'What Straight-A Students Get Wrong' (nytimes.com) 372
From a story: Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A's. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers. I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a 4.0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.
Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem -- it's more about finding the right problem to solve.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.
Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem -- it's more about finding the right problem to solve.
Academic grades are what you can parrot! (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, they have little bearing on the real world, where you need to actually achieve, rather than regurgitate words at the professor.
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It depends what the exams are like. I've had questions like "given this system, if you replace part A with a component of type B instead of type A, how will the behavior of the system change under X and Y conditions. Really forced you to think, since the functions of the systems and components were mentioned in class, but how a system with DIFFERENT components would work was up to the test-taker's imagination.
Another fun question in an engineering dynamics class. [Picture of a male elephant walking with
Re:Academic grades are what you can parrot! (Score:4, Insightful)
From this picture, calculate the approximate length of the elephant's penis."
Bad question. When a male elephant urinates his penis is only partially extended from the preputial sheath. So a pendulum oscillation calculation would not give you the full length.
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Re:Academic grades are what you can parrot! (Score:5, Funny)
Haha. Length at the time, not fully extended length :D
Ok. Thanks for straightening that out.
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Haha. Length at the time, not fully extended length :D
Ok. Thanks for straightening that out.
I see what you did there.
Re:Academic grades are what you can parrot! (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, they have little bearing on the real world
Indeed. In my entire life, this is the number of times an interviewer has asked about my GPA: 0.
The were mainly interested in what I had done (demo with source code listing) and what I could do (whiteboard + marker).
Even applying for grad school, an impressive undergrad independent research project will help more than a perfect GPA, especially if it was published.
In grad school, your GPA means nothing. All anyone cares about is your research and publication record.
High school is the only place where your GPA is really important.
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At least that is how it was for me during my doctorate. Not a problem as I had a 4.00 in undergraduate, and would have had a 4.00 in grad school if not for pissing off a professor in an analog IC design class.
Re:Academic grades are what you can parrot! (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. In my entire life, this is the number of times an interviewer has asked about my GPA: 0.
Why would they ask you? That information is normally on your CV, which will be filtered by HR drones long before you get to the interview.
Re: Academic grades are what you can parrot! (Score:3, Insightful)
Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house. The schools nearby are mediocre at best on a good day.
I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now would only add further insult and injury to the insult and and injury I already (and my kid) suffer in the pubLic schools. More money will not hire better teachers until the evil af teachers unions are destroyed. Those people could give less than a fuck about the kids or teaching a
Re: Academic grades are what you can parrot! (Score:5, Interesting)
Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house. The schools nearby are mediocre at best on a good day.
I find what you are saying very unlikely (although not impossible). Most areas in this country with high property taxes have very good schools. Often the exceptions are in areas with high private school enrollment, where public schools therefore have a higher percentage of troubled children which drags down public school quality (private schools can say no to students, public schools generally cannot). It is possible you live in this kind of area, considering you likely have a $750k+ home with only 3br/2ba which means you and your neighbors are probably at least fairly affluent.
I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now would only add further insult and injury to the insult and and injury
Paying teachers more does not improve the quality of individual teachers. Research is clear that paying someone more doesn't make them work harder. But paying teachers more does help stop good teachers from quitting and going into the private sector. It helps good students decide to become teachers instead of other careers. A 2010 McKinsey report [mckinsey.com] found only 23% of our new teachers were students performing in the top third of their class. That drops to 14% of new teachers in high poverty schools. There are countries where you are able to get better teachers without higher pay, but in a country like the US where money is worshiped I find it hard to believe we can improve teachers without paying them like valuable professionals. We pay teachers less than half what some high performing countries do as a percentage of per capita GDP. Literally doubling teacher pay in many areas is likely necessary (some areas do pay teachers very well, but still not quite enough).
