

Do Good Grades Predict Success? - blogimus
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/do-good-grades-predict-success/

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babyshake
I predict that in ten years, we'll be astonished that we let the reign of a
completely inane grading system continue so long. The letters A-F, printed on
a sheet of paper? Disk is cheap. Processing is cheap. There's no reason to
artificially restrict a person's educational data to such an incredibly
limited, arbitrary schema.

The problems described here - grade inflation, subjectivity, etc. - would be
alleviated with _more_ grades, not less.

~~~
run4yourlives
The problem is that humans have an innate desire - need even - to classify and
quantify nearly everything. We want to know simply: What are the best cars?
Who are the prettiest? What grades are good and what are bad?

It's the reason you get a web full of top 10 lists. Quick and easy evaluations
of often subjective and arbitrary data.

We simply can't process the amount of information it takes to evaluate whether
a child is doing well in school beyond said child being an absolute genius, a
dismal failure or "somewhere in between".

So long as parents demand that they know whereabout in the "somewhere in
between" spectrum their child stands, we'll have abstract and near useless
grading mechanisms.

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hugh
The problem is that the leter-grade system doesn't give this information. "A"
could mean you're a super-genius, or a plain old genius, or a reasonably good
student, or a so-so student at a place with severe grade inflation.

At my school (in Australia) we didn't have letter grades, we had a mark out of
(say) one hundred combined with an indication of your ranking within the
class. Bold, stark information which told you in no uncertain terms exactly
how many people in your class or year were better than you. No doubt it was
ego-destroying if you got "150/150", but pretty motivating if you got
"11/150", and suitably rewarding if you got "1/150".

This wasn't continued through to the university level, but at least we still
got a nice high-resolution mark on a 0-100 scale for each course. And the
grades weren't too inflated, so any mark over 90 was a real achievement even
for the top students. Getting 100 for any course was unheard of (not quite
true, I did hear of somebody getting one once.)

I work at a university in the US now, and I'm really confused about why they
still use such a low-resolution system for grading students.

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RobGR
If anything, it should be a lower resolution system. If you measure a distance
by crudely pacing it off, you don't say it is "134.581234 yards". You say it
is about 130 yards.

Consider the following questions in thinking about how many significant digits
should be expressed in a grade:

* Go back through every homework and test for your entire college career, and have them re-graded by the professors involved. Or consider doing that for a sample of 50 or 100 students. By how much does the GPA change ?

* Go back through every homework and test for an entire college career, and have it re-graded by a commitee of 10 experts in the field, who must all agree on every problem's grade after consulation with each other. By how much does the GPA change ?

* Does the average grade given out by a professor or other grader change if they are in their first semester of grading / teaching, versus following semesters ? If they grade late at night versus early in the morning ? If the name on the paper being graded is that of a good or poor student ? ( Presuming it is the same paper for both students -- this study was done by two students I know, who agreed to copy each other's papers for a couple of grades and then confronted the biased teacher and were punished for it.)

Now, if you are putting so many significant digits on those GPA's that non-
student related stuff such as which professor they were randomly assigned to
comes into play, then you are just fooling yourself. And that's only
considering how good grades are at predicting THEMSELVES.

And, if you want to consider how good grades are at predicting anything else,
except maybe "will I get into medical school" and other explicitly grade-
related questions, I think you end up ignoring them all together. I would only
care about whether or not they graduated high school, which college to a very
loose degree, and whether or not they finished college. The presence or
absense of a master's degree does not seem to predict anything (except maybe
good grades as an undergrad).

If you assign a number to anything, some people will become fascinated by it.
If you made a video arcade game, where you pressed a button once and it gave
you a random score between one and a million, some people would stand there
feeding in quarters until they were at the top of the high scorers list.

If you think that the grading system is low-resolution, then you aren't trying
to use grades to predict anything useful about people, you are just fascinated
by a very expensive and time consuming video game.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

~~~
eru
Perhaps should not have a higher numeric resolution - but more dimensions.

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ciscoriordan
This reminds me of a quote from Calvin and Hobbes:

"You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well, mine are even worse!"

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maxklein
People who get As are divided into two:

1\. One group who are just smarter than everyone else 2\. A second group who
just are more concentrated on getting more As that everyone else

The first group is likely to be more successful. The second often don't make
the transition between that type of highly focused success with all round
success. Like many many nerds.

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bigthboy
I don't think I'm necessarily an example, but in high school I was generally a
A- student who got As because of either inflation or I just sucked up to the
teachers to give me an A. =P In college I'm more of a B student but I also
haven't changed any habbits and can happily say I am able to spend an
abundance of time working on my start-up and driving it forward. It helps,
however, that most of my professors are leanient on allowing me to miss
classes for various business reasons without reprocussions.

I can say that I hope the stat about the B student tending to have the highest
net worth is accurate. =)

~~~
mleonhard
repercussions

~~~
bigthboy
thank-you

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peregrine
This article and every comment is missing the point almost completely.

Success is measured by how hard your willing to work to complete your dreams
and how much of that hard work you actually do.

