4 ms·

You can't assess anything until college is over and you are actually in the real world. Good Grades does not mean you will succeed in real life. It mostly mea

by pfisch 12y ago

You can't assess anything until college is over and you are actually in the real world. Good Grades does not mean you will succeed in real life. It mostly means you are good at following orders.

aetherson 12y ago
I think good grades probably mostly means that you picked courses you're well suited for.
- benesch 12y ago
  That's why you have to evaluate the grade in the context of the course! GPA is meaningless; individual grades are much more informative. See Harry Lewis, recently appointed dean of Harvard's engineering school, on the subject. [0] The savvy employers do this—though probably not enough. There's a finance firm that hires exclusively Math 55 [1] alumni—I forget the name; a number of tech firms screen for CS161 [2]. Both among the hardest classes you can find. An A in those takes a hell of a lot more than just following directions. [0]: http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2014/11/can-we-find-better-way-to-rank-students.html http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2014/11/can-we-find-better-w... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 [2]: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs161/ http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs161/
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hueving 12y ago
>It mostly means you are good at following orders. Maybe if you went to a terrible school. In any decent school it means you were able to come up with a solution to a problem presented to you. This is especially true for upper-level classes where the majority of the grade is based on a personal project.
- drcomputer 12y ago
  Nah, I sort of agree. I graduated with almost 4.0 for my masters. There's so much more I am learning now - things everyone who didn't do well in school learned - humility, balance of life and work, ability to adapt without explicit rules, implicit socialization and direction, ability to self direct, ability to group direct, ability to lead, ability to learn things not traditionally used as metrics of intelligence. Education gave me a beautiful foundation of knowledge, the concept and form of theory and knowledge, and a strong love for it. It didn't teach me how to live, nor could it teach me how to think outside the bounds it defines.
- crpatino 12y ago
  As someone who has been on and off of lecturing for the last 10 years, I think you overestimate the size of the Decent Schools Set.
- pfisch 12y ago
  Solving discrete problems with discrete answers is just not the hard part of real life, at least not the entrepreneurial part which I am the most familiar with. Starting and completing a huge project that doesn't have deadlines where you have to figure out how to bring it from idea to market is real, and it rarely takes a semester and it isn't at the discretion of a single person to look at it for 30 minutes and then put a letter grade on it, and then throw it in the garbage. The most important difference though is that amount of effort only loosely correlates with the success of a venture in the real world. In school you can really just brute force most problems.

by pfisch 12y ago

You can't assess anything until college is over and you are actually in the real world. Good Grades does not mean you will succeed in real life. It mostly means you are good at following orders.

aetherson 12y ago

I think good grades probably mostly means that you picked courses you're well suited for.

benesch 12y ago
That's why you have to evaluate the grade in the context of the course! GPA is meaningless; individual grades are much more informative. See Harry Lewis, recently appointed dean of Harvard's engineering school, on the subject. [0] The savvy employers do this—though probably not enough. There's a finance firm that hires exclusively Math 55 [1] alumni—I forget the name; a number of tech firms screen for CS161 [2]. Both among the hardest classes you can find. An A in those takes a hell of a lot more than just following directions. [0]: http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2014/11/can-we-find-better-way-to-rank-students.html http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2014/11/can-we-find-better-w... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 [2]: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs161/ http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs161/

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hueving 12y ago

>It mostly means you are good at following orders. Maybe if you went to a terrible school. In any decent school it means you were able to come up with a solution to a problem presented to you. This is especially true for upper-level classes where the majority of the grade is based on a personal project.

drcomputer 12y ago
Nah, I sort of agree. I graduated with almost 4.0 for my masters. There's so much more I am learning now - things everyone who didn't do well in school learned - humility, balance of life and work, ability to adapt without explicit rules, implicit socialization and direction, ability to self direct, ability to group direct, ability to lead, ability to learn things not traditionally used as metrics of intelligence. Education gave me a beautiful foundation of knowledge, the concept and form of theory and knowledge, and a strong love for it. It didn't teach me how to live, nor could it teach me how to think outside the bounds it defines.
crpatino 12y ago
As someone who has been on and off of lecturing for the last 10 years, I think you overestimate the size of the Decent Schools Set.
pfisch 12y ago
Solving discrete problems with discrete answers is just not the hard part of real life, at least not the entrepreneurial part which I am the most familiar with. Starting and completing a huge project that doesn't have deadlines where you have to figure out how to bring it from idea to market is real, and it rarely takes a semester and it isn't at the discretion of a single person to look at it for 30 minutes and then put a letter grade on it, and then throw it in the garbage. The most important difference though is that amount of effort only loosely correlates with the success of a venture in the real world. In school you can really just brute force most problems.