What Straight-A Students Get Wrong

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/college-gpa-career-success.html

by wallflower • 8 years ago

55 69 8 years ago

twtw2• 8 years ago

In a 2006 study of over 500 job postings, nearly 15 percent of recruiters actively selected against students with high G.P.A.s (perhaps questioning their priorities and life skills)

While I sorta see where this is coming from, it still strikes me as BS.

Consider a student who went to school to get a degree, which is accomplished by taking a series of courses. In those courses, said student put in the effort to understand that material, and as a result got As in most of their classes. Why does it make sense to punish this person for doing too well in their classes? I don't see how there is a reasonable connection to be made between high GPA and poor "life skills."

grawprog• 8 years ago

I kind of agree. At least for me getting good grades in school required learning to manage my time and life skills effectively. I worked while I was in school and was taking fairly work intensive courses.

We were expected to prepare reports and presentations weekly on different things, we had tests and quizzes, we had a large comprehensive term project worth a large part of our grade that required regular field work, preparing drafts and progress reports coordinating with our contact at the park we were working at, on top of spending 10-12 hours a day 2-3 days a week in doing field work or away to different places.

And I still had to find time to work a few nights a week to help pay bills and such.

Though I suppose it depends on what you take in school.

cbkeller2• 8 years ago

Yeah, there's a ton of BS in here IMO. For instance

Getting straight A’s requires conformity

we could equally easily reach the opposite conclusion with an equally bald assertion that "getting straight A's requires an ability to hack the system"

Retric• 8 years ago

Ehh, hacking the system to get straight A’s is a bad sign. The equivalent ‘hacking annual reviews’ makes you more expensive employe without a creating more value for the company.

jmoss20• 8 years ago

This would be true if both time and marks were not zero-sum.

nxc182• 8 years ago

Consider a student who went to school to get a degree

That's the problem right there.

You don't go to school to get a degree - you go to school to get an education and build a network.

Often, especially in the case of your interests not aligning with your degree program, effort put towards your degree detracts from your education.

I learned a heck of a lot more from leading a software team in Student Government than I did from any of the coursework attempting to teach those skills. SG doesn't count for shit in my GPA, took 20-40 hours a week, and really whipped me into shape.

I say it doesn't make sense to punish for having a high GPA, but it is a red flag in exactly the same way that a low one is - it indicates a lack of balance or a preponderance of extrinsic motivation.

twtw2• 8 years ago

This seems strange. It's like you only want people who only sort of deviated from the requirements to graduate in some field - who don't commit to following their own path, but also don't commit to their studies. Why not just go all the way, and prefer students who took random classes for a decade to gain an education in the fields of their interest and had great experiences, yet never graduated? That seems like the continuation of the reasoning you are describing.

Also, if the core problem is students setting out to get a degree, then the system is fundamentally broken - after all, the unique differentiator of universities is the ability to award degrees.

FWIW, I think college is significantly overrated, but treating a high GPA as a red flag and yet seeking candidates with a degree seems contradictory to me.

For some context, my own experience was that I had offers for employment before university, but I decided a diploma would be valuable, so I spent 3 years in school to finish a 4 year degree with a "high GPA." That's a red flag?

throwaway5tre• 8 years ago

It’s possible the grade isn’t the actual factor, but rather there are certain groups that are more likely to get As and those recruiters have a bias against members of those groups.

bluntfang• 8 years ago

Just as the quote says, the interviewers are questioning their life priorities. Not every business needs to best book smart people or the best homework doers. Maybe they need someone who isn't going to take the job too seriously?

WalterBright12• 8 years ago

recruiters actively selected against

That's good news. No need to waste time interviewing with such employers, and I certainly wouldn't want to get a job with them.

yhoneycomb2• 8 years ago

Ever since Asians started succeeding academically, America has sought to prove that grades aren't a legitimate means of evaluating students.

Sure, they're not perfect, but everything else is fraught with bias.

greatzebu• 8 years ago

Grades are also fraught with bias, and in a lot of cases measure compliance more than mastery of the material.

sys_64738• 8 years ago

This. I thought everybody for sure in the USA got A grades for everything. If you were not then you get extra credit to let you get the A Grade.

In England, A Levels have gotten to the point where each year more people get an A for a subject than the previous year. This is analogous to the Soviet harvests beating each preceding years. Not they have A* grades or some such derivative to say that it's a "real" A grade.

chongli2• 8 years ago

Grades, and the exams written to obtain them, can be gamed. This is entirely unlike what employers of high skilled workers want.

