Is a perfect GPA necessary for success in industry?

[twofish-quant]

Sure, maybe some B student did spend time outside the classroom writing poetry, but that doesn't imply that B students are better prepared for life (or whatever standard you're trying to measure them up to) than A students.

Writing poetry prepares you for life (i.e. it keeps you from going insane when you are looking for a job). If getting an A keeps you from writing poetry, that's a bad thing.

It's great that it worked out so well for you, but now you're making it seems like by definition A students are worse than those with B's.

There is a certain type of A student that ends up in worse shape in the business world than a certain type of B student. One of the things that you have to do if you have a 4.0 GPA is to convince people that you aren't that certain type of A student.

Whether some one better or worse depends on the type of environment. In academia, *by definition* and A student is better than a B student, but that doesn't necessarily carry over outside of academia.

I'm probably not the best person to talk first hand about what gets you liked by a graduate school admissions committee, but I can talk first hand about what can worry an employer.

What boggles my mind most, though, is the fact that all of you are or striving to be scientists. If these inferences and conclusions are based on logic employed in science, then slap me silly and call me Sandy.

My conclusions are based on personal experience which may or may not be different from yours.

Also life and business works with a different logic than science and engineering.

 

[viscousflow]

I said:

Also I've heard of perfect A students speaking of a pressure vector. High grades doesn't mean you know everything, it just means you know how to pass a test expertly.

Vanadium said

So you're arguing that grades are reliably and negatively correlated with achievement? Hmmm...

twofish-quant mentioned:

I'll let others talk about graduate admissions committees, but I do know first hand that employers are a little worried about people with GPA's that are too high, because it suggests that they might focus too much on classes and not on things that aren't graded.

One other difference is that most managers are people that don't have perfect GPA's so that having perfect GPA's is not something that gets you much respect in industry.

My point exactly. Passing a test for a perfect GPA and the real deal are two different things.

 

[twofish-quant]

If I get a resume with someone that has a 4.0 GPA, I'm not going to toss it in the trash, but one thing that I will ask in the interview is "tell me about a situation in which you failed and how did you deal with that" or "can you give me an example of a situation in which you tried something that you knew that you were unlikely to succeed in?"

If the response is "I've never failed and I don't plan to" then it's going to count very strongly against them when I write the interview report. If the response is "I didn't like my school because the classes were too easy, so I studied X, Y, Z to keep myself from getting bored, and I really messed on at X." that's a decent answer.

One other question that can be revealing is "what's your favorite color and why?" The reason that's a revealing question is that it's a random question with no real answer. What people will often do with job interviews is to study job hunting books left and right looking for the "right answer" to every question, and so you can often figure out something about someone by asking them a question with literally no right answer. If I ask "what's your favorite color and why?" and the interviewee looks very uncomfortable because that question was not on the script, that's a bad sign.

Also, the fact that personal characteristics are important is why businesses will not hire someone without a face to face interview.

 

[snipez90]

Repeated logical fallacies running through this thread. Being a good test taker is obviously useful, and many people who know their subjects well can (and should be able to) pass exams with ease.

 

[clope023]

See, now I think you're just being contrarian. Sure, maybe some B student did spend time outside the classroom writing poetry, but that doesn't imply that B students are better prepared for life (or whatever standard you're trying to measure them up to) than A students. It's great that it worked out so well for you, but now you're making it seems like by definition A students are worse than those with B's.You haven't answered his question, though.

And really, some of you are now making it seem as if it's the admission committee's task to try and come up with as many "excuses" for those A students performing well as they can, and then when they do, experience that "gotcha!" moment and adamantly refuse to let a "good test taker" into their school. This is getting ridiculous.

What boggles my mind most, though, is the fact that all of you are or striving to be scientists. If these inferences and conclusions are based on logic employed in science, then slap me silly and call me Sandy.

Well I'll give you an example, Sandy, in my controls engineering class the instructor allowed open notes even on the final; however he was a somewhat lazy professor who didn't change his questions from year to year. He only made 2 different versions of each test and it was not difficult to find old tests with answers that were the exact same questions as the one being currently given if you knew the right bunch of guys. So all one had to do was obtain the old test, stuff them in your notes, and copy the answers on your final, boom, instant A on the final. I'm sure this does not characterize every A student, I know plenty and the good ones work damn hard for it, but some don't work hard and don't deserve high grades in every instance.