But better teachers are only a very small part of any realistic solution. While yes we do need better teachers, ending school segregation strategies is a much bigger win for our students. I live in a school district with $600k houses and almost no affordable living housing, so we have among the best schools in the state because our teachers don't have to work with very many troubled students. But while every grade, middle, and high school in my district is rated a 9/10 by GreatSchools.org, there are two districts bordering mine with schools rated closer to 3/4. This is where the working class employees who keep my community running live. Zoning policies keep affordable housing from being built in our school district, and funding schools by local property taxes only exacerbates the problem.
Teachers unions may be a convenient scapegoat for those who have never put much quality thought into the issue, but even abolishing teacher unions tomorrow wouldn't bring us 1% towards solving the real problems hurting our schools.
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So property taxes on an average house cost $25,000 dollars in your area, and you are pissed that the teachers are making (probably low) six figures?
- Someone with property taxes and no kids.
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As I mentioned, this is a correlati
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We apply and get accepted based on college criteria, for free.
Yep, and those criteria commonly include tests.
Re: Academic grades are what you can parrot! (Score:2)
If you just want to learn, you can learn on your own at much less cost, or simply audit courses sat reduced fees. You do not need to EARN A DEGREE in something with no market relevance.
What the hell are they teaching students? (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem solving is apparently not taught anymore? What kind of courses were these students aiming for A in?
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Merit and ability can be tested for.
A university is a place to show what a person can learn and then put that past ability to a new use.
To support the gov/mil/NGO/brand/company/nation/project they find work with and not needing constant support.
That their professional credentials are valid and that they can do what they can be expected to do.
When a person with "q
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That they are not going to make mistakes. That if the see a mistake made they understand the duty of care they have.
That any design change approved by such a person is correct.
Governments around the world have tried to change such academic methods for:
Communist party members.
Demographics
Faith
New ideas in education and using non academic considerations to enter further edu
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Problem solving has never been taught. You can look across all the generations and see how well people problem solve. Most people's problem solving ability is just trying the same tactic over and over again until it just happens to succeed in one instance. Just a
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Have you ever been through the education system? It's all about tests and exams. People love numbers, even if they don't mean anything. Nerds aren't immune from this kind of thinking, even though they think they're too smart to fall for the trap.
I guess it depends on the subject matter. Basic math is the sort of subject that does very well by rote. My son came home with common core math homework, and it was bullshit - making a very simple thing like addition and subtraction mind numbingly overcomplicated.
Problem solving has never been taught.
Critical thinking and reality based personal finances would be good as well.
Re:What the hell are they teaching students? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to say critical thinking should be taught. But how? Just like everything else, it ends up being taught to some test. Of course, those kids who do think critically will see through the absolutely non-critically thought-out education system.
Kids learn by example, and I fear the uncritical, uncreative, adults around them are teaching them to be the same by example.
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Well, there are math teachers in the US that get payed to show up in TV commercials to tell parents that kids should never learn any math - tricks but only text book math like "in this book" ... holding up a school book.
I saw videos about that but don't remember the details.
Bottom line teachers show up in advertisements to go against math tricks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
As if that would make the book they promote any better.
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My niece was a straight A student.
She actually couldn't change a light bulb in her room without help.
One time, she admitted she "didn't know how many ounces were in a pound".
She can't cook.
She's a math teacher in high school.
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I wonder if you asked her about anything Math related? Probably not.
Context is all. Most people have limited areas of expertise. Partly because they've not that much exposure to life outside a limited sphere, and partly because lots of stuff in the world simply doesn't interest them that much.
I freely admit to not knowing how to fix much on a modern car, even though I'm a proper (not software) engineer.
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I wonder if you asked her about anything Math related? Probably not.
Context is all. Most people have limited areas of expertise. Partly because they've not that much exposure to life outside a limited sphere, and partly because lots of stuff in the world simply doesn't interest them that much.
I freely admit to not knowing how to fix much on a modern car, even though I'm a proper (not software) engineer.
Mostly because diagnosing a modern car usually means plugging in an ODB-2 scanner and reading codes.
Although people do have limited interests and areas of knowledge, I find that the smartest people tend to have more interests than average, and those interests tend to be completely unrelated to what they do for a living. Mainly, the smarter the person, the more likely he or she is to enjoy learning, which almost inevitably results in at least some breadth of understanding.