Creativity and teamwork can't be gamed. But they can't really be tested either.

thaumasiotes2• 8 years ago

Grades, and the exams written to obtain them, can be gamed.

Grades are generally not achieved (in the US) by taking exams. The whole point of grades is to produce a different set of results than standardized tests do; your grade is a composite of exam scores, homework completion, the amount you talk in class, and the amount you press the teacher for a better grade, all weighted at the teacher's discretion. The weighting applied to you may be different than that applied to your classmates. It is very much not the norm for low test scores to translate into a low grade as long as the student asks for more credit and is willing to complete makework assignments.

waterhouse7• 8 years ago

At least in terms of college admissions, they started doing that with Jewish applicants many decades ago.

taysudif2• 8 years ago

Who taught us to be like this?

Who created a system where the wrong things are rewarded until it's too late?

Maybe the title should be:

"How society and the education system fails to prepare conscientious and risk averse people for the real world."

neogodless• 8 years ago

There may be something to gather from this opinion piece, but I don't think the take away is "avoid getting As" in school.

First, I feel I can speak anecdotally as an "in-between" academically. I was a "straight-A student", though never unwavering, through about middle high. I still did very well in senior high school, but my effort level wasn't high. I did pretty terribly in college, and I dropped out once I got employed writing Cold Fusion web sites. (I've been coding in one way or another since then, and have not had trouble being employed locally, but I am not your typical MEGACORP software engineer.)

Having said that, I think the thing to learn here is that grades are just a mediocre indicator of anything at all. They can be achieved, but they shouldn't be a goal because they aren't an achievement in and of themselves. Your goals in education should be to "learn how to learn", "gain broad, reusable skills", and, yes, demonstrate that you can fit into organized environments where you're given a task and can work towards achieving your objective. (Some may say that our education system leans too hard in that direction.)

If you're trying to learn how to learn, school is a reasonable medium for practicing that (and other) skills. Grades are not perfect, but they'll give you a rough indicator of your competence. Do not prioritize them so much that you sacrifice the other important elements of education and personal growth.

rayiner• 8 years ago

Anti-asian garbage.

taysudif2• 8 years ago

Maybe, but as a white Eastern European immigrant to the US, I found myself well described by the article. Precise and studious but anxious and risk averse.

whymauri• 8 years ago

asians aren't mentioned anywhere in the article. maybe you're the one being biased here?

hyperpallium• 8 years ago

Some say that people with second class honours do better than people with first class honours.

sn41• 8 years ago

Straight-A ness is a very subtle slippery slope. You start off by being normal. Then you do well in a few difficult courses, and people start telling you - you might be the first straight A student in a long time. And despite yourself, you start being a lot more conservative in your course selections. You start dropping courses when you suspect that you might not get an A (mind you, you're still doing very well, and you might even get an A, but there's a small risk). An early B would have made me much more knowledgable, since I would have gone out and explored a few more out-of-the way areas, and taken more difficult courses towards the end. (This is based on my experience.)

It's perhaps better to have a few gaping holes in your resume. Probably it pushes you more. A relevant quote that I find inspiring:

"And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery."

- Apsley Cherry-Garrard, "The Worst Journey in the World" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World

joppy• 8 years ago

Something I see a lot is bright students taking easy courses for the marks. And these students are not lazy, don’t have many other time commitments, are generally very pleasant and engaging to talk to, and ace the material. But when I suggest that they should be taking harder or more interesting subjects, they respond with something about marks.

jerf• 8 years ago

Well, I can definitely speak to that from the other side. I took courses I figured I wouldn't get a 4.0 in college, and they were some of my most educational precisely because they did stretch me a bit.

Speaking from the interview side, I will say that if I get a resume from a recent grad with a 4.0 or greater (given the way some places grade nowadays), I will often subtly probe for the difficulty of courses taken. I could have easily scored a 4.0 in college, but I would have been worse for it. Unless you're 4.0'ing the hardest set of courses you could reasonably be taking, your 4.0 doesn't necessarily mean to me what you probably intend it to mean. It doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, it just... doesn't mean the good thing you would have expected most people to interpret it as.

(That said, there were also some courses I could have done better in, even so.)

JumpCrisscross• 8 years ago

you start being a lot more conservative in your course selections

Conversation I had when young comes to mind. Stranger and I are on a ski lift. I am bragging about having not fallen once all day.

He replies: "Not falling means you're getting better. But it also means you aren't taking risks. If you want to keep getting better, you can't be obsessed with falling."