You're assuming any criticism of some A students based on jealousy or whatnot and that's not the case.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'd expect zero correlation, but it wouldn't surprise me if the correlation was negative.

Feel free to argue that. What facts do you have supporting it?

 

[flyingpig]

Even if the actual percentage did show up on your transcript (which, in concurrence with cjl, I have never heard of), it seems very unlikely that a grad school or possible employer would know how many other people got 100%. Not only would the other 100%-scorers have to apply to the same place at the same time, but whoever was reading the transcripts would have to somehow know that you took the class at the same time, with the same professor, and then notice how many of you got 100%. And even then, there would be no way of knowing whether it was an easy class, or if several excellent students had just happened to apply to the same place. All-in-all, there are too many farfetched "if"s to bother worrying about such a scenario.

I thought class averages also appear on transcripts...?

 

[twofish-quant]

Feel free to argue that. What facts do you have supporting it?

Personal experience. A lot depends on your definition of achievement, but if you use my definition and you use as a sample people I knew as a undergraduate then it's pretty negatively correlated with GPA.

Also even if I'm totally all wet, listening to what I'm saying it still useful since, there is a non-trivial chance that someone will have to deal with me or someone that thinks like be in a job interview, so even if it turns out that what I think is totally unsupported, stupid, and wrong, you still have to deal with it.

 

[twofish-quant]

Being a good test taker is obviously useful, and many people who know their subjects well can (and should be able to) pass exams with ease.

That's not necessarily true. In software development, you have a lot of certifications which are useless because they are based on knowledge that isn't useful. It's easy to come up with a programming test that a good programmer will fail at but a lousy programmer would ace. Designing a good test can be quite difficult, and one thing is that in some fields (software development is pretty notorious for this), any test in which you get a numerical score is inherently limited.

In our hiring we do give written paper tests, but it's to identify people that have no programming skill at all. Once you've passed that test, then you need to talk face to face to figure out if they are barely competent or outstanding.

 

[twofish-quant]

I thought class averages also appear on transcripts...?

They don't in most US schools.

Also, if you are getting 99% or 98% on a calculus test, that means that they are teaching calculus in ways that is quite different than the way I think it should be taught if I were teaching the course. If I had control over a class, I'd want to teach it so that the median score would be like 60% and I'd do this by including "unfair" programs (i.e. problems that I didn't directly cover in class).

 

[leright]

That sounds silly. Why would a B student have better communications skills than an A student?

I know many B students that have better communications skills than many A students but I also know many A students than have better communications skills than many B students. Not much correlation between grades and communication skills, especially in technical fields. English, for instance, might be a different story.

 

[leright]

So you're arguing that grades are reliably and negatively correlated with achievement? Hmmm...

I did not see anymone above your post arguing this.

 

[R.P.F.]

That's not necessarily true. In software development, you have a lot of certifications which are useless because they are based on knowledge that isn't useful. It's easy to come up with a programming test that a good programmer will fail at but a lousy programmer would ace. Designing a good test can be quite difficult, and one thing is that in some fields (software development is pretty notorious for this), any test in which you get a numerical score is inherently limited.

In our hiring we do give written paper tests, but it's to identify people that have no programming skill at all. Once you've passed that test, then you need to talk face to face to figure out if they are barely competent or outstanding.

I have a lot of friends with very high GPA. None of them has perfect GPA though. I guess the reason is that you need to fulfill some distributional requirements to graduate and a lot of humanities professors at my college simply do not give out 4.0s. My friends with high GPAs are usually very active members in varsity, student organizations. So speaking from my personal experience, people with high GPAs tend to be successful outside academia as well. High GPA means you are hard-workding, smart or both. Pretty much every aspect of life requires at least one of those two.
I also know this one person who is extremely smart and is a fantastic programmer. But all he did was playing video games so he failed some of his classes. We tried really hard to get him to do work for his classes but he wouldn't listen to us. I'm pretty sure even after he got a job he would still only do things that interest him. I'm not sure that he would be an ideal employee.

 

[Vanadium 50]

See FAlonso's post about employers rejecting A students.

