<p>What I mean by the question is that people focus too much on the grades they receive instead of the learning. I know that gpa is extremely important but I am concerned whether in life gpa determines everything or learning determines everything or both? </p>
<p>It depends. Some people feel that the grade is the ultimate goal. And as people in society, they have their place. It’s not for everyone and we are all enriched by people who actually hunger for learning, will risk much just to achieve something that might not be achieveable.</p>
<p>Certainly, don’t be a grade grubber solely w/o showing any actual care/concern for learning. Teachers HATE that and it’ll show up in rec letters. there are a few CC threads about someone who got an 89.918% but the teacher refused to bump it up to an A- so the kid brings mom/dad to school to sway the teacher. You can only imagine what happened to the kid’s reputation among the faculty and staff that ensued.</p>
<p>The key is to attain BOTH, if possible.</p>
<p>To schools & employers who don’t know you, the only evidence they have that you learned something is your grades/scores. </p>
<p>As a high school teacher, my dad has had students drop his AP bio class to take sewing instead because they are afraid that they are going to end up with a B in the course. To them, GPA is more important than learning, and this understandably frustrates my dad to no end. If they challenged themselves and took the B (or worked harder maybe got the A), they would learn more than abandoning the course, and they would be better prepared for college and for life. After you start college, no one cares about your high school GPA. Right after college, you’re generally in good shape as long as you have a decent GPA. After a while out of college, no one will care what your college GPA was and you will probably forget yourself. As @GMTplus7 points out, grades are an indicator of learning in the absence of other information, but they’re not the end all, be all. And once you prove yourself in other ways, your grades become less and less relevant, and what you actually learned is far more important for your success.</p>
<p>To me, learning is more important than the GPA. You may have a class where the teacher or professor is a very hard grader. In college I took many of those classes. In one I received a B and the other I only scraped away with a C. Although my grade wasn’t necessarily where I wanted it to be, I took the most away from classes like those. I played GPA catch up for three years after a bad freshman year of college which led to a major switch and I also worked full time with 18 credit hours. My GPA wasn’t where I wanted it to be, but no employer I interviewed for saw my GPA as a negative thing. College is a learning experience, and in the real world I think it is more about the knowledge and skill sets your bringing to the table when interviewing for a job. I managed to find a job after graduation even with my lackluster GPA. Don’t obsess over a perfect GPA, just take the most out of every class and experience that you can!</p>
<p>For college admissions, grades are far more important. I honestly feel like I could teach myself most of the things I learn in school and gain no educational value (or minimal) from doing many of the mundane activities I’m assigned, but I do them anyways. Why? Not for the learning but the grade. Usually I learn nearly all hy concepts in school anyways or really in less time than the class takes.</p>
<p>this is CC in a nutshell</p>
<p>anyway, grades for sure: you learn the important things in college/grad school.</p>
<p>Unless you’re not prepared once you get to college because you didn’t actually learn the background you needed in high school…</p>
<p>Learning is easy. Grades require effort. Plus yju probably forgot much of it by college anyways, how long does it take to relearn? I took differential equations/linear algebra a year and a half after Calc bc (with Calc III in the middle) and forgot some of the stuff I needed to know but picked it back up easily enough.</p>
<p>Excuse me while I cringe. </p>
<p>Putting grades ahead of learning puts the cart before the horse. Your education is yours forever. The grades are just a means to an end. If you learn material well you will usually get good grades. Grades are an approximation to the true value of the work you’ve done. Sometimes you will be given a grade that’s too low, sometimes too high, but on average, it’s about right. </p>
<p>Learning is more important. If you find learning easy, you’re not challenging yourself hard enough and selling yourself short. </p>
<p>^^I agree and well put.</p>
<p>To put it another way, to you (and every other student), learning is the most important thing. To everyone else, from potential colleges to employers, grades are the most important thing, as they are the tool they use to evaluate your learning. Therefore, grades need to become important to you as well. You really need both if you intend on selling your knowledge to someone else. If you’re just learning on your own for the sake of learning, then you can not worry about the grades.</p>
<p>This type of question seems to always reveal the over-achieving but naive students who seem to be so wholly focused on grades that they miss the point: grades were invented to show what you’ve learned. The ultimate goal of school is learning. A perfect grading system would mean grades that exactly matched what you learned. (But such a system is, of course, non-existent and impossible.)</p>
<p>The statement “Learning is easy. Grades require effort.” really reveals how naive this view is. It also makes me cringe. If this is what you think, either you’re not doing it right, or the system isn’t. Real learning is hard; unless you challenge yourself, you’re not learning. And grades come from learning, not the other way around.</p>
<p>The further you go in school, the more you realize this. As a college senior, I’m now taking classes based on what I want to learn to know for the future, not at all based on how easy I think a class will be. And in graduate school (specifically thinking of science PhD programs here), the grades are of rather minimal importance. You’re taking the classes because you need to know the material for your research. As long as you do decently in the class, no one will give a rat’s behind what your grade was. The learning, and the research that it facilitates, are what people care about.</p>
<p>Sadly from everything I’ve read…yes. From Gibby " Based upon this survey, Harvard fills more than half their beds with students who have perfect unweighted 4.0 GPA’s from their high school. So, it would seem Harvard prefers perfect GPA’s over perfect test scores".
