
Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades? - psg
http://devblog.presstartgames.com/post/3381258704/is-it-better-to-be-smart-or-get-good-grades
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vladd
Schools are designed to provide education for the masses, just like jobs are
designed to reward workers' efforts with money. Such schemes remove the low /
high extremes (slackers / highly gifted people) by conforming them to a
pattern which is proven to increase, in time, the average performance of
people participating in them.

Was Bill Gates better off as an entrepreneur and a drop-out? Yes, he's a
highly gifted individual -- for him the freedom to focus on what he does best
allowed him to shine and get from life huge returns when compared to what the
'system' would have reserved for him. But for a significant part of the more
average folks, we could have trouble stating similar things.

The question in the title is nothing more than a matter of risks and
insurances against them: do you want to take the chance of dropping out of
school and pursuing your raw intelligence/dreams or you want the overhead of
an administrative process in order to get at the end some lose guarantees
about your hire-ability and your skills... It's not an easy question and it
depends too much of everyone's personal situation (parents support, wealth
savings etc) to be addressed generally.

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iamdave
My grandfather once told me "I went to college and got a degree. I went back
10 years later and got an education".

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pasbesoin
One of the smartest people I know -- he now works on the CMS at CERN, and can
explain everyone else's work as well as his own -- got kind of crappy grades
when we were in college. He was simply interested in other things.

He had a cartoon on his door, at one point. A figure walking down the street
in the city. All the signage around him displaying "Lies". I thought it was
excessively cynical, at the time. Over the intervening some decades, I've come
to understand his point of view.

It's better to _understand the system_. Then make your own, informed choices.
If you like doing something, do it. If you're doing it because someone told
you there's an eventual payoff, beware.

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JoeAltmaier
Better for society: good grades. Means you might be productive.

Better for you: smart. You will be happier, or at least know the reasons you
are unhappy.

~~~
notyourwork
I appreciate your use of "might" in the first statement.

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mattmanser
Well, at least I know the meaning of proactive, so personally I think smart.

You can't be proactive to solve the unknown.

Also the opposite of reactive is not proactive.

Apart from being pedantic about the word proactive, I also totally disagree
with the premise of the article, some of the most inventive problem solvers
I've met are lazy as hell.

~~~
pestaa
Proactivity does not make one busy by definition. I think it means, when one
is challenged by an interesting problem, he/she does everything and more to
tackle it. A side effect may be that proactive people generally care far less
about boring problems, thus making them appear lazy.

~~~
mattmanser
It doesn't mean that either!

It's anticipatory action to deal with a known future event.

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robryan
I think employers reliance on grade and qualifications are more about
eliminating the really bad hires than finding the best hires. It is good in a
way though, just like having a body of work to show, a hiring process that
comes down to how you solve a few problems in an interview can be really hit
and miss and is hard to show your full abilities.

~~~
lallysingh
If people meet the minimum, then it's a success. If they're substantially
above average, that's a nice bonus, but not enough to justify risking a bad
hire.

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brudgers
In addition to execution, earning good grades require particular kinds of
intelligence - among them recognizing the bounds of systems and social
relationships.

Being smart isn't an achievement and hard work won't get you there. It is
merely potential and without execution, it eventually becomes "wasted
potential."

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The demographic of Mensa is "underachievers".

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stcredzero
It's best to become a member of a close group that is not only smart, but
which has good values and is well connected to reality.

So long as you get a 3.5 GPA or above, you can, in the words of a fellow
alum's mom, "pretty much do what you want." But what you want to do may not
even involve that kind of GPA signaling.

If you really are smart, then you can figure out how to generate the right
sort of signal for your purposes. You'll also figure out that you're not
infallible and that there are others out there who are smarter than yourself.
From this, it follows that durable signals need to be based on real underlying
value.

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dwc
A not too smart "go getter" will always be able to do well at something.
There's always a place for such people, and it's easy for management to
understand how someone like that can bring value.

OTOH, a personal story:

In school, I got excellent grades up until lots of effort was required. At
that point my grades went down drastically. This is what comes from being
praised as smart, separate from results.

It took me a good while after I was out of school to really come to grips with
things, and it's still a bit of a struggle. However, I _have_ managed to make
a career of programming. I try to play to my strengths, solving tricky
problems that don't yield easily to hard work _alone_. This makes me fairly
valuable, though I have to work hard to find employment where management
realizes that there are roles for people like me. Currently I develop software
in support of the science team on an active NASA space mission. If I can pat
myself on the back a bit, that's not bad for someone who took an extra
semester to graduate high school and never went to college.

So someone smart can learn to work harder and be results oriented, but without
help from parents and school I think it's a lot harder and brings delays. What
could I have done if I'd been praised for results rather than "being smart?" I
don't obsess about that, but it comes to mind these days as I raise my child.

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yhlasx
"Education is what is left after you've forgotten everything you've learned."
-> Albert Einstein

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methodin
The most worthless, stupid people I know got straight A's their entire life.

~~~
omaranto
Smart people can get A's too, and tend to find it even easier than stupid
people do.

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notyourwork
Smart people can also find grade school to not provide enough challenge and
complexity and thus they tend to find other ways to occupy their time. In
college the scene changes because you pursue what you want and most professors
recognize true interest over mere putting in time to complete a class for
credit. The moment you find a professor who recognizes your interests, keep a
close relation because they can help you in more ways then you can imagine.

~~~
methodin
Sadly college still does not provide enough of the "real world" to make much a
difference. The college I went to, at least, seemed to be more interested in
grooming me to be a researcher which is why I found most of the CS classes to
be extremely boring.

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webwright
Funny, earlier on HN was a headline that said to praise your children for
their effort and NOT their intelligence.

Grades are a sign of effort. Effort wins most of the time.

What really surprises me about the wildly successful people I meet is that
most of them aren't brilliant. But all of them work their asses off. Non-stop.
I haven't met one who was brilliant and had a good work/life balance.
Unsurprisingly, these habits often (but not always!) start early... Most of
these successful people went to great schools and got great grades.

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gersh
Has anyone actually run the numbers? Does GPA predict founder success? Do SAT
scores? Does IQ? How much does each matter? Is there a negative correlation?

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jleyank
I'm sure people will say it in various ways, but one's path in life is (far)
smoother if they have a track record - something people can see and relate to.
It might be serial startups, it might be open-source success, it might be
commercial success. Starting out, it's a transcript.

There's gobs of people out there. Differentiate yourself, so that people
actually care when you talk to them.

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zandorg
That's why I'm doing a Master's degree. You get no grades, just the degree.

[Edit] A friend tells me it's pass or distinction. Oh well.

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drallison
It's time for the author to brush up on his argumentation and rhetoric. It
makes no sense. But it is provocative.

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hammock
This is great fodder for thinking about how I'm going to explain my average-
ish GPA on law school apps.

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rick_2047
I read the thing and didn't understand the word of what the author is trying
to say. Maybe I am fumbled up in vocabulary or something. Anyways, if any
random person were to ask this to me I would definitely go for "good grades if
you want to lead a happy peaceful life and smarts if you want to live like
hell but have a shot at being happy as heaven".

