The Surge of A+ Students

Goodhart’s Law at its finest—every actor is acting rationally to maximize their own metrics, which means there is immense friction in obtaining true value out of the system. Universities use high GPA and extracurriculars as measurements of success, which both high schools and students know. High schools apply pressure on teachers to maximize university admissions, and in certain areas teachers are seeing an increase in class sizes. In response, teachers are utilizing easier standards (such as un-proctored online evaluation) to grade, and students are actively avoiding difficult classes to maintain a strong GPA.

Universities, as a consequence, look to differentiate candidates but hit a ceiling where discernment between a 97% and a 95% is functionally impossible. As a consequence, they then look to extracurriculars, further de-incentivizing academic difficulty as students seek good-looking extracurriculars instead of studying. Furthermore, high schools cannot merely stop, because nobody wants to be the administrator of a high school that has worse grades than its peers—an example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This creates a situation where students are held to a lower standard in high school and then thrust into a higher standard in undergrad, hurting them worse than exploring these topics in high school would have been.

Anecdotally, as an American, I had a similar experience where high school focused on algebra, but my undergraduate physics focused on calculus, which I thankfully knew ahead of time so I could spend the summer preparing. It was ultimately one of my most challenging and rewarding classes, but it also featured a lot of struggle for students who were caught off-guard. The professor was accommodating (this had been a problem for several years already), but it really shows how unprepared these systems are leaving students.

Ultimately, my own time in education and in self-study has informed my current beliefs, which is that the most important part of evaluation is the final exam, and everything else is meant to build you up to a sufficient level of mastery. High school and even university students shouldn’t fear that their midterm might be 79% and thus avoid higher learning opportunities they might be capable of. I feel like, as a whole, we overestimate the worth of inherent abilities and don’t consider the work required to get there, punishing failure as a consequence instead of constructively building on it. Einstein was inherently gifted, but he needed self-study and formal education to achieve what he did. Without that education, he would have just been a naturally intelligent but somewhat mundane man.