 

[Ryker]

Well I'll give you an example, Sandy, in my controls engineering class the instructor allowed open notes even on the final; however he was a somewhat lazy professor who didn't change his questions from year to year. He only made 2 different versions of each test and it was not difficult to find old tests with answers that were the exact same questions as the one being currently given if you knew the right bunch of guys. So all one had to do was obtain the old test, stuff them in your notes, and copy the answers on your final, boom, instant A on the final. I'm sure this does not characterize every A student, I know plenty and the good ones work damn hard for it, but some don't work hard and don't deserve high grades in every instance.

So how does this example of yours support the claim that more students with some B's deserve their grades, whereas those with A's not only don't deserve the A's, but deserve even less than what their B counterparts get? I mean, are you saying the admissions committees should hold assumptions that all universities have such poor standards as in the example you provided, and on top of that, that the A's came from studying up the previous exam questions, whereas the B's came from independent study and mastering of the material?

Again, what you provided is an example of why perhaps someone doesn't deserve an A. That's fine, and I'm sure there are plenty of cases of this being true, but it still adds nothing to the argument that not only are there less such cases when a B is concerned, and even less to the argument that those that get a B actually function or master the material better than those that get an A.

You're assuming any criticism of some A students based on jealousy or whatnot and that's not the case.

I don't quite get this. What jealousy are you talking about? If one was a straight-A student, jealous of those that get an occasional B, wouldn't that he be able to easily fix that then?

 

[snipez90]

That's not necessarily true. In software development, you have a lot of certifications which are useless because they are based on knowledge that isn't useful. It's easy to come up with a programming test that a good programmer will fail at but a lousy programmer would ace. Designing a good test can be quite difficult, and one thing is that in some fields (software development is pretty notorious for this), any test in which you get a numerical score is inherently limited.

In our hiring we do give written paper tests, but it's to identify people that have no programming skill at all. Once you've passed that test, then you need to talk face to face to figure out if they are barely competent or outstanding.

You didn't necessarily refute my point though. The person who applied to your firm and managed to pass the preliminary tests, regardless of whether he or she is barely competent or outstanding, still probably understands the value of good test-taking skills.

As for your claim that it's easy to design a programming test that a good programmer will fail but a subpar one would ace, providing some specific cases would be enlightening. Certification exams don't seem to cut it, since the good programmer should already understand that these are probably pretty useless. Part of what I deem 'knowledgeable in a certain field" involves understanding basic problem-solving and test-taking skills in that particular field. If the "good" programmer can't do something that the "bad" programmer can do (and certainly it must be something basic), then there seems to be something fundamentally lacking in the "good" programmer's basic problem-solving ability.

 

[thegreenlaser]

I'm having a little trouble here, because the impression I'm getting is that even if someone gets straight A's because they love the material and have the work ethic to spend time mastering it and really understanding it, they should stop working as hard and get a couple B's because their communication and real-world work skills will magically improve. (I know that's probably not what people mean, but that's the sense I'm getting)

There is a certain type of A student that ends up in worse shape in the business world than a certain type of B student. One of the things that you have to do if you have a 4.0 GPA is to convince people that you aren't that certain type of A student.

What would you say are the characteristics of the A student that ends up in good shape vs the one who ends up in bad shape? Would I be correct in saying that the successful A student will be the one who gets A's because of a love of learning combined with a good work ethic, whereas the one who ends up in bad shape is the one who's just terrified of failure or thinks that good marks automatically make them better than everyone else?

I have to admit I'm a little biased, because a couple of my relatives are convinced that getting A's is pointless and that C/D students are obviously way smarter, so I get into this argument a lot. One of those people has literally told me this: when he was in university, he spent half an hour on a project and failed it, whereas the people that got A's spent an entire weekend. From there he claims it's obvious that he's much smarter than the A students because he could have got an A if he'd spent another half hour on the project. The thing is, there's no proof that he could have got an A, and I'm seeing a lot of similar arguments here. Sure, a B student COULD be spending his extra time developing important life skills, but there's nothing inherent to getting B's that requires that to be true. All you really know about an A student vs a B student strictly based on marks is that the A student has done better in an academic setting then the B student. I don't see the jump to making claims about 'real-world competency' based on grades alone.

