Do Good Grades Predict Success?
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
The problems described here - grade inflation, subjectivity, etc. - would be alleviated with more grades, not less.
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.
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.
A - 80-100 B - 70-80 C - 60-70 D - 50-60 F - Less than 50%
In terms of rebuttal, what scott_s said.
A 100-90 B 89-80 C 79-70 D 69-60 F 59-0
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.
The CS departments I've been a part of don't expect students to publish much - if anything - until after most of their course work is done. That's usually about two years.
H (high pass),
P (pass), and
L (low pass).
Well, and and F, technically, but you are kindly asked to leave if you get an F.
You can have at most one L. You need to maintain a slightly above P average to be admitted to the PhD program.
When I was in grad school for physics, C+ was considered failing. Beyond that, we were specifically told, as long as we passed, grades didn't matter. It was of course quality of research that mattered.
I don't know how differently people faired with different GPA's coming out. I think employers mostly looked at publications and references. And I'm not far enough out to say who was "successful" yet.
I wish I had started out in departments like some of you described. I started doing research my first year, and my grades suffered for it. I got three of those Bs, and I had to take an extra course just to be admitted as a Ph.D. candidate in that program. Luckily, I have since transferred to a different school.
Improving the precision doesn't necessarily improve the accuracy. But if improving the precision increases our confidence in the metric - without necessarily increasing it's accuracy - maybe we're better off not doing it.
I was an A- student in high school and a B student in college, but with all the extra time I had I hacked and read. The A+ students spent all their time working on their homework and learned nothing else. That has something to do with it.
Consider the following questions in thinking about how many significant digits should be expressed in a grade:
* Go back through every homework and test for your entire college career, and have them re-graded by the professors involved. Or consider doing that for a sample of 50 or 100 students. By how much does the GPA change ?
* Go back through every homework and test for an entire college career, and have it re-graded by a commitee of 10 experts in the field, who must all agree on every problem's grade after consulation with each other. By how much does the GPA change ?
* Does the average grade given out by a professor or other grader change if they are in their first semester of grading / teaching, versus following semesters ? If they grade late at night versus early in the morning ? If the name on the paper being graded is that of a good or poor student ? ( Presuming it is the same paper for both students -- this study was done by two students I know, who agreed to copy each other's papers for a couple of grades and then confronted the biased teacher and were punished for it.)
Now, if you are putting so many significant digits on those GPA's that non-student related stuff such as which professor they were randomly assigned to comes into play, then you are just fooling yourself. And that's only considering how good grades are at predicting THEMSELVES.
And, if you want to consider how good grades are at predicting anything else, except maybe "will I get into medical school" and other explicitly grade-related questions, I think you end up ignoring them all together. I would only care about whether or not they graduated high school, which college to a very loose degree, and whether or not they finished college. The presence or absense of a master's degree does not seem to predict anything (except maybe good grades as an undergrad).
If you assign a number to anything, some people will become fascinated by it. If you made a video arcade game, where you pressed a button once and it gave you a random score between one and a million, some people would stand there feeding in quarters until they were at the top of the high scorers list.
If you think that the grading system is low-resolution, then you aren't trying to use grades to predict anything useful about people, you are just fascinated by a very expensive and time consuming video game.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
"You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well, mine are even worse!"
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.
I can say that I hope the stat about the B student tending to have the highest net worth is accurate. =)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people. [...] Dr. Carlisle set about analyzing the two million data points the survey collected. Among the first results was confirmation that Google’s obsession with academic performance was not always correlated with success at the company."
I seem to remember there being another better article than this one that went into more detail, but I can't find it right now. If you want the real story you'd probably have to ask a high ranking ex-googler...
Silicon Valley makes me think this rule isn't hard and fast.
I think another reason might be that if you aren't quite as intelligent, the thing you learn is school is how to make an effort - and that skill is more valuable than any of the subject matter. This is related to whether you believe one is born smart/dumb, or you believe that your intelligence is affected (or even, effected) by your efforts: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...
Also, for a start-up, if you are intelligent enough to work things out, but only with great effort, then you are: (1). dumb enough to identify with the problems of ordinary people (customers/users) (2). capable enough to do something about it. The reason I stress the "dumb" in (1) is because I pride myself on being a member of this group (especially when I'm frustrated by something that the really smart people genuinely think is "obvious" and "trivial" - their intelligence sets them apart so much that they are incapable of helping ordinary people).
I think there's another factor, that being extremely capable and talented relative to your peers can make it harder for you be aware of, to acknowledge, and to appreciate the unknown - that nature's imagination is greater than your imagination (Feynman).
Of course, some extraordinarily capable people don't fall prey to any of these dangers - and they really accomplish things.
I agree with you about google etc, and that intuitiveness and simplicity benefit smart people as well as dumb people. Also, a smart person is sometimes a dumb person - when tired, unwell, upset or when they need to concentrate on something more demanding.
Although a smart person will benefit from it once it exists, what I'm saying is that the smart person won't be the one to do it, if it seems too easy for them, because they don't feel the frustration. In fact, if it's easy for them but hard for others, it may give them a little ego boost, which they'd like to keep.
Another aspect is smart people who do not like to acknowledge that they are sometimes dumb people... Also, a person with much intellectual effort invested in the old way is less likely to adopt the new one - and even less likely to be the one to change it. This isn't precisely smartness, but a kind of education.
Examples:
- a way to clarify mathematical proofs in papers that are "trivial" and "obvious", with hypertext to rigorously open up the steps (like http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmset.html#overview);
- programming languages are often slow to be adopted by expert users of the old way, including those who are very smart; these people aren't the ones to create the new language in the first place.
- computerized legal systems - lawyers are smart, but reluctant to change, probably because they have so much invested in learning what they have already. Similar may be true of doctors, dentists and civil engineers.
Perhaps whenever anyone says "but that's trivial", "it seems clear to me", "that's so easy, why can't you understand", "you're stupid" that their attitude is a flag that this is something worth looking at...
Thanks for your comment, I like your point of view.