Straight-A students overlap with th
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Does it change the discussion if the student isn't trying but still gets straight As?
Re:What the hell are they teaching students? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, to be clear sometimes when creating a product, like the iPhone, it is useful to think about the problem from a different perspective. Likewise, pulling the real problem client wants to solve out of them is an artform. But it is important to work the problem, and not jjust redefine it to suit your needs.
For instance about 20 years ago I was working on a roll you own web server. There was some data visitation code that broke for certain cases of data that were outside the arbitrary parameters the original coders set. These people redefined the problem to one they knew how to solve instead of solving the problem that needed to be solved. I have the education and the skills to actually do the research and coding to solve the real problem,
This in fact is why people fail tests. They are taught in school that they can work an easier problem that they know and they never are going to have to go through the effort to create a solution to a novel problem,. We ate training people to work in factories or scripted technical support.
The problem with the straight A student, in fact, is not that they are necessarily better or worse prepared to push papers or sell widgets to widget buyers. The problem is that they, unless they are very organized, focused, and precocious, likely earned their A by taking the easiest classes, by crying to administrators about how mean the teacher was anytime they got a b, and by having their parents threaten to sue. This means that why they do get a challenge in the work place, they are going to be unable to deal with it, or feel like the challenge is unfair.
I am thinking about the devil wears prada where the protagonist has a job, and is unable to do it without constantly whining.
A student with a low to mid b average is probably going to be a better employee.
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That's why standardized testing exists.
Standardized testing in nearly all cases is simply the regurgitating of information to see if you remember what you've been told. I've been back to university in the last 6 years for law, psychiatry and various legal courses. The only tests that I came across that required "understanding and thinking" were the courses in law which required you to reference, understand, and be able to explain your answer.(eg, a man is walking down the street and encounters two men in a discussion in a public place. He c
Re: What the hell are they teaching students? (Score:5, Interesting)
Standardised testing is part of the problem. You want a test with high reliability that is applied over a large population. Unfortunately, you then hit practicality: you can't have one person mark all of the scripts (and even if you could, one person is not likely to be perfectly consistent if they mark even 1,000 tests). So you end up having lots of different people mark the tests. If you want consistent marking, then you must have very detailed mark schemes. If you want to produce a new test every year (which you do, or people will just find last year's one and memorise a good answer), then you end up with very questions that have only one correct answer and a lot of detail describing what that answer looks like. It is incredibly hard to write a good test that will be taken by tens of thousands of people a year, gives consistent marks, and measures the ability to produce creative solutions to problems.
One of my colleagues at Cambridge described the UK A-level system as training one-piece jigsaw puzzle solvers. He wasn't wrong: they teach you that any problem that you'll encounter has precisely one correct solution. Even in a subject like maths, you're given a handful of tools and then problems where you must apply the correct one in the correct order. For humanities subjects, there is one correct line of argument for each essay topic and one list of sources that you're meant to cite. At the end of it, students are not prepared for a decent university education or the real world, either of which expects people to come up with original solutions to new problems.
Do companies even care about grades that much (Score:2)
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When the interviewer started bragging to me that they didn't have to write good code, I decided not to pursue that 'opportunity'.
Re:Do companies even care about grades that much (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes and no. They don't really care in terms of doing the job, but especially in STEM, it's common to slap on an arbitrary GPA cutoff for graduate positions. So if you don't have 3.7, you simply cannot apply for a certain percentage (HR literally throw applications away without reading). At 3.5 there's another cutoff. At 3, another.
None of that is really relevant to the job, it's just "more efficient" for HR. They "need" someone with a degree, because that means they can grind the handle and meet deadlines for four years. And they "need" the best, so 3.7 must be better than 3.5 ....
It's ridiculous, but yes, it happens. After the first job, no, nobody cares. But for that first position, absolutely.