 

[Ryker]

Sure, a B student COULD be spending his extra time developing important life skills, but there's nothing inherent to getting B's that requires that to be true. All you really know about an A student vs a B student strictly based on marks is that the A student has done better in an academic setting then the B student. I don't see the jump to making claims about 'real-world competency' based on grades alone.

Nicely put, and that's all I'm arguing, as well.

 

[AlephZero]

Baed on my own experience interviewing, I don't think there is any correlation either way between "real world competence" and academic grades. 99.9% of the time we are looking to hire people with a balance of both, which is why we have to spend a lot of time and money interviewing people.

On the other hand, there is a (fairly small) minority of people with excellent grades who are totally clueless about "real life", or what working in industry is actually about (in extreme cases they seem to think they will be solving exam type problems for the rest of their lives). There don't seem to be many of those misfits who DON'T have brilliant academic records - or else something filters them out before we get to see them.

 

[kmarinas86]

On the other hand, there is a (fairly small) minority of people with excellent grades who are totally clueless about "real life", or what working in industry is actually about (in extreme cases they seem to think they will be solving exam type problems for the rest of their lives). There don't seem to be many of those misfits who DON'T have brilliant academic records - or else something filters them out before we get to see them.

It is because they are shy. They don't break the barriers they need to have a feel for their industry. They often work alone. Their success comes from their organizational skills and memory, and that's pretty much it.

These "misfits" can be warmed up, but it takes some effort—something that not all employers are interested in doing for them.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Someone who has the skills to get good grades but no others might make it through college. Someone who doesn't even have that won't. So you never see them.

 

[twofish-quant]

High GPA means you are hard-workding, smart or both. Pretty much every aspect of life requires at least one of those two.

It could also mean that you have one of two personality traits that make you dangerous in investment banking. If you have a perfect GPA, I'm not going to toss your resume, but I will make sure that you don't have one of those personality traits. (The two very dangerous traits are the inability to cut your losses, and the inability to distinguish skill and luck.)

Again this is company and personality dependent.

I also know this one person who is extremely smart and is a fantastic programmer. But all he did was playing video games so he failed some of his classes. We tried really hard to get him to do work for his classes but he wouldn't listen to us. I'm pretty sure even after he got a job he would still only do things that interest him. I'm not sure that he would be an ideal employee.

There are no ideal employees. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and part of the point in hiring is to get a mix of people with different strengths and weaknesses. Also one thing that is important in my company is diversity. This isn't merely ethnic diversity, but also diversity in personality, backgrounds, and test scores.

 

[twofish-quant]

So how does this example of yours support the claim that more students with some B's deserve their grades, whereas those with A's not only don't deserve the A's, but deserve even less than what their B counterparts get?

I don't see where I was talking about "deserve."

My experience is that people more or less end up figure out rules about "deserve" based on what they have and what they think they are likely to get.

In academia, GPA correlates very strongly with "success." In other fields the correlation is not as strong because the definition of "success" is different. Where I work the definition of "success" is how much money that you make, which may or may not correlate with getting all A's.

The correlation is weak enough is that people don't use grades for anything other than the initial screening, so once you get to the interview stage, no one will care what your GPA was. I do know of some companies that will hire pretty much on the basis of only GPA and test scores (DE Shaw) and I know of others in which having a high GPA is considered to be a sign of lack of "street smarts" which will get your resume tossed.

Everyone does things differently, which I suppose is a good thing because everyone is different.

Also, it would be good if people stopped talking about "what employers want" as if there was one employer that wanted one thing. I can tell you want I want, and what my company wants, but that is very different from what other people want, which I think is a good thing because it means that no one starves.

I mean, are you saying the admissions committees should hold assumptions that all universities have such poor standards as in the example you provided

Talking about *should* makes things more complicated. I'd prefer to focus on talking about *is*. I can tell you how things work in my company and with me. If you think that we *should* be selecting employees in a different way, that's another conversation, and one that's likely to be somewhat useless.

As far as *should*, personally I think the system should be set up so there are enough places so that we don't have to spend as much time selecting people.

Again, what you provided is an example of why perhaps someone doesn't deserve an A.

I didn't say anything about "deserve." One thing problem with the grades is that it gives people an idea that the world should work a certain way, which causes problems because the world doesn't work that way because it can't.

