands that your company do some "bullshit tasks"?

pw0ncakes4• 16 years ago

I think the reflexive not-doing-homework attitude is moronic and ultimately more useless than doing everything assigned without introspection.

I tended to do the assignments in school. They were easy compared to the things I would do on my own, and the silly ones tended not to be time-consuming.

If you never do homework, how do you know that the homework is bullshit? Some teachers actually know what they're doing, after all.

bugs• 16 years ago

Some teachers may know what they are doing but by the time highschool rolls around the smarter students already have been through so many bullshit classes and assignments to have figured out how to get the grade their parents (or themselves) want or require with minimal effort and work.

I didn't like homework in school and I didn't do it but that doesn't stop me from doing it in college courses where I don't understand the material but it does stop me from doing grunt work for the sake of doing grunt work.

lolcraft• 16 years ago

If you are hiring for truly bullshit tasks, you are wasting your money. It's that simple.

On the other hand, maybe you wanted to say "boring tasks which are necessary". But don't they stop being bullshit, by definition, when there's some monetary incentive attached to them?

nerme• 16 years ago

Awesome, so what kind of people are working for you? Did any of them pretty much single handily engineer tumblr?

Or do you have a bunch of shmucks who plod in to work, do what they are told (and never any more), and then plod back home?

Have you ever thought that maybe the most successful businesses are the ones where the employees are bright and motivated and will actually call YOU out on your bullshit ideas? Do you really think that every idea that you deem important really is important?

jdietrich• 16 years ago

From the source: "I'm Marco Arment, lead developer of Tumblr and only developer of Instapaper.".

I don't think Marco really gives a shit about whether you would hire him or not. He has better options than to be cube fodder. The same goes for anyone who can build good things and solve real problems. If I were to concoct some evidence for my case, I couldn't do better than Marco's boss at Tumblr, David Karp. In this industry, smart people who ship get to call their own shots.

bobdole2695• 16 years ago

So.. you did nothing in school to approach the paltry standards you were given in school.. but yet this is the secret to your success?

Really?

grinich2• 16 years ago

On the topic of grade inflation:

In 1966, 22% of Harvard undergraduate students earned A's. By 1996, that figure rose to 46%. That same year, 82% of Harvard seniors graduated with honors.

In 1973, 31% of all grades at Princeton were A's. By 1997 that rose to 43%. In 1997, only 12% of all grades given at Princeton were below the B range.

(source: Source: American Academy of Arts & Sciences)

One of the best things about MIT is that they have not succumbed to the this trend. There is no such thing as "honors"— An MIT degree is an honor by itself. That attitude is a fundamental basis of the student culture.

sp332• 16 years ago

My college didn't do grade inflation either. If you do an average job, you get a C. At the beginning of each year, they call the parents of incoming students and tell them not to be worried if the students get Cs - most people in the college get Cs. The on-campus bookstore sold t-shirts with "C+ Better than average!" on them.

hga6• 16 years ago

Well, I'd say it's an aspect of one of the best things, that MIT is firmly dedicated to meritocracy. If you belong in your department (and there is at least one for you) and put in the work, you'll get As and Bs and the degree at the end.

A reflection of this is that you are allowed a "saving throw" in your final semester: you can petition to graduate if you are lacking just one required course that you earned an F in that last semester. It must be "well earned", you have to have really tried, and I don't know how often the petition is granted but it is upon occasion.

chrischen5• 16 years ago

Do they have legacy admissions?

jbeda2• 16 years ago

The data from http://gradeinflation.com/ (posted in another response) suggests that MIT is worse than average for grade inflation.

hga6• 16 years ago

A thought: In the period from 1980 or earlier to the dot.com crash, ~ 400 students in each MIT class were majors in the EECS department ("Course 6"). With a class size of ~ 1050, that's 38% of the students.

In the early '80s EECS drastically changed it's core curriculum (or at least the CS part of it, SICP/6.001 was the start), and it definitely got better at teaching it.

If that also gave the students a better foundation for higher level courses, then we'd expect significant grade inflation based on MIT's policy of grading on mastery instead of the curve.

Also during that period the EE to CS ratio was 3:1 and flipped to a mirror 1:3. If CS is better or markedly better taught ... and be sure to factor in higher availability of computers, before MIT and at MIT ... that probably also is a factor.