It was a philosophy diametrically opposed to the one espoused by my parents. With the benefit of hindsight, it's right. Prioritising straight A's over taking interesting (and varied) courses, building deep relationships and trying extra-curricular activities is not a great long-term decision for most favored life paths.

baddox• 8 years ago

Also, when I got my first B in high school I completely stopped caring about my grades. My high school had ridiculous grade inflation and no weighted courses in GPA, so the first B meant no chance of being a valedictorian.

WalterBright12• 8 years ago

I've known a few "easy A from basketweaving" high GPA students. I wouldn't hire any of them, as they'll do as little as possible as employees. I'd much rather take an employee who got B's in the toughest classes.

adverbly• 8 years ago

Assume that working harder can lead to a better grade.

Assume that having an intrinsic interest in the specific areas related to your work leads to better work than simply being motivated by other external rewards such as salary or title or prestige.

From these assumptions it follows that you would actually prefer the B/C average student to the straight A one.

It is far more likely that straight A students are simply someone who is motivated by good grades and will work hard to get them, than that they are an "all-around genius".

Compare this to someone who gets a couple As and a bunch of Ds. These individuals are less likely to be motivated by grades or else they wouldn't have got Ds. They are more likely to have an intrinsic interest in specific areas, or else they wouldn't have got As.

petronio• 8 years ago

The amount of effort I've seen others apply towards getting straight As has led me to believe that they have been misled on priorities. They essentially asked as children "what does it take to be successful", received "straight As" as the response, and then ran with it.

Although it ended up working out for those I knew who went into medicine, for those who went into other fields I can't help but think that they would have been better off spending time actually learning something else, whatever it may have been, as opposed to trying to please their teachers without really learning anything.

Being a hard worker is a great virtue, but effort needs direction otherwise it might be wasted, or worse, destructive.

WalterBright12• 8 years ago

trying to please their teachers without really learning anything.

If they got an A without learning anything, they took courses taught by incompetents. That's not an indictment of schooling in general.

waterhouse7• 8 years ago

The way grades work these days (most recent source: a friend who graduated public high school in Palo Alto in 2014), a large fraction of the grade is doing homework. Lots of homework. Enough that the friend I'm thinking of was often awake into the a.m. doing it.

It's not that he had to spend that much time to learn the subject for the test; he probably could have dropped half or more of his homework and still done fine on the tests. The trouble is, if he did that, even if he got perfect scores on the tests, he would have gotten Cs or worse in the overall grade, because of the portion that is homework. This friend decided he wanted to play the game and max out his grades because he wanted official recognition (he did get into Harvard later). Another friend, probably equally intelligent, did drop a bunch of homework, did get Cs, and had a rough time with college admissions (through a string of luck and outside intervention involving setting up a meeting with a Fields Medalist professor at Berkeley who then advocated for him, he managed to get into Berkeley). Both friends are now doing math PhDs.

I, myself, also dropped a bunch of homework, also got Cs, and left high school after 10th grade, and never went to college. I subsequently studied programming on my own, and have been employed doing that for nearly four years.

justarant• 8 years ago

Conformists are the straight C and D students. They are the super majority. Everything and everyone caters to them and their taste and they are all about proud mediocrity. At least this opinion piece is a nice break from the endless succession of articles about the importance of getting one's ass through school ("or else you won't amount to shit"). Or is it? Those articles are almost never about the importance of studying and learning. They are mostly about the necessity of having the right papers to maximize one's earning potential. People pay lip service to the idea that "college is about learning how to learn", yet when they (even the tons of hackers on here) learn you're studying anything on your own, they let you know in no uncertain terms you can't possibly learn anything on your own unless you have an army of teacher/mentor/adviser/nanny/parent figure/guru/counselor/consultant/sensei/master/instructor/tutor/guardian/sugar parent/Satan slaying God by your side; not to mention colorful 1000 page doorstops with all important bits and parts removed for easy testing purposes. What does that say about American schools of higher learning? Are they just a glorified day care for adults who are after papers? If so (and maybe an open secret), why does American industry require students to go into debt to get expensive and worthless piece of paper to just even consider hiring them? That's unfair to students, both those who actually want to study and learn and those who just want a job.

mcphage• 8 years ago

why does American industry require students to go into debt to get expensive and worthless piece of paper to just even consider hiring them?

Because it shows you picked something and stuck with it for four years.