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For a fresh out, I look at GPA quite closely - but more importantly, the source of the GPA. I do like pretty close to a 4.0 GPA (depending on the school) for "in major" courses but for "out of major" courses such as that Literature course you took to satisfy general education, I will accept a 3.0 without hesitation. In fact, this gives me more information about you than a 4.0 across the board would - it's likely you really enjoyed the "in major" classes and focused on them and likely were not obsessed with
Stupid logic (Score:5, Insightful)
At one point, the article says, in effect, that it's unhealthy to obsess over getting straight As -- and that it's ineffective, because people like Martin Luther King and JK Rowling didn't get straight As. If it's unhealthy to give yourself a hard time pursuing straight As, it's even more unhealthy to give yourself a hard time trying to be Martin Luther King or JK Rowling -- and it's wildly less attainable.
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My first thought was that I’d much rather be an MLK Jr than a JK Rowling... but then I realized that Rowling doesn’t have people trying to kill her and is ridiculously wealthy.
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Meh, I was in a highschool in a rural town, no honors courses, no tiger moms, getting As wasn't that hard.
Also I found that in college, the students who had AP credit and skipped the intro math classes actually had a more difficult time of things adjusting to the college level of difficulty cold turkey.
Nope (Score:3)
In a large go-getting start-up type company, you are much better off focusing on solutions and not how you can BS.
I don't believe it (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked in a company where GPAs strongly influenced hiring decisions (yes, even after years in the workforce). At that company myself and most of my colleagues had 3.5+ GPAs from top universities. I've also worked at companies where GPA and school meant zero towards the hiring process.
The difference in the quality of personnel was stark. At the high GPA company everyone was incredibly smart, hard working, and overachieving. At the anything-goes companies, *some* people are smart and hard working, but most are just there to clock in their 9-5, get their paycheck, and put in the minimal amount of effort along the way that they can without being fired.
Re:I don't believe it (Score:4, Interesting)
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I work 9-5:30 because that's what my contract stipulates. I don't get overtime, so I'm not working outside those hours. I certainly wouldn't get nebulous and meaningless "kudos" points for staying late,. If anything, there'd be eyebrows raised.
Whether I have a CS degree or not is irrelevant (and always was). What is important is whether I can do the job I am employed for.
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30 years working in IT industry, can say with complete honesty the only people grades mattered was for Grad intakes, anyone else I have never seen them even looked at as they just don't matter.
Grades indeed don't matter. what does matter however, is what kind of education you've completed. Was it a "memorize this and you'll pass" kind of education? Vocational training? Academic education?
In my experience, vocational training gets the most out of people given standard tasks, even for high-skilled tasks like programming, as this type of education better teaches the "how" of programming, and fast-forwards a person in their career by a few years (because it takes tat long to learn this on the job).
Bu
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It's useful as a screening tool—just because someone has 3.5+ GPA doesn't mean they will be good fit for the job (they might not have actually earned that grade; they might have earned it at a middle- to low-tier university). But not hiring people who don't at least meet that mark means you are screening out a lot of people who can't function at the level you need them to.
But, alas, the one-percenters you describe aren't going to drive the correlations (also, there are people who don't have that GPA b
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I'm used to seeing a minimum grade cut-off at companies and if you passed that grade it is never discussed again. It's just like the old "Hello Doctor with Honours and a mountain of certificates, do you have a Bachelor Degree? Good you have not been automatically rejected!"
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Be like scotty. Do just enough to be useful, and then when important stuff needs doing quickly, you put all your effort in and are seen as a miracle worker.
In most offices I've ever been in, the quicker you work, the more work you're given, which doesn't usually translate into either compensation nor accolades.
Work is trading time for money.
As companies are trying to get the most work for the least money, the only winning move is to get the most money for the least work.
Good ol' selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
>> at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance
Sure, if they can pass Google interviews, their grades are unlikely to have much bearing on their performance. They have a pretty serious bearing on being able to pass interviews, though, I can tell you that.
