
Why I regret getting straight A's in college  - hhm
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/12/04/twentysomething-why-i-regret-getting-straight-as-in-college/?
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aston
On the other hand, it allows you to write retrospective articles like this, in
which you speculate about how your life may have turned out if you hadn't
focused quite so much on grades.

Too bad these types of hypotheticals are wholly unrealistic. I think your
standard straight A student (especially a straight A _college_ student) would
have a hard time _not_ making straight A's. And it's really that quality (or
personality flaw) that makes the grades completely irrelevant. How many C
students were running a radio station and participating in the student
government simultaneously?

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earthboundkid
"2. I didn't sleep."

"3. I've forgotten 95% of it."

These two are related. I graduated with a similar GPA, but I never once pulled
an all-nighter. I also remember most of it, at least at a conceptual level, if
not down to the fine details.

The problem is that students get brainwashed into thinking that grades are the
goal, when in fact grades are supposed to be a measure of the real goal, which
is learning. I think the English have a good idea with their "gap year." If
Americans started doing that, I think it would help a lot of people get
perspective on what their actual goals are.

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edw519
"I majored in English Literature and minored in Communication Theory."

You call that college?

Get 37 A's in math and science and then we can talk.

~~~
cstejerean
I think you're missing the point. Getting straight A's is a pretty hard thing
to achieve. I for one rarely got A's in the gened classes. The amount of work
required to go from a B to an A was very high and not worth it in my opinion.
I ended up doing better in math, physics, comp sci because it was interesting
subject matter.

~~~
edw519
Exactly what point am I missing?

What's the cube root of 9? What is the minimum number of points needed to
determine a plane? What happens in your app if you divide by zero?

On the other hand, what motif did Browning employ in the last stanza? Is man
basically good or evil? Which economic theory works best in the third world?

Maybe you're missing the point. If there's no right answer, what's the point
of grades?

~~~
aston
So you're saying there's no use trying to measure the goodness of anything
that isn't either clearly right or wrong?

On a semi-related note, you should understand that answering a question well
is different from giving the objectively correct answer. Especially when there
is no objectively correct answer.

~~~
edw519
Er, yea.

This is hacker news. You better be precise, accurate, and correct. Or it won't
work. And you're toast.

Don't like it? Go watch figure skating. And let me know who wins. If you can.

~~~
aston
Yet many hackers can't write well enough to pitch their ideas to others and
can't design a website that's usable to save their lives. There's utility for
more subjective judgements even in the geekiest of pursuits.

~~~
Goladus
The assertion, though is that _grades_ that subjective aren't worth much.

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koolmoe
If nothing else, the author demonstrated the ability to work hard.
Demonstrating to yourself that you can work hard has a lot of value in and of
itself, IMO.

Of course, there are other outlets for working hard, but for many Americans,
high school and later college present the most obvious and most consistent
opportunities to do so. In fact, the author may have even _learned_ how to
work hard in college if he didn't already have that ethic.

~~~
edw519
Get the kids up and fed, drop them off, hot tar that roof in 100 degree
weather for 8 hours, fight traffic, get to the supermarket, fix dinner for the
kids, and pay the bills after you put them to bed, only to do it all over
again tomorrow, with a smile on your face the whole time (because others
depend on you to smile so they know everything's ok).

Or hang out in the lounge with your latte discussing the merits of Marxism
while someone pays your bills.

Please, please, please don't confuse hard work with anything that happens in
college. You make the rest of us wish we were still there.

~~~
koolmoe
>please don't confuse hard work with anything that happens in college.

You can work hard at anything. Playing an instrument isn't something I
consider work, but it takes hard work to become one of the top musicians in
the world.

Consistently trying to be the best at something rather than just accepting
mediocrity is important, and not a lot of people have that drive. It's the
kind of thing that keeps you from having to tar roofs for a living.

>You make the rest of us wish we were still there.

You must have me confused with someone else. I'm not a student.

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menloparkbum
"I majored in English Literature and minored in Communication Theory."

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mmp
The smarter students become aware pretty soon that grades are meaningless, and
only care about them if they have a good reason to (scholarships, etc).

There's a middle ground of fellows like him, who are smart enough to get good
grades if they work really hard, but think it matters.

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nostrademons
Totally agree. I averaged a 3.0 in college (with a lot of Cs and Fs mixed in
with those As), and it hasn't hurt me yet. Meanwhile, it let me do lots of
other things that have arguably helped more, like serve as the tech lead on
the largest HP fanfic site on the web, or write a course evaluation website
for my college that's still in use 3 years after I graduated, or learn a bunch
of exotic programming languages or try out a couple sports I would never have
thought I'd try, or meet friends (one of whom is now my startup cofounder).

The only thing I regret about my college experience is too much time spent
reading UseNet. Everything else - staying up late with friends, trying new
activities, learning programming languages - was well worth the drop in GPA
that resulted.

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geebee
This blog entry does have a good message. Good grades are nice, but nobody has
every asked me about my GPA, either. I actually think there comes a moment in
most people's lives where they find themselves choosing between good grades
and focusing on what they are most passionate about. In grad school, I got so
into programming that I started putting less effort into my coursework, and my
grades suffered (a bit). I still got my MS, and nobody has ever even once
asked about my grades. One of my professors was so into one of the software
apps I wrote that he agreed to sign off on it as fulfilling the MS project.

In the end, you may have to let go of grades to truly follow your passion.
Some of the top grad programs are set up in recognition of this.

Now that said, I have no idea how or why this blogger needed to sacrifice her
time or sanity to get A's in English. I double majored in English and Math,
and I think I got one B in lit the whole time (my overall lit gpa was someting
like a 3.85, because there were some A- grades in there as well). It took a
bit of doing, but really, you don't have to go to the wall to get A's in a
most lit classes.

The Math, on the other hand, was really tough. I got about a 3.5 in the major,
because the undergrad calc series throug differential equations made sense,
and I could handle applied math pretty well. But math theory (real analysis,
abstract algebra, and so forth) was hard as hell. I really struggled for even
a glimpse of understanding of this stuff. I studied hours every day, spent
hours working in student groups and in office hours solving problem sets,
giving it everything I had, and I still got B's in plenty of these classes. In
the end, I'm glad I did it, but I could tell I was not Ph.D material in
Mathematics.

I agree with edw519 - unless you're doing serious math or science, don't tell
me about your super high GPA.

------
hbien
"If I could do it all over again, I would spend less time in the library and
more time at parties"

Man, same regret here.

~~~
eru
What about parties in the library?

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manvsmachine
I'm pretty sure that this has already been posted, recently.

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zaidf
"Why I regret getting straight A's in college"

Drop that apostrophe!

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Goladus
Although from a strict, computer-like grammar perspective you'd be right;
stylistically it is more effective to use an apostrophe in this case in order
to avoid confusion with the word "As." I suspect if you asked a hundred random
people about "Straight As" a goodly number would feel weird reading it, or
would actually mistake the meaning. Conversely, "Straight A's" is only going
to bother people who have memorized the rules.

~~~
zaidf
Interesting. It always hurts my eye each time I come across it and I am far
from a grammar-nazi.

