[Ohiogift] The straight-A academic quest

[Jerry MacDuff]

Friends:

The New York Times just published an opinion piece on the quest by many
students to get nothing but the best possible grades, an undertaking by
many students in gifted ed. The author contends that such a focus comes at
a high price. Perhaps this is a matter many of us parents, teachers and
others who support excellence via gifted ed coursework need to consider.
The article is pasted below, for your convenience; you will find it online
here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/college-gpa-career-success.html

Best wishes to all,
Jerry MacDuff
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*Opinion*
*What Straight-A Students Get Wrong*

*If you always succeed in school, you’re not setting yourself up *
*for success in life.*

*By Adam Grant*
*Dr. Grant is an organizational psychologist and a contributing*

A decade ago, at the end of my first semester teaching at Wharton, a
student stopped by for office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. My
mind started cycling through a list of events that could make a college
junior cry: His girlfriend had dumped him; he had been accused of
plagiarism. “I just got my first A-minus,” he said, his voice shaking.

Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight
A’s. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school
after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a
conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and
lucrative job offers.

I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a
4.0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing
that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong.

The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of
career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation
between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after
college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once
employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no
bearing on their performance. (Of course, it must be said that if you got
D’s, you probably didn’t end up at Google.)

Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and
teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes,
straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on
exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a
problem — it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.

In a classic 1962 study, a team of psychologists tracked down America’s
most creative architects and compared them with their technically skilled
but less original peers. One of the factors that distinguished the creative
architects was a record of spiky grades. “In college our creative
architects earned about a B average,” Donald MacKinnon wrote. “In work and
courses which caught their interest they could turn in an A performance,
but in courses that failed to strike their imagination, they were quite
willing to do no work at all.” They paid attention to their curiosity and
prioritized activities that they found intrinsically motivating — which
ultimately served them well in their careers.

Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career
demands originality. In a study of students who graduated at the top of
their class, the education researcher Karen Arnold found that although they
usually had successful careers, they rarely reached the upper echelons.
“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold
explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A.,
J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C
average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four
years at Morehouse.

If your goal is to graduate without a blemish on your transcript, you end
up taking easier classes and staying within your comfort zone. If you’re
willing to tolerate the occasional B, you can learn to program in Python
while struggling to decipher “Finnegans Wake.” You gain experience coping
with failures and setbacks, which builds resilience.

Straight-A students also miss out socially. More time studying in the
library means less time to start lifelong friendships, join new clubs or
volunteer. I know from experience. I didn’t meet my 4.0 goal; I graduated
with a 3.78. (This is the first time I’ve shared my G.P.A. since applying
to graduate school 16 years ago. Really, no one cares.) Looking back, I
don’t wish my grades had been higher. If I could do it over again, I’d
study less. The hours I wasted memorizing the inner workings of the eye
would have been better spent trying out improv comedy and having more
midnight conversations about the meaning of life.

So universities: Make it easier for students to take some intellectual
risks. Graduate schools can be clear that they don’t care about the
difference between a 3.7 and a 3.9. Colleges could just report letter
grades without pluses and minuses, so that any G.P.A. above a 3.7 appears
on transcripts as an A. It might also help to stop the madness of grade
inflation, which creates an academic arms race that encourages too many
students to strive for meaningless perfection. And why not let students
wait until the end of the semester to declare a class pass-fail, instead of
forcing them to decide in the first month?

Employers: Make it clear you value skills over straight A’s. Some
recruiters are already on board: In a 2006 study of over 500 job postings,
nearly 15 percent of recruiters actively selected against students with
high G.P.A.s (perhaps questioning their priorities and life skills), while
more than 40 percent put no weight on grades in initial screening.

Straight-A students: Recognize that underachieving in school can prepare
you to overachieve in life. So maybe it’s time to apply your grit to a new
goal — getting at least one B before you graduate.
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