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Or maybe they are. There are many reasons why one might have a bad GPA. Maybe they didn't pay attention initially but then really got their ass in gear. Or maybe they did a lot of stuff outside the normal curriculum to the detriment of grades. Who knows.
My point is, the interview selects for people who can code. Proportionally speaking, there will be a lot more of those who can code among people with good academic record, and a lot more people with bad academic records will be discarded (but, crucially, not
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Spot on.
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I can't speak for Google, but about 30% of the people I interviewed couldn't code up a variation of FizzBuzz. I guarantee you none of those will be a net positive if hired.
Re:Good ol' selection bias (Score:4, Informative)
I actually wouldn't "guarantee" that. Some people get anxious and can't code worth a damn in an interview. That's just how the brain works: once fight-or-flight kicks in, neocortex basically shuts down. I know because I'm one of those people. I do very well if, for whatever reason, I'm not anxious. I did well in my Google interview only because I had 2 other offers from elsewhere. I spent well over half a decade at Google doing what I think is excellent work, and perf evaluations agreed.
I don't know how to fix this, but I can assure you that there are at least a few great coders among those who can't code FizzBuzz on the whiteboard under the stress of a typical eng interview.
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If a candidate has a portfolio of work, then go through their work. This is about work and career, so judge candidates based on realistic conditions.
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How do you interview then?
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I mean, how do you determine if candidate’s “body of work” and “qualifications” are real?
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You get them to explain their work.
Doesn't work.
I used to believe that I could chat with someone about their work and come away with a solid idea of how good they were, but then I made some bad hires that made me realize how wrong I was. Your method does filter out the bad liars, but not the good ones. The good ones know enough to be able to explain the work, point out pros and cons, key design decisions, etc., and explain the rationale... but that is far from the same thing as meaning they could actually do the work they're describing.
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I think it's easy to fix - stop making interviews an exam.
I can't speak for other companies but in every hiring activity I've done the "exam" is not about the right question. We also make this clear up front and last time we ended up hiring graduates we hired one of only 2 people who got the engineering question wrong. The difference was as he was trying to solve it he was scribbling on the paper and showed perfect thought process on how to approach the problem. Ultimately he drew some components in the final picture backwards.
I quizzed him on it on his first day
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Where did anything indicate that? I have yet to see any study that looked at the ability of people who have passed the google interviews and compared it to the failures. The only thing this study seems to indicate is that Google seems to value education perfectly in the interview process.
I got 3.98 at University over4 years in.. (Score:3)
Re:I got 3.98 at University over4 years in.. (Score:5, Insightful)
...theoretical physics and have had a very successful career for over 20 years.
You are probably the type of person who loves what he does, is capable of independent research to solve problems, and whose University grades have no bearing on his ability to do his job.
You could probably have lived life more, studied less, gotten lower grades, and still be perfectly able to do your job.
In short, you are probably just the person the article author had in mind to prove that University grades are meaningless beyond the hiring process.
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This.
I put out a job call and a hick from Fred, Texas came to interview. This was WAY back, OK?
I asked him what an autoexec file (and lots of other DOS stuff) was, and he looked at me and said, "I don't know.. Do you, though?"
I said, "Yes, I do.." He said, "Wow. I'd like to know what you know!" After a few minutes, I told him to go speak to the people out on the floor (about 25 users) while I printed some stuff.
I got coffee and waited until he returned. I told him to wait right there. I went out to the floo
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So... did he turn out to be the star performer on your team or the guy that always fucks things up and had to be saved by his teammates?
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Regrets, I've had a few (Score:4, Interesting)
As a former A student, the biggest thing I got wrong was never asking Peggy Blair out. She was smoking hot and she looked like she would have been a lot of fun, but I didn't think I had a shot with her. All these years later she becomes my friend on Facebook and asks me why I never asked her out, and that she liked me back then.
I realize that there were so many times I didn't take a shot because I was a little shy and caught up in my own head and I could have been fucking like crazy if I'd only had the confidence of a guy like Kenny Jaworski, who was a jerkoff and had nothing going on but was always macking on the girls.
That, and I wish I'd spent less time studying and more time getting high.