Assume also during this period that only half the majors had a "calling" to EECS; therefore the quality of teaching would make the most difference to the other half to whom it doesn't come so naturally.

grinich2• 16 years ago

In looking at MIT, it's important to note that they grade on a 5.0 scale. I'm assuming these are readjusted, but its not stated anywhere.

mrtron• 16 years ago

   Grades don’t reflect your aptitude, intelligence, or
 understanding of the subject matter.

I understand the criticism of the current grading system: cheating, focus on memorization, constrained learning system, ...

However this type of complaint requires some suggestion of a viable alternative.

tdoggette• 16 years ago

Between my junior and senior years of high school, I did a paid internship along with a few dozen other high schoolers working on CanDo, a module for SchoolTool (an OSS school management platform built on Zope). It was all paid for by a combination of state funds, local school district money, and $10,000 from Mark Shuttleworth.

CanDo is grading software that tracks competency instead of percentages. Each student has a rating on various skills that the class is supposed to teach, something like "Familiar with basics." The top level is being able to teach the skill to others.

Though that project is now stagnating, there's still a mandate to explore that type of grading software from the state of Virginia.

(Incidentally, paying high schoolers to work on something practical is a great way to get them to learn.)

maxklein2• 16 years ago

Get this: Most people are not hypersmart creative individuals. They are normal people who need to learn some basic material about the world that they likely will never use because they don't care.

The grading system caters to them, and it's a pretty good indicator of which of those people is going to be able to successfully do a standard job placed in front of him.

School was made for average people, if you are so much above the average, then you can surely figure out a way to be the best in a system that is so much below you. If you failed a test designed for average people, then by that criteria, you are below average.

People that are very much above average do not need the grades, because they will have a lot to show for themselves anyways. People who are average need the grades, because they need a way of showing their ability to do work in comparison to their peers.

So the logic of the writer is fundamentally flawed, because assuming he is indeed above average, he cannot use the failure of the system on him to mean that the system fails for the average person.

tokenadult2• 16 years ago

If you failed a test designed for average people, then by that criteria, you are below average.

There are numerous counterexamples to this in the gifted education literature. If a teacher writes a test without fact-checking the approved answers, it is possible for a child who has a better grasp of the facts than the teacher to get a bad score on the test, while a child who parrots the teacher's mistaken view of the facts gets a good score.

The system actually lets down all learners, above-average, average, and below-average, but that's not only in the form of lousy grading standards. For detailed references to this, see the books

http://books.google.com/books?id=EjkKBotJcyIC&dq=Knowing...

and

http://books.google.com/books?id=7ncMKDdCd84C&printsec=f...

and the articles

http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99...

and

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

and

http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues...

There are more articles on similar subjects showing that much school improvement is necessary.

P.S. It may be you are not a native speaker of English, or you are a native speaker of English like me who types rapidly under conditions of distraction. I just wanted to point out, in a way that I hope will be friendly, that "criteria" is the plural of "criterion," so one can write of "that criterion" (singular) or "those criteria" (plural) as occasion demands.

maxklein2• 16 years ago

Criteria as a singular is in common usage, and common usage is good enough for me, a commoner.

vitobcn• 16 years ago

I acknowledge there's a problem with the current grading system, yet I am still convinced that grades are correlated with one's aptitude/intelligence.

In my personal experience though, I only noticed the inflated grades problem in the US. While I was an undergrad engineering student in Spain there were some classes where not even 50% of the students passed, and overall, only 5% of them graduated with the minimum amount of time (5 years).

On the other hand, when pursuing graduate studies in the US, not only were the classes easier, but in many of them most people got A's. In my opinion, that defeats the purpose of grading.

kscaldef• 16 years ago

In my experience, grades in grad school were a pure formality. You were there to do research not classwork, but the college required grades and you needed a B average to stay enrolled, so half the class got As and half got Bs. As long as you passed your quals and kept your advisor happy with your research, no one really cared about anything else.

houseabsolute• 16 years ago

Among the people I knew in school, grades certainly were correlated with intelligence. There were some counter examples, me among them, but I don't blame anyone for weighting grades heavily when it filters out a big section of people who lack either the discipline or the intelligence to do well in school.

tokenadult2• 16 years ago

Scholars have been criticizing school grades for a long time:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordD...

And grade inflation is rife at the college level, as well as at the high school level:

http://gradeinflation.com/

yosho• 16 years ago

Another person who believes that intelligence overrides hard work.

Sorry but I'm calling BS on this one. Intelligence might allow you to score well on tests while not finishing your homework, but it's hard work and dedication that truly makes someone successful at what they do.

cabalamat• 16 years ago

> Intelligence might allow you to score well on tests while not finishing your homework, but it's hard work and dedication that truly makes someone successful at what they do.