If we could give new employees a standardized test to hire and hire only on the basis of that, we would, because the way we do hiring is extremely time consuming. The problem is that no one has come up with an easier way, most of the efforts to save time cause problems.

What jealousy are you talking about? If one was a straight-A student, jealous of those that get an occasional B, wouldn't that he be able to easily fix that then?

It's actually harder. One thing that I have seen is when people with extremely high academic credentials get extremely angry when it turns out that people with lower academic credentials end up with the money and power, and it makes people angry because the people with high academic credentials think that the world is unfair because they didn't get what they "deserve."

Examples of this are in any engineering company when the people that make the major decisions (include decisions about who gets hired and who gets fired and who much everyone makes) are often managers that are less smart and have much lower grades than the people they are hiring and firing. Another example, is the lament of the physics Ph.D. who finds that someone that just barely passed air conditioning repair in a community college is finding it a *lot* easier to get jobs.

Now how the world should work is a complex topic, but let's start with the way the world does work.

 

[twofish-quant]

The person who applied to your firm and managed to pass the preliminary tests, regardless of whether he or she is barely competent or outstanding, still probably understands the value of good test-taking skills.

Or maybe worse each overestimates the value of good test-taking skills. I happen to be in a line of work in which good test-taking skills aren't important for "success" (i.e. corporate profitability).

As for your claim that it's easy to design a programming test that a good programmer will fail but a subpar one would ace, providing some specific cases would be enlightening.

MCSE and Oracle Java Certifications. Also Ph.D. in computer science. There are some great Ph.D.'s in computer science that are great programmers, but there are those that can't program at all. It shouldn't be that surprising. Just because you have a Ph.D. in English Literature doesn't mean that you can write a great or even decent novel.

Part of the problem, is that a subpar programmer would memorize the MCSE material. A excellent programmer would start by asking why we are using Microsoft.

Part of what I deem 'knowledgeable in a certain field" involves understanding basic problem-solving and test-taking skills in that particular field. If the "good" programmer can't do something that the "bad" programmer can do (and certainly it must be something basic), then there seems to be something fundamentally lacking in the "good" programmer's basic problem-solving ability.

It doesn't work that way where I work. What people at least were I work is someone that can work in a team to make money. Everyone is good at some things, and everyone is bad at some things. It gets more complicated because you are a looking for a mix of people. There have been situations where we've hired someone we know is a bad or incompetent programmer because we already have a great programmer on the team, and we need someone that is good at another skill.

One other thing that we look for (and the academic system discourages this) is the ability to cross fields quickly. The other thing that helps is the ability to self-evaluate (i.e. the ability to figure out if you are good and bad at something and then the ability to do something decent about it).

Also, one observation that I've made is that the educational system right now is designed mainly to produce corporate cogs that do one particular thing very well. This may have worked for the jobs of the 1960's, but it doesn't work that well for today's jobs.

Again, standard caveat applies. I can just tell you about what I look for and what my company looks for. This *is* very different from what other companies do (and curiously different people within our company have different standards) so anyone input from people that can talk about what they do is appreciated.

This is sort of important, because diversity is good, and if you think that our company does hiring wrong, you are unlikely to change it, so you are better off just finding a different company that does things the way you think they should be done.

 

[twofish-quant]

Someone who has the skills to get good grades but no others might make it through college. Someone who doesn't even have that won't. So you never see them.

*You* never see them. *I* see them. There are lots of people in the business world that are "dropouts" (including myself, I dropped out after getting my Ph.D.), and this impacts hiring.

Part of the history of finance in NYC is that you have some places that were started by people that barely got through high school (Goldman-Sachs to name some names), and so you have places where people actively look down on people with high GPA's (although Goldman is neutral toward this). You also have places that were started by people with high GPA's and high elite colleges types (DE Shaw and Morgan-Stanley).

 

[bcrowell]

Also, one observation that I've made is that the educational system right now is designed mainly to produce corporate cogs that do one particular thing very well. This may have worked for the jobs of the 1960's, but it doesn't work that well for today's jobs.