So if the man who owns the small hardware shop dream was to own a small
hardware shop and live a simple life then he got there and if hes happy hes
successful. Maybe he had dreams of something more but was unwilling to put the
time in.

The home depot guy put the time in and worked his butt off to build his dream.

The same applies to startups. You guys can have Ideas, 4.0s and 39 act scores
but if you don't put the time necessary to achieve your dreams you will never,
EVER get there.

Success is how happy you are. Nobody can measure it and its different for
every person. The best definination I can think for success is how happy the
person is, in other words the goal of life is to be happy.

Also remember to achieve big dreams you need to give up BIG TIME. If anyone
here has read East of Eden by John Steinbeck he visits these exact ideas. Its
lonely at the top.

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endergen
Like he says in the article, you can't define success so you can't really
answer this question.

A more interesting test would be comparing randomly sampled students from
standard schools against students from alternative schools of thought(Home
schooled, private schooled, new age methologies etc.)

You would then have to find a way of generating tests or activities that
creates meaningful comparisons of their abilities/attributes. The problem in
the end, maybe that boiling everything down to a few attributes is rewarding
people for gaming the system, versus changing the system.

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markbao
I really hope not.

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kingkongrevenge
"The Millionaire Mind" and "The Millionaire Next Door" have hard data on this.
(Mediocre books, BTW.) The answer is that high net worth individuals are
predominantly low B students.

A possible explanation for this is simply that lower scoring yet ambitious
students are forced to take bigger risks. Johnny A student has a decision tree
with more safe salaried gigs on it, but fewer big payoffs.

I saw once that one of the better income predictors was having had more than
one sexual partner in high school. I don't know how applicable this is in the
top quarter of the income scale. But for people in general I think it
illustrates the criticality of social skills over other factors.

~~~
13ren
I've heard, that for their honours year in an undergrad degree, people who get
a 2A are _more_ successful than people who get a first. One reason a 2A
graduate gave is that it closes them out of the esoteric, idealistic academic
life of chasing perfection. Also, in practice, if you aren't comfortable with
your head in the clouds, being able to effortlessly hold abstract arguments in
your head, you won't be attracted to it. My high school was streamed, and the
"top" class was a little airy-headed.

I think another reason might be that if you aren't quite as intelligent, the
thing you learn is school is _how to make an effort_ \- and that skill is more
valuable than any of the subject matter. This is related to whether you
believe one is born smart/dumb, or you believe that your intelligence is
affected (or even, _e_ ffected) by your efforts:
[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-
sm...](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids)

Also, for a start-up, if you are intelligent enough to work things out, but
only with great effort, then you are: (1). dumb enough to identify with the
problems of ordinary people (customers/users) (2). capable enough to _do
something about it_. The reason I stress the "dumb" in (1) is because I pride
myself on being a member of this group (especially when I'm frustrated by
something that the really smart people genuinely think is "obvious" and
"trivial" - their intelligence sets them apart so much that they are incapable
of helping ordinary people).

I think there's another factor, that being extremely capable and talented
relative to your peers can make it harder for you be aware of, to acknowledge,
and to appreciate the unknown - that _nature's imagination is greater than
your imagination_ (Feynman).

Of course, some extraordinarily capable people don't fall prey to any of these
dangers - and they _really_ accomplish things.

~~~
asdflkj
Can you give an example of startup that would benefit by solving problems that
are trivial to the really smart people? I can't think of one. All good
technology that's designed to be suitable to "dumb" people is equally suitable
to smart people (e.g. Google, Ebay, Amazon), it seems to me. Smart people like
things that are intuitive and no more complicated than necessary, just like
everyone else. (Or so I've heard).

~~~
13ren
You're right, but you're asking a slightly different question from me.

I agree with you about google etc, and that intuitiveness and simplicity
benefit smart people as well as dumb people. Also, a smart person is sometimes
a dumb person - when tired, unwell, upset or when they need to concentrate on
something more demanding.

Although a smart person will benefit from it _once it exists_ , what I'm
saying is that the smart person won't be the one to _do_ it, if it seems too
easy for them, because they don't feel the frustration. In fact, if it's easy
for them but hard for others, it may give them a little ego boost, which
they'd like to keep.

Another aspect is smart people who do not like to acknowledge that they are
sometimes dumb people... Also, a person with much intellectual effort invested
in the old way is less likely to adopt the new one - and even less likely to
be the one to change it. This isn't precisely smartness, but a kind of
education.

Examples:

\- a way to clarify mathematical proofs in papers that are "trivial" and
"obvious", with hypertext to rigorously open up the steps (like
<http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmset.html#overview>);

\- programming languages are often slow to be adopted by expert users of the
old way, including those who are very smart; these people aren't the ones to
create the new language in the first place.

\- computerized legal systems - lawyers are smart, but reluctant to change,
probably because they have so much invested in learning what they have
already. Similar may be true of doctors, dentists and civil engineers.

Perhaps whenever anyone says "but that's trivial", "it seems clear to me",
"that's so easy, why can't you understand", "you're stupid" that their
attitude is a flag that this is something worth looking at...

Thanks for your comment, I like your point of view.