I disagree. Hard work cannot compensate for lack of intelligence, just as intelligence cannot compensate for lack of hard work. (More fully: you can substitute the one for the other a little bit, but not a lot).

For example, a stupid person couldn't understand quantum theory no matter how hard they tried. Nor could a clever person if they put zero effort into it.

Fo a startup to succeed, its founders need a combination of intelligence, hard work, and luck. And I expect the same is true of most difficult and competitive human endeavours.

cobralibre• 16 years ago

For any intelligent youth, a typical high school education is not unlike a dull corporate job, but with a blessed excess of Google-style 20% time. The effort required to achieve the goals expected of you is minimal, and meanwhile, you have a level of free time to explore your passions that most people will never have again. Some teens recognize this and exploit it.

On a personal note, being able to blow off high school and still go to college requires a level of financial privilege that neither I nor anybody else in my family enjoyed. There are plenty of reasons to play the high school game.

sumeeta• 16 years ago

Is this a nugget of wisdom or a naive frustration / hate piece? I can't help but relate to the author (in this post, too: http://www.marco.org/43768310) and feel annoyed by the "average" person's lack of passion and inattention to detail. It seems that his main concern is that school as we know it is geared towards creating this type of individual – and that people need to be more like us and care about stuff.

Judging from the year he graduated college, the author is in his late twenties – pretty young. Since he's still several years older than me, I'm inclined to let him validate my feelings. And that worries me.

Would someone older (and wiser) like to chime in and tell us why we're wrong and why the "average" person doesn't suck as much as we think?

scott_s• 16 years ago

I don't know if I'm younger or older than you, but: chances are that you are the average person and don't know it.

http://www.damninteresting.com/unskilled-and-unaware-of-it

tsally• 16 years ago

The temptation for smart people is to reject the system and secretly congratulate themselves for being enlightened enough to do so. This is the approach the author advocates. I will admit, I had similar thinking when I first started college. However doing down that road can really limit (although not remove) opportunities later in life that you deserve. I've seen many extraordinarily intelligent friends get rejected from graduate schools because they took the scorched earth approach towards busywork.

Being completely subservient to the system and rejecting it outright are not the only two options you have a student. Personally I found the most effective method was to maintain a GPA over 3.25 with minimal effort and make my real focus undergraduate research. This has worked out incredibly well so far. I have a blast doing research because I get to work on intellectually stimulating problems and I only spend the minimum amount of time necessary on busywork for courses.

The concrete results in terms of awards and internships has been excellent. I've never once had an interviewer ask about GPA; it's high enough to be acceptable and is overshadowed by research experience. One recommendation from your research supervisor eliminates any doubt concerning intellectual ability and/or work ethic. If you want to optimize for both understanding and marketability at the same time, I believe in and strongly recommend this approach.

ekiru• 16 years ago

I agree with the title of the post and little else. Marco seems to be extolling the virtues of doing nothing in high school instead of explaining why grades are broken or even why not doing schoolwork may be a good decision.

Why do people treat not doing schoolwork as being inherently virtuous? The view that the activities required to do well in school are a waste of time(though I believe that it wastes very little time) is valid, and I agree, for the most part. There are also some who believe that the potential benefits of doing well in high school(for example, going to a good university) are not worth the cost. I disagree with them, but if they make a considered decision that attending MIT or Stanford or the like is not worth the opportunity cost of doing well in high school and that their time would be better spent doing something else, then I'd respect their decision and them for giving more thought than most people to the consequences of their actions.

However, even in this community that I consider to have noticeably above-average intelligence, I sometimes see people almost boasting of how they did nothing in high school. This is somewhat understandable when they are explaining what they did instead of their schoolwork that was a more useful use of their time, but I simply cannot understand why people will brag solely of their inaction during high school without describing what they did instead. If you don't have something else you did in the time that was a better use of your time, doesn't that mean that you wasted the time even more than if you had done all of the work?

bhewes• 16 years ago

Reminds me of Samuel Bowles' Does education help? . “Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that—well, that’s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you’re told."

Now, broken or not which is easier meeting the very low standards of most schools or fighting it tooth and nail? Sure fighting worked for you, but you still have to expended large amounts of energy defending your position. To me this is politics 101, pick your battles. Why attack one of the largest social institutions with a frontal assault?

dustingetz• 16 years ago

In my experience, bright kids who underperform (grade wise) do so because they are spectacularly lazy, not because they are refusing to memorize.

School grades are hopelessly broken

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