There's some pretty decent empirical evidence that going to college 50 years ago used to improve students critical thinking skills more, and going to college now improves them less:

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Arum and Roksa, 2011

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand

How Robust Are the Findings of Academically Adrift? By Ernest T. Pascarella, Charles Blaich, Georgianna L. Martin, and Jana M. Hanson, http://www2.education.uiowa.edu/centers/Libraries/CRUE_Documents/AcadAdriftChangeArticleFINAL.sflb.ashx

 

[twofish-quant]

I know that's probably not what people mean, but that's the sense I'm getting)

It's not working less hard, but working hard at different things. My GPA at MIT suffered because I didn't put 100% of my time into physics, but I worked hard at doing things that I wasn't being graded for. Rather than spending five hours to get the extra ten points on the exam so that I could get an A, I spent those five hours at the Athena cluster trying to learn the X11 protocol or in the library reading Yeats and trying to think about the symbolism and how it connected with Irish history.

That hurt my grades because I wasn't being tested on the X11 Xlib protocol. Fortunately, my teachers were telling me that grades weren't that important, and as long as I understood the material, I'd be fine. Part of the reason they were telling me this is that they were smart enough to know that telling everyone that they should get A's wouldn't work.

If you tell the MIT physics students that they should all get A's, you are telling them to do something that is mathematically impossible. Your choices are to give everyone A's (which is more or less what Harvard does) or you have to weed out people (which you can do at big public state universities but you can't at MIT) or you have everyone work twice as hard, at which point people (literally) start jumping out of tall buildings and set fire to themselves because of the pressure.

So when I didn't spend all my time in classes, but instead wrote short stories and learned C++, I had a ton of people telling me that I was doing a good thing. Now the problem is that those people don't control graduate admissions, so when I couldn't get into my first choices of graduate school, I got quite angry, but it's worked out for me.

What would you say are the characteristics of the A student that ends up in good shape vs the one who ends up in bad shape? Would I be correct in saying that the successful A student will be the one who gets A's because of a love of learning combined with a good work ethic, whereas the one who ends up in bad shape is the one who's just terrified of failure or thinks that good marks automatically make them better than everyone else?

It's different from people to people, and one thing I find annoying about classifying people is that you become numbers and letters rather than people. We are talking about the "A student", we should be talking about Frank, Mary, and Jim. To quote the show Prisoner "I am not a number (or letter), I am a free man!"

I like to think, and I hate to stop thinking, so when people say "just get an A and stop thinking about what that means" that really bothers me.

I have to admit I'm a little biased, because a couple of my relatives are convinced that getting A's is pointless and that C/D students are obviously way smarter, so I get into this argument a lot.

As with most things. It depends. There are situations in which C/D students do end up on top. What I've found is that often it's not that a person is stupid, but they are smart in different ways, and sometimes those ways happen to get you more money and power... Or not.....

 

[twofish-quant]

There's some pretty decent empirical evidence that going to college 50 years ago used to improve students critical thinking skills more, and going to college now improves them less

On the other hand that empirical evidence can be challenged, and then we have to ask about the relevance of the test metric. For example, if the MIT physics classes that I took didn't improve my scores on the critical thinking skills test, that wouldn't have mattered.

One thing that you do have to be *very* careful about is the meaning of tests. For example, you can call something a "criticial thinking" test or an "intelligence" test and then people just will assume that the test measures "criticial thinking" or "intelligence" without thinking about that.

One reason that I am a bit dubious about the results is that the authors claim to be measuring "critical thinking" and "communication skills" whereas they making what seem to me to be some "critical thinking" mistakes in presenting their results. Even claiming that they are measuring critical thinking seems to be an act of non-critical thinking.

This matters a lot in finance. You end up with a variable which everyone calls the "probability of mortgage default" and it stinks if that number has nothing to do with the actual likelihood of mortgages defaulting.

 

[flyingpig]

They don't in most US schools.

Also, if you are getting 99% or 98% on a calculus test, that means that they are teaching calculus in ways that is quite different than the way I think it should be taught if I were teaching the course. If I had control over a class, I'd want to teach it so that the median score would be like 60% and I'd do this by including "unfair" programs (i.e. problems that I didn't directly cover in class).

Well thank goodness I am too stupid to go to MIT. Just out of curiosity, would you have put it on the syllabus if you don't cover it in class or are you going to do a surprise "haha" thing...?

 

[Ryker]

I don't see where I was talking about "deserve."