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It's a common Irish Catholic name.
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I believe you may have wooshed yourself. I can see the stain from here.
Perfectionism (Score:5, Interesting)
Self sabotage disguised as integrity.
Grades can be important (Score:2)
but even more important is having valid work experience in your field of study.
Some technical schools require a year of Co-op blocks with paid employment at external companies. Some additionally require a senior project for graduation.
If you're a pre-med student, or pre-law student, well that's another kettle of fish.
Yep (Score:2)
>"Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence."
I can tell you that when I hire (which is rare, but still relevant), I don't care about grades AT ALL. I really don't care which University either (as long as it is not mail-order). It does matter which degree, depending on the position, but not as much as most people would expect.
I am far more interested in things like: Where they have worked and for how long, what experience they have, their personality, their interests (in or out
GPA: Know how to work (Score:2)
GPA is only marginally about intelligence. It is mostly about being able to identify and fulfill expectations, combined with a decision that grades matter. In hiring, I want someone that I think could get a 4.0 if they decided it was important, but honestly when doing recruiting, I haven't always looked at the GPA on the resume; what matters is having skills that go beyond the basic curriculum to make the candidate stand out. My favorite interview question for programming positions is to ask about projec
Advice (Score:2)
My kid just got into her major (Score:4, Interesting)
Kid's aren't fighting for a 4.0 for top schools anymore. 30 years of nonstop state & federal funding cuts mean they're fighting for spots in regular public Universities. This is what happens when you've got a winner take all, survival of the fittest economy. What pisses me off is how few people acknowledge it. There are literally tens of thousands, if not millions of parents with kids in college. Do you all just not talk to your kids?
The "right" problem for Capitalism. (Score:2)
"...career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem -- it's more about finding the right problem to solve."
Finding the right problem?
The very capitalism that drives careers thrives in pimping materialistic shit products packed full of features we never asked for and didn't want, to fill a need that doesn't really exist.
Consumers buy solutions to non-problems all the damn time. If someone ever did find the "right" problem, they would probably be fired.
4.0 gets you into more doors... (Score:3)
Science related degree related to the job
Highly ranked college
The GPA may not say much about success, but in order to be successful, having a high GPA means you at least get to try.
> For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.
How many 2.0 GPA hires do you think Google has?
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How many 2.0 GPA hires do you think Google has?
/me raises hand.
High school GPA was < 2.0. College was better, but not great. I know another Google engineer who never finished high school. I know another who finished her associate's degree with a 2.0 GPA.
It's the transition (Score:3)
My company hires a lot of "kids" right out of engineering school. These kids are smart, don't get me wrong, but they come out looking for more grades as school is all they've ever known. There is a transition from this to the real world and the academic community fails to prepare many of them (if any) for this. A quick "A+" and closure to whatever challenge they just met, while the rest of us know things aren't that simple, may take years of work, and even then the overall, multi-faceted success may have some facets of failure. So many don't seem to get this.
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True. This is what a good mentoring program is for. Computer science and software engineering don't have formal apprenticeship programs, and the informal ones are _invaluable_.
School is wrong ... (Score:5, Informative)
... because everyone is taught the same shit.
That's OK for elementary, but by middle school (junior high), it's time to recognize people's passions and aptitudes and steer them down that or those lanes.
A friend with kids asked me if the kids should learn code. I said, absolutely not. Expose them to it and see if that take the bait. If not, try different bait.
As an analogy (not car), I told him that some parents force their kids to learn how to play the piano. Know how many good pianists there are? Not many.
Forcing kids to take code is a good way to piss them off and never forgive you for being stupid.
And if a kid like the violin, buy them one and the lessons to go with it.
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Learning "to code" as in C# or Java syntax is just a skill. Breaking down a problem to a set of precise instructions to complete a task is fantastic general tool. For example if you ask someone to find the sum of all numbers from 1 to 100, being able to create pseudo-code like:
sum = 0;
for i in sequence(1,100)
sum + i;
return sum;
and realizing this is the same as 1+2+3+4+5+....+100 is the key to saving tons of tedious work. It may seem trivial to us, but you have to more or less ru
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I agree.
