<p>I assume most of you are in college now considering what forum you are posting on, but I have an opinion question. </p>
<p>Do you think people in college are more focused on grades or on learning material and expanding their knowledge base?</p>
<p>Sure, in high school most of us were all about grades, but has it really changed all that much when college comes along. I mean, whether we like it or not grades can typically influence both our job and graduate school prospects. Do you find yourself memorizing information that you will forget the day after the test instead of truly understanding it simply to get a better grade?</p>
<p>Ya, you can shoot for a good grade and take the time to genuinely learn the material (and sometimes getting a good grade motivates us to really learn the material), but what about those weeks when we just have so much to do that we just memorize how to do those problems because we know that the quizzes the teacher gives are exactly from the homework.</p>
<p>So what do you think? Do grades add or take away from our education? Do we become so obsessed with getting a good grade that we miss the whole point of going to college? </p>
<p>If its something you are interested in and will use later in life (for a career) the focus is on learning. Grades matter too, but its more about “not doing bad” than getting an A.</p>
<p>If its just another filler class or something you are forced to take, most people seem to concentrate on grades. Art history? Sociology? Most people won’t use that information later on in life. If you happen to actually be interested in the subject, that’s different…</p>
<p>If you’re interested in a class, you don’t have to study for it. Period. I have yet to study for my history or anthropology class and I’m making As in both. I see other people taking them as humanities filler courses for their tech degrees, and of course they’re cramming before the test because they don’t particularly care.<br>
It all boils down to who you are, your interests, etc.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say that that’s true “period”. Probably only in the humanities. I’m intensely interested in quantum mechanics, for example, but it still takes hours upon hours of studying daily to have even a chance of doing well in it.</p>
<p>It’s certainly not true in the humanities. I still do multiple readings of various depths of the texts I read for my humanities and history courses.</p>
<p>Studying has a negative connotation though. It implies hours of dull memorization. If you’re interested in the subject, you should love reading it and not dread studying.</p>
<p>Weird, it doesn’t have that connotation to me, but then I’d never say that I dread studying. Memorization doesn’t even take that long. When I’ve had to know dates for history classes all it takes is making a mental timeline and figuring out where everything fits together, which usually takes all of 15 minutes. I don’t know what I’d call the hours of working out problems if not studying. But then studying has always been a hobby of mine.</p>
<p>I don’t even count dull memorization as studying, just as cramming. To me, studying is the process of doing everything you need to do to truly learn the material over the course of the entire semester, not just a day or two before each test. We might just have different definitions of studying.</p>
<p>In a fantasy/perfect world everyone shouldn’t worry about grades but the pursuit of learning.</p>
<p>In the real world (aka the one we’re living in) grades are important if you’re going after Grad school, medical school, wall street, etc. Depending on what you want to do grades are important.</p>
<p>And like someone in this forum said, there’s nothing “ughhhhhmazing” about a degree. All it shows is that you have the ability to learn and study. </p>
<p>Ask the average college graduate 2 years later after he or she has graduated about something he or she learned from college and I bet they won’t remember. </p>
<p>I blame the world we live in. If our world wasn’t so superficial maybe more people would be in college for the sake of learning and not just getting the grade and moving on to the next chapter in their lives. </p>
<p>And then others figure out how to enjoy the material AND get the grade - I’m told I’m particularly good at recognizing inter-connections between the different fields that other students have a lot of trouble with.</p>
<p>Studying does not have a negative connotation, you just apply a negative connotation to the word. I actually like studying because I enjoy learning in general. Some schools, such as New College, Hampshire, and to a lesser extent Reed (still have letter grades, but you have to request to see them and are not otherwise informed of what they are) truly value learning over letter grades.</p>
<p>It’s highly variable?
It depends on the person, but nobody is clear cut grade-gatherer/knowledge-fangirl.</p>
<p>Depending on how interesting the class is, I’m becoming more enamored with the art of research, writing and ideas.
I’m more enthused by learning in my second year, but that may just be because there are more interesting classes available.</p>
<p>I feel that learning is the most important thing to do in both high school and college. I recently got into a discussion with someone about how grades aren’t an accurate reflection of your learning in high school and brought up an example; I’m a freshman taking college level physics at home yet in my science class I die from boredom constantly as the teacher jabbers on and on about things that I already knew in elementary school. In this case, I’m not being graded on my actual learning, I’m being graded on how well I know the bland tofu-like curriculum my school mustered up to educate simple-minded students on basic science. I am concerned that when college admission officers see all of my A’s they will assume I’m a good student and admit me because of my grades not my learning. How (other than with grades) can I show colleges and universities that i’m a good student? I think grades aren’t as important as learning so I tend not to care about them very much, I do have all A’s right now but I don’t feel like that matters because I’m not learning very much. Do you get what I’m saying? I feel like either this is a very good view, or a very bad one. What do you think?</p>
<p>My daughter feels that so far the kids in her college classes are more interested in learning vs. just getting a grade then they were in HS. This is mostly because they get to choose the courses and have genuine interest in the subjects.</p>
<p>A friend used to say to me “Andrea, grades don’t define who you are”, and then I began to wonder, is he correct? Grades are important in order to move on in life and in your career. But, what do you really think? Are you there to learn, or to impress your teachers? What really matters is what you have learned from the material your professors have taught you.</p>
<p>Grades are extremely important. I can see how it can be true for some majors that you study your subject for four years and don’t really learn anything, but a lot of majors force you to study rigorously and a lot depends on the material given beforehand. </p>
<p>Think about it this way. An employer is not going to know you could’ve gotten an A in Calculus if you didn’t get an A in Calculus. Sure, you could demonstrate on the job, but the person viewing against you knows Calculus and HAS an A. You are always better coming away with both. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you had an A in Calculus by lots of memorization of formulas and have to apply it on the job a lot, you’re gonna have a bad time and will probably get quickly sorted out.</p>
<p>Grades get you into graduate schools. Grades get you into better jobs. Grades get you picked over the next guy. But you also have to be great in everything else on top of grades.</p>
<p>I don’t see why you’re trying to impress your teachers. You should be learning and getting an A because you worked hard at it and were simply not lazy when it came to exam time. Any person who got an education worth anything not only spent time in class but learning a lot on their own.</p>