
What Straight-A Students Get Wrong - wallflower
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/college-gpa-career-success.html
======
sn41
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World)

~~~
jerf
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.)

------
twtw
> 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."

~~~
cbkeller
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
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.

~~~
cbkeller
My point was that at the relatively evidence-free level of discourse seen in
the article, we could equally well paint straight-A students as anything from
conformist (as the article claims) to subversive.

In my limited TAing experience, the actual explanation is much simpler:
students who do very well in my class tend to do well in their other classes
too because they're (as far as I can tell) smart and motivated. Go figure!

------
taysudif
_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."

------
justarant
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
> 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
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.

------
petronio
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.

~~~
WalterBright
> 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.

~~~
waterhouse
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.

~~~
WalterBright
Caltech also had an institute policy that if you aced the final, you got an A,
even if you never did any of the homework.

There were students who did that (google Hal Finney), but alas I did not have
that kind of wattage upstairs. I could not do well on the finals unless I
mastered every last homework problem, which often involved getting help from
my ever-indulgent roommate (thank you, Mark!).

~~~
waterhouse
That would be an improvement. I think, more generally, students should be able
to choose to make their grade depend entirely on their test scores. (Knowing
all the material on a test is much different from acing it; you have to be
thoroughly checking your work multiple times to reliably achieve perfect
scores. I've taken a decent number of math contents where the winners were
basically determined by "who makes the fewest careless mistakes?". It is good
for a person to be able to do that, but by that point it's measuring a
different skill. Having a higher ceiling is much better—but teachers like to
have the grade be "number correct / number of problems".)

If you didn't answer the 10 homework problems designed to make you practice
the law of cosines, but you correctly applied the law of cosines on a quiz and
a later test, how is it justifiable to take points away? It seems to me that a
student's grade should be the best available estimate of their ability in,
knowledge of, and perhaps interest in, a subject. If a teacher knowingly gives
a C to a student in the above type of situation, that seems to me like lying.

And if the tests aren't enough, in total, to make a decent stab at measuring
all relevant aspects of the subject matter being taught, then that seems to be
a deficiency in the tests. Maybe some subjects need take-home projects because
a timed test simply isn't a good format to demonstrate some skills, but
grading down for the lack of regular drill-type homework seems indefensible to
me. (I wouldn't _make_ all the students switch over to being graded solely on
tests, because some probably do like the current system, and because there are
reasonable arguments that a high-pressure timed test is especially bad for
some students and isn't a good reflection of how well they'd do real work.
Similar arguments may be made about coding interviews.)

Another, possibly more important, reason to oppose required grading of drill-
type homework: It basically forces everyone to follow the same study program.
(Well, they can study more on top of it, but they can't follow any study
program that doesn't include doing all of those problems.) Given the range of
human variation, this single study program is going to be suboptimal for lots
of people. That's a problem in itself, but moreover, it gives students no
incentive to try out different studying approaches and learn what is best for
them. Then, when they go to a more unsupervised environment, where the
problems are hard and studying really is important, they may be totally
unprepared. Some may rapidly seize upon decent studying methods, others may
just fail miserably. (I've heard this is a classic failure mode of smart kids
who go to college.)

~~~
WalterBright
How can you divine that a person has mastered the material when they fail
every test you can concoct?

> careless mistakes

You haven't really learned the material if you keep making careless mistakes.
I wouldn't want to hire a person who was so unreliable. I wouldn't want to fly
on an airplane with a accomplished pilot who kept making careless mistakes. I
wouldn't want the best surgeon in the world to work on me if he was careless.