For me, I started learning the stuff that matters when I left home at age 19 for the US Navy.
I selected electronics; ate up the math and physics and was a damned good troubleshooter.
I had to do an extra year in high school to graduate.
I had to unlearn the bullshit like Washington chopping down a fucking cherry tree.
I look at grades for job candidates (Score:2, Informative)
I'll admit that I've never seen a 4.0 average for anyone I interviewed, except for schools that grade on a 5.0 scale. If they received poor grades in subjects we were hiring for, I did ask why. If they were constantly on the edge of flunking out, and didn't have an _amazing_ excuse, I'd turn them down on the basis of having poor task management skills. Conversely, I made a job offer to a recent graduate who got a C in object oriented programming courses because he kept looking at lower levels of abstraction
I told my niece if she gets into Harvard (Score:3)
airy fairy nonsense (Score:3)
Maybe if you're doing underwater basketweaving at somewhere like DeVry.
Perhaps for a handful of entrepreneurs & visionaries. Not for the majority of jobs. If I'm a plumber I need to solve the problem of finding & fixing the leak. If I'm an ER doctor I need to solve the problem of the patient in front of me bleeding out. If I'm a programmer on a stock control system that can't convert stones to kilograms I need to solve the problem of where & how to multiply (or is it divide?) by 6.356.
They fail to learn prioritization (Score:2)
Prioritization is critical in any real-world project. You never have the resources or time to make it perfect. You always have some parts that need to be as close to perfect as possible and others that do not. And you have do deal competently with having a shifting situation priority-wise.
Prioritization is something that requires to many guestimates that it can only be learned by experience. Hence I submit that the straight-A people lose their edge and may even be falling behind when experience accumulates
Diminishing returns (Score:3)
The B students work for the A students... (Score:3)
At companies started by the C students.
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You go to expensive international student programs in said "less developed countries" which are more than happy to take your money if your grades are halfway decent (say above a 2.7 or 3.0 GPA).
Or, if you're black, you go to med school in South Africa, where black students with C average all round are accepted over white students with straight As. It's the local policy of affirmative action in which the 90% minorities are given artificial advantages (one of many).
(No, I'm not white in case you were wondering)
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Are you sure you're going into it for the right reasons? If you are, you still have options.
(1) Pass the BMAT. Do whatever it takes. Take time off from work, do questions to a clock for hours every day until you get the timing right. Take Adderall or other focus-improving drugs.
(2) Look north or south of Hungary. Why are you only mentioning Hungary? Some Eastern European countries allow for their own entrance exams (in English, too!), which are more organic chemistry, chemistry, physics, and math in
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Some nations have helicopter crews that can fly at night and get people to very advanced and well equipped teaching hospitals.
Every part of that nations medical system has to be very professional. From the skilled crews that fly at night to the experts on duty at at every hospital 24/7.
The best people a nation has tested for that are on duty in shifts, 24/7.
That ensures people transferred with conditions that need experts get seen by actual experts on duty.
Other less advance
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I don't know where you went to school (Score:2)
I don't know where you went to school, but in my alma mater the amount of information was far in excess of what anyone could memorize. You had to understand, and be able to derive things to do well on the exams. Memory does help, but that help is very limited without understanding.
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I can only speak from my own experience - science subjects in England - and the rote component falls away pretty sharply during A-Levels. That's age 16-18, the equivalent of senior high, I believe.
TFA is bullshit.
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It's usually more productive to just not react to idiots. After all, just when you thought the world had reached peak idiot and that you've solved that problem, you invariably find out you are wrong with the world throwing up an even greater idiot.
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Get enough people, and you can divide them into teams to tackle each issue. Perhaps those teams could be termed as "organizations".
One organization keeps track of nuclear proliferation. One organization assists the rights of the poor. One organization figures out means for clean drinking water. One organization stops human/animal trafficking. One organization does medical researc