6 ms·

Do Good Grades Predict Success?

30 points by blogimus 18y ago

babyshake 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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.
  - hugh 18y ago
    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.
    - run4yourlives 18y ago
      The letter grade system is basically this: A - 80-100 B - 70-80 C - 60-70 D - 50-60 F - Less than 50% In terms of rebuttal, what scott_s said.
      - jacktasia 18y ago
        In the U.S.? I have always seen closer to this: A 100-90 B 89-80 C 79-70 D 69-60 F 59-0
        run4yourlives 18y ago
        Yeah, there are different versions... and I could be wrong. I gave the high school one since it's what I could remember off hand. Getting a "D" was just as bad as failing though.
        PieSquared 18y ago
        In some places, sadly, getting a low B is considered 'failing'... In most of my classes, at least. But I suppose the pressure gets you to work more quickly and efficiently.
        scott_s 18y ago
        Getting a B in grad school is basically failing.
        robg 18y ago
        In grad school, we were specifically told not to get too many A's and to focus on publications. If some industrious type got mostly (or all) A's the next question from their committee was: Why aren't you working on publishing? C's though were failing. Still, you had to try really hard to fail. The B's were inflated. The difference is probably domains - a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience doesn't prepare you for much else than doing science. There, judgment for a tenure-track job begins and ends with publications. And no one will want to see grades and no CV ever includes them.
kingkongrevenge 18y ago
"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.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- Alex3917 18y ago
  IIRC Alfie Kohn's book What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated has a couple studies on it. I believe he says that GPA accounts for about 3% of future income potential. Many firms have done their own internal studies though. IIRC Google undertook a big study and found no correlation between gpa and job performance. I'm sure financial firms have probably looked at the link between gpa and alpha, if only because it's so easy to measure. A more interesting thought experiment is to ask yourself the opposite question: For students who have jobs before going to college or grad school, would you expect those who made more money to later get a higher GPA?
  - timcederman 18y ago
    Interesting if true, given Google's strict GPA requirements.
    - antiform 18y ago
      I'd be interested to see the analysis or references to this analysis, if anybody has any links. I'd be even more interested to see how GPA correlates with people actually getting an interview and getting a position there. It wasn't too long ago that Google required you to have above a 3.8 GPA to be a serious candidate. I can accept that there isn't too much difference between people in the 3.8~4.0 GPA range, but I'd expect that there would be a significant difference between someone getting a 3.8 and a 3.3 from the same school.
bigthboy 18y ago
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 18y ago
  repercussions
  - bigthboy 18y ago
    thank-you
ciscoriordan 18y ago
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!"
markbao 18y ago
I really hope not.
peregrine 18y ago
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.
maxklein 18y ago
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.
endergen 18y ago
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.

30 points by blogimus 18y ago

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 18y ago
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.
- hugh 18y ago
  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.
  - run4yourlives 18y ago
    The letter grade system is basically this: A - 80-100 B - 70-80 C - 60-70 D - 50-60 F - Less than 50% In terms of rebuttal, what scott_s said.
    - jacktasia 18y ago
      In the U.S.? I have always seen closer to this: A 100-90 B 89-80 C 79-70 D 69-60 F 59-0
      - run4yourlives 18y ago
        Yeah, there are different versions... and I could be wrong. I gave the high school one since it's what I could remember off hand. Getting a "D" was just as bad as failing though.
        PieSquared 18y ago
        In some places, sadly, getting a low B is considered 'failing'... In most of my classes, at least. But I suppose the pressure gets you to work more quickly and efficiently.
        scott_s 18y ago
        Getting a B in grad school is basically failing.
        robg 18y ago
        In grad school, we were specifically told not to get too many A's and to focus on publications. If some industrious type got mostly (or all) A's the next question from their committee was: Why aren't you working on publishing? C's though were failing. Still, you had to try really hard to fail. The B's were inflated. The difference is probably domains - a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience doesn't prepare you for much else than doing science. There, judgment for a tenure-track job begins and ends with publications. And no one will want to see grades and no CV ever includes them.

kingkongrevenge 18y ago

"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.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 18y ago
IIRC Alfie Kohn's book What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated has a couple studies on it. I believe he says that GPA accounts for about 3% of future income potential. Many firms have done their own internal studies though. IIRC Google undertook a big study and found no correlation between gpa and job performance. I'm sure financial firms have probably looked at the link between gpa and alpha, if only because it's so easy to measure. A more interesting thought experiment is to ask yourself the opposite question: For students who have jobs before going to college or grad school, would you expect those who made more money to later get a higher GPA?
- timcederman 18y ago
  Interesting if true, given Google's strict GPA requirements.
  - antiform 18y ago
    I'd be interested to see the analysis or references to this analysis, if anybody has any links. I'd be even more interested to see how GPA correlates with people actually getting an interview and getting a position there. It wasn't too long ago that Google required you to have above a 3.8 GPA to be a serious candidate. I can accept that there isn't too much difference between people in the 3.8~4.0 GPA range, but I'd expect that there would be a significant difference between someone getting a 3.8 and a 3.3 from the same school.

bigthboy 18y ago

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 18y ago
repercussions
- bigthboy 18y ago
  thank-you

ciscoriordan 18y ago

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!"

markbao 18y ago

I really hope not.

peregrine 18y ago

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.

maxklein 18y ago

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.

endergen 18y ago

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.