Would you?

~~~
waterhouse
> You haven't really learned the material if you keep making careless
> mistakes.

In case it's not clear what "careless mistakes" means, this would be something
like taking a physics problem where two rigid balls of a given mass and given
initial velocity and momentum collide, and correctly carrying out the steps to
determine their final velocities, except you forgot to carry a 1 or flipped a
sign somewhere along the process.

Given that the student showed his work for each step of the process, I think
this can be clearly distinguished from, say, a student who didn't know how to
apply the laws of conservation of momentum and energy. I'd agree that it makes
sense to take a point off, because there _is_ a correlation between mastery
and a lower error rate, but I don't think it makes sense to say "well, you're
not perfect, therefore we'll take 20% off your grade for not doing homework".

If you took a bunch of physics _university professors_ and gave them a quiz
with 10 problems of roughly that level, how many of them do you think would
get _perfect_ scores?

Er, I assumed that the phrase "aced the final" meant "got a perfect score".
Was I wrong? If it's more like "got 90+%", then forget everything I said about
it.

> How can you divine that a person has mastered the material when they fail
> every test you can concoct?

Er... you decide that they probably haven't mastered the material? I haven't
talked about anyone who fails tests, just those who make a few math mistakes
and don't do most of the homework.

> I wouldn't want to hire a person who was so unreliable.

I think there's a lot of time in between high school and becoming a pilot or a
surgeon. Once you're pretty close to knowing your career path, it certainly
makes sense to practice a lot and lower your error rate a great deal—and if,
for some reason, you can't do that, then it would make sense for people to
refuse to employ you in that field. However, when students are taking classes
in 4 completely separate subjects, and there is no way any career would cover
more than 2 of them, then intense practicing is very premature—most of the
work would be wasted.

Also, by the way, pilots and surgeons are two examples of professions where
your work is direct and has immediate effect, and mistakes can be catastrophic
and hard to fix. In fact, it's hard to think of professions that are more
extreme in that regard (drivers and other operators of heavy machinery—but
airplanes are some of the biggest and most dangerous machinery out there).
There are plenty of professions where all your work can be looked over by a
peer before it goes into production / otherwise has a real effect. That is a
cost, but if you're good enough in other ways, you may more than compensate
for it (and I think it is common for sufficiently large tech companies to
require peer review for all changes before they go into the master branch, let
alone production).[1] So I would say it is inappropriate to apply the
standards of pilots and surgeons to all students of all subjects.

[1] Come to think of it, I know two programmers who have some form of
dyslexia; one is my coworker and his pull requests are full of typos, the
other is a friend and keeps mixing up words. Both of them also spent lots of
time studying CS on their own—one focusing on data structures, the other on
programming languages—and are quite valuable engineers. They're also fans of
programming languages that do advanced compile-time type-checking.

~~~
WalterBright
Making mistakes in programming can get very expensive, as in millions of
dollars. It's not a profession for the careless. Making mistakes in accounting
can get you an audit, or even charged with a crime. You won't last long in
carpentry if you persist in cutting boards too short. Having to hire an
additional person just to clean up after their mistakes is expensive.

And flipping a sign? One thing to be learned in solving problems with math is,
once you have the solution, working the problem from solution back to the
initial conditions is a check. Another thing to be learned is to recognize
when your solution is "unreasonable", like momentum not being conserved. Not
doing these checks means you've got more learning to do, or are lazy. Neither
is acceptable. And partial credit doesn't mean jack when you've got angry
customers.

> If you took a bunch of physics university professors and gave them a quiz
> with 10 problems of roughly that level, how many of them do you think would
> get perfect scores?

I expect them to not make excuses for getting the wrong answers.

> dyslexia

When I began programming, I discovered I was prone to making certain kinds of
errors. I learned to use techniques that minimized the risk of those errors,
and learned to specially check for them. I.e. don't make excuses, find ways to
compensate. Your example of using a programming language to help compensate is
along those lines.

> it is inappropriate to apply the standards of pilots and surgeons to all
> students of all subjects.

You might change your mind next time you pay someone for a service, and they
carelessly botch it up and present you with the bill anyway.

~~~
SamReidHughes
In the context of math contests, the careless mistakes aren't really careless,
they're the result of doing math problems under time pressure.

~~~
WalterBright
The better one knows the math, the faster one can solve the problems. For
example, I'd done so much trigonometry in college that I could see the
solutions to problems several steps at a time, whereas in high school I'd have
had to do them step by step.

Putting time pressure on solving the problems is a good way to differentiate
(!) different levels of mastery.

------
WalterBright
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

~~~
analog31
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_f
It is pretty awful how focused education--generally speaking--is on
memorization.

~~~
WalterBright
Sadly, you must have gone through a poor program. I don't know how things are
generally done, but at Caltech there was very little memorization - exams were
open book, open note. The emphasis was on derivation, not formula plugging.

Engineering formulae have assumptions built in and if one doesn't know that,
one is apt to misapply them to cubical cows.

~~~
wallace_f
I'm sure you are aware that your university program in engineering from
Caltech is not necessarily broadly representative of all education in the US?

I can remember history, science and math tests from elementary through high
school that were nearly 100% memorization. Even the math tests.

~~~
analog31
I remember that different people experienced those tests differently. It was
possible to get through those tests by memorizing formulas, but also possible
to get through by understanding principles and getting quick at what amounted
to lightweight derivations. For instance I never memorized the cosine of pi,
or anything like that, and still haven't. Often memorization occurred by
accident, in the process of working through the problems.

In the higher level math classes, the formulas vanished and it was all
derivations / proofs.

The problem with physics class was that the derivations were impossible
without calculus, so the non-calculus students were actually handicapped and
it was kind of an anomalous situation.

~~~
WalterBright
I never memorized the 8086 opcode encodings, either, but eventually I just
knew most of them :-)

------
neogodless
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.

------
SamvitJ
> 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!

------
anonytrary
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.

------
adverbly
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.

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

------
mathattack
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.

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

~~~
sys_64738
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.

~~~
yhoneycomb
> 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.

that's incredibly inaccurate and naive

------
rayiner
Anti-asian garbage.

~~~
taysudif
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.