I didn't say anything about "deserve."

I didn't say you were. I was quoting clope023 and replying to his statements.

*You* never see them. *I* see them. There are lots of people in the business world that are "dropouts" (including myself, I dropped out after getting my Ph.D.), and this impacts hiring.

You're taking things too far here. You have successfully obtained a PhD, you can't just throw yourself into the category of "dropouts"! We all know what was meant by the use of the latter word, and disputing what that word encompasses is beyond the point. You can't skew arguments like that in your favour by arbitrarily choosing to argue a point by defining it in a much broader way than was originally meant. That's called building strawmen.

It's different from people to people, and one thing I find annoying about classifying people is that you become numbers and letters rather than people. We are talking about the "A student", we should be talking about Frank, Mary, and Jim. To quote the show Prisoner "I am not a number (or letter), I am a free man!"

I agree, but it's you and other people supporting your view that started this. The rest of us were talking about A students as individuals and distinguishing between their personal traits and grades. But then the generalizations started surfacing about how B students are "better" than A students.

Again, I fully agree we should talk about Frank, Mary and Jim, and my point is that if we do, your argument loses all footing.

 

[bcrowell]

One thing that you do have to be *very* careful about is the meaning of tests. For example, you can call something a "criticial thinking" test or an "intelligence" test and then people just will assume that the test measures "criticial thinking" or "intelligence" without thinking about that.

Sure, but it doesn't have to be a complete mystery what a test measures. The simplest thing to do is to look at what is referred to as the "face validity," which simply means whether the test, on the face of it, appears to measure what it claims to measure.

On the other hand that empirical evidence can be challenged, and then we have to ask about the relevance of the test metric. For example, if the MIT physics classes that I took didn't improve my scores on the critical thinking skills test, that wouldn't have mattered.

It wouldn't have mattered because...? Maybe it would have indicated that your MIT physics classes were focused narrowly on building computational skills, and that you didn't really learn to do original thinking, argue logically, express yourself precisely, etc. Or maybe it would not have meant much, because the test had what people in the testing business refer to as low reliability, meaning basically large random errors on an individual basis -- but that wouldn't invalidate it as a measurement of historical trends, group differences, etc.

It's different from people to people, and one thing I find annoying about classifying people is that you become numbers and letters rather than people. We are talking about the "A student", we should be talking about Frank, Mary, and Jim. To quote the show Prisoner "I am not a number (or letter), I am a free man!"

I could argue that grades are relatively meritocratic, whereas individual judgments about Frank, Mary, and Jim are more susceptible to class and racial bias, good-old-boyism, sexism, etc.

 

[Sankaku]

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand

That article is well worth reading carefully and the "Academically Adrift" tests are only part of it. I think the more interesting thing is his discussion of what people think education is for.

To paraphrase crudely:

Theory 1: Sort the dumb from the smart for industry and academia.
Theory 2: Provide educational opportunities for all to improve.

The stress on grades is more correlated to Theory 1. You want to sort the strong from the weak. Personally, I think the entire grading system is broken. No, I don't have a brilliant idea of how to fix it, but I think that 'grade inflation' is just a symptom of our culture trying to purge itself of an unworkable metric.

Yes, we need decent feedback for students on their academic abilities. And yes, we need to be able to fail people who are completely non-performing. I am not so sure about all the rest, though.

 

[twofish-quant]

Well thank goodness I am too stupid to go to MIT

It's not stupidity, just a certain type of teaching that I think works well. I've found that students in other schools get really offended if the prof puts things on the test that weren't directly covered in class, but this happens less (i.e. students getting offended) at MIT.

Just out of curiosity, would you have put it on the syllabus if you don't cover it in class or are you going to do a surprise "haha" thing...?

If I'm teaching a class in physics, then I'd include a problem on the final that was about physics, but wasn't directly covered in class.

Also there isn't any real surprise. All of the tests for the physics courses at MIT are online so that you can see how the teaching works.

 

[twofish-quant]

You're taking things too far here. You have successfully obtained a PhD, you can't just throw yourself into the category of "dropouts"!

1) It's my life and I can do what I want.

2) Seeing oneself as a dropout and a failure is pretty common amount physics Ph.D.'s, and something that you should expect if you go down that route. One thing that is interesting is that in some situations, the more prizes and success you have, the more of a failure you end up feeling.