Justin_K• 8 years ago

I feel like this is more of a perception than a requirement. There are endless blue collar jobs that many young people feel they are too good for. I also know numerous programmers who went to relatively inexpensive schools and have done extremely well. Too many people think of they go to an expensive school they're entitled to a high paying job. Reality is companies are looking for hard workers and resources willing to learn.

NTDF9• 8 years ago

> why does American industry require students to go into debt to get expensive and worthless piece of paper to just even consider hiring them?

This is an American problem, not problem of university education or corporations per se. Maybe vote for politicians who want to make society better for all instead of just handing out loans for everything?

analog314• 8 years ago

>> why does American industry require students to go into debt to get expensive and worthless piece of paper to just even consider hiring them

Why does everybody think you need a taxi license to drive a taxi? If this market is artificially distorted, then it will eventually be disrupted. A company could begin to hire workers with lesser credentials. They would have an incentive to pay less. The workers would have an incentive to accept lower pay due to being able to get their careers going sooner with less debt. A shorter path to a job might attract a more diverse candidate pool. Everybody wins.

Another possibility is that the education is of value after all.

I managed the self-learning issue in the following way. I majored in subjects that I would have had a hard time learning on my own for whatever reason. I taught myself other subjects that lent themselves to self-teaching. Then I actually blended all of those things together in my graduate degree.

I don't think everybody needs to attend college with the same purpose. Despite the image of paternalism, there is a fair amount of flexibility. One student might want to get a credential with minimal effort. Another might want to spend some time while they're young, learning interesting or hard subjects. A third might be looking for a breadth of social experiences. A fourth, networking. All of them graduate, and maybe they all get similar grades.

anonytrary2• 8 years ago

Conformists are the straight C and D students.

Conformity with respect to what? As an A student, I can tell you that the conformists are in fact the A students, not the C and D students, and that would be true in a certain light. If we're preparing robots for the world, then the A students definitely make the best robots.

WalterBright12• 8 years ago

For people who wonder whether they should take "weeder" calculus or "honors" calculus, I recommend the honors track:

1. they'll feel a real sense of accomplishment from mastering the honors, rather than "meh"

2. the other students in the weeder class won't be of much help if you need help

3. the weeder prof will be a low status prof who got stuck teaching weeds

4. you'll get the good prof in the honors class

5. the honors class will be more work, but it'll be much more fun working with other students who want to be there and a prof who wants to be teaching

6. the fellow honors students will be the ones you'll want to associate with later, as they'll be going places

analog314• 8 years ago

Don't know about calculus, but my college had two tracks for physics, and the more advanced track was actually easier because it was based on derivations rather than memorized formulas.

wallace_f2• 8 years ago

It is pretty awful how focused education--generally speaking--is on memorization.

mathattack• 8 years ago

The author should talk to the admissions dept of his school, which requires applicants to have straight As, or darn near close. Penn/Wharton isn’t famous for taking risks on the non-wealthy.

SamvitJ• 8 years ago

This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.

In contrast, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all graduated at the top of their classes in high school. So much confirmation bias - and that too from a psychology professor!

anonytrary2• 8 years ago

I was in honors math, until a teacher in high school told me I wasn't cut out for it. I ignored the teacher's recommendation and kept myself in honors math for the rest of high school. I ended up taking AP Chemistry and AP Calculus in high school and passed with As and Bs.

Despite all of this, when I got to my freshman year of college, I didn't see myself as someone who would be interested in math. My grades plummeted to an average 2.0 because I had no interest in the cookie-cutter mandatory classes I was essentially forced into. I decided it would be better to hang out, get high on drugs and party all year instead.

In the summer between my first and second year, I grew to resent college culture and decided it was time to focus on learning useful things. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I felt that math and physics, being pivotal to everything else, were the best choices for someone who wanted to defer making a choice.

At that point, I was in the straight-A mindset, but I was someone who was very familiar with bad grades. I took an advanced mathematical physics course during that second year while I was taking Introductory Physics 1. About half way through the course, I was set on getting a 2.0 and realized that maybe taking a senior-level math class while I was still in Physics 1 might have been a shitty idea. I told the professor that I'd probably drop the class if I couldn't manage a 4.0.

I never dropped the class, and ended up getting a 3.5. Over the next three years, that would be one of the two 3.5s I got. The effort it takes to improve from bad to great is much lower than the effort it takes to improve from great to perfect. At one point, I thought I could be perfect, and eventually realized that perfect isn't worth it. Trying to be perfect at something will prevent you from being great at dozens of other things. I know this first hand and I missed out on a lot of experiences because I cared way too much about being the best in the silly little grading system.

What Straight-A Students Get Wrong

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