You can ask some of the other physics Ph.D.'s that didn't to into academia what they think of themselves, and I think you'll find that I'm not that unusualy here.

We all know what was meant by the use of the latter word, and disputing what that word encompasses is beyond the point.

Something that you will learn when you talk with other people is to avoid statements like "we all know" since "we all don't know" something.

What happens is that there is a funny trick, you divide society in "winners" and "losers". The "winners" are hard working people that get all A's and are destined for greatness. The "losers" are people that smoke dope, have sell drugs, drop out of high school, go on welfare, and are generally people that you don't have to worry about. You are a "winner" so you can stomp down on the "losers". Because you get all A's, you expect to be a great success.

Except, in my case, I found out that life didn't quite work out that way. What happens is that when you are young, it's easy for people to make lots of promises. Get the A's, you'll be a success, because you are a winner. At some point, you try to cash in, and find out that you are a loser.

You can't skew arguments like that in your favour by arbitrarily choosing to argue a point by defining it in a much broader way than was originally meant.

I'm not arguing. I'm stating the fact that I see myself as a loser and a dropout, and so I have a lot of sympathy for losers and dropouts. Now if you want to argue that I really don't believe this then that's weird.

The rest of us were talking about A students as individuals and distinguishing between their personal traits and grades. But then the generalizations started surfacing about how B students are "better" than A students.

But there are certain personality traits that A students have that impact hiring. If you have gotten a B, I can be reasonably certain that you won't totally freak out if you get a B. If you have only gotten A's, I don't know this so that I'm going to have to ask more questions to make sure that you won't, that I woudn't have to ask someone that I know has been non-perfect.

Again, I fully agree we should talk about Frank, Mary and Jim, and my point is that if we do, your argument loses all footing.

It's not an argument, it's an observation.

Also, there is agreement in the abstract, and agreeing in a way that promotes action. Personally, I think that universities shouldn't be giving out grades at all, since at least when it comes to hiring, they are pretty useless.

 

[twofish-quant]

Sure, but it doesn't have to be a complete mystery what a test measures. The simplest thing to do is to look at what is referred to as the "face validity," which simply means whether the test, on the face of it, appears to measure what it claims to measure.

And it doesn't seem to have that to me. One problems that if you start *calling* the results of your test critical thinking or intelligence, you start defining what critical thinking and intelligence mean, and then you get into all sorts of "bait-and-switch" confusion.

It wouldn't have mattered because...?

Because the point of going to MIT wasn't go get a high score on the critical thinking test. One problem with the work is that they are making some very broad and suspect statements on what purpose of college is

but that wouldn't invalidate it as a measurement of historical trends, group differences, etc.

But it would invalidate it as a statement that "something is wrong" with college.

I could argue that grades are relatively meritocratic, whereas individual judgments about Frank, Mary, and Jim are more susceptible to class and racial bias, good-old-boyism, sexism, etc.

You could, and IMHO you'd be right.

A lot of the ideas in testing and education came out of the 1920's with people like James Conant who was president of Harvard, and some of the people had really noble goals in breaking down class system. Some of them had goals that were less noble, but it's an interesting story.

It's worth noting that China has a college examination system that is based on one number. The national entrance exam score. Nothing else matters for college admission, and the reason the system works that way is that anything that involves any human judgment is subject to corruption.

The problem with meritocratic systems of selection is outlined by the book The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young. It's a dystopian future history about what happens to a society when people are selected via IQ+effort, and he *invented* the word meritocracy. One thing that he argues is that in a non-meritocratic system, people at the top realize that they really didn't deserve to be on the top so they have more sympathy for people at the bottom, because they could have ended up there two. However, if the people at the top think they deserve power, they are going to be less sympathetic, and this will create social revolution.

The other problem (which I don't think that Young mentions) is the problem of "too many smart people". If the number of places at the top stays the same, but the number of people that are qualified increases, then you have a problem in that in order to get into the top you end up having to be hyperspecialized which in turn causes problems. If you increase the competition to get to the top, then eventually you'll have so much pressure that something bad happens.

(Also spending time reading and thinking about Michael Young's points is the type of thing that killed my GPA in college.)