Here’s where I have been placed into strategizing by looking ahead. Instead of having my son go ahead(like he should/needs)he would be better off not taking the HS courses in 8th and simply take the hardest courses that any typical 9th grader would who is pursuing the University track.Instead of having pressures and being challenged in the courses he could instead relatively breeze thru, get checked off for most rigorous, and get a 4.0 like the colleges want.</p>
<p>@moscott - What do you mean by “better off?” More likely to get into Harvard? You seem to admit yourself that your son should skip ahead. I was hugely frustrated by being bored in all of my classes until I was allowed to skip ahead. I found everything much more enjoyable when I was being challenged by my courses. Why not let your son push ahead if that’s what HE wants to do? If he gets a few "A-"s or "B"s along the way, are colleges really going to reject a student who has the difference between a 3.9 GPA vs. a 4.0? At that level, there are far more factors going in that just GPA. And only a few of the very top universities would even be making that distinction.</p>
<p>This is the classic condundrum. IS it better to play the game well (i.e learn) or to win the game (i.e get the grade)? The answer depends on one’s desired outcome. To put it in context, is it better to get into med school or become a good doctor? You need the grades to get into med school but you need to learn to be a good doctor. If you do not get in, however, you may never get to apply what you learn. Ultimately, I come down on the side that it is better to learn. If you learn the good grades will usually follow. </p>
<p>Ok so tell me what I am learning by outlining a chapter of the textbook for a quiz on it when I never will refer back to the outline again? Doing a physics problem set and even doing the problems corresponding the sections I know already?
Exactly. I do these for grades, not for the learning. Much/most of high school homework doesn’t help me learn at all, you simply have to do the busy work to earn the grades. I’d rather study for a test (actual learning) than do a mundane assignment. The only things for which I think it’s different are english essays and science labs (or ss papers) which are things you should know how to do and valuable skills; not mundane work. Unfortunately, much of the work in HS even in AP courses is of the mundane sort. Therefore it’s done simply for the grade. Where grades don’t measure learning is the fact that grades/assignments are standardized, they are the same for everyone, whereas everyone has different things they need to learn so the assignments don’t fit their needs and thus at least to some degree (and to a varying degree) don’t help one learn. </p>
<p>From what I’ve seen, college does a far better job on these issues. Grades seem to come almost entirely from things like tests, lab reports, papers etc that measure how one actually learned and learning can be more individualized. So in college I can more effectively coalesce these two goals. Of course college curriculums are supposed to be much harder than high school curriculums, but that just means more focus on actual
Learning and less on mundane work.</p>
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<p>Not everything is as useless as it seems. Making an outline might seems like a useless exercise, since you never refer back to the outline, but the act of making the outline actually teaches you the material. It’s a known teaching technique widely used in law schools. It forces you to identify the key points and the act of writing wires it into your brain far more than just reading the material.</p>
<p>Repetitive problem sets are necessary to give you long term understanding of the problems, not just short term recall. Take a look at a Kumon math program and understand their teaching techniques - it all looks like drill and kill, which American schools disdain, but students who go through it are a lot more accurate and faster than students who don’t.</p>
<p>Yes, a lot of school work is folly, but not all of it is. The techniques you disdain actually are trying to teach you the material, while you sound like you’re just pursuing the grade, which is probably the opposite of what you believe is happening.</p>
<p>Nano…better off meaning more likely to get into a top 20. “, are colleges really going to reject a student who has the difference between a 3.9 GPA vs. a 4.0?” Apparently yes…more so if a 3.8. thus the risk of pushing ahead and getting a 3.8 vs a given 4.0 is huge. I was under the assumption that he was indeed better off being more challenged and jumping ahead(and we did). The numbers say differently…sadly I may have been wrong in doing so for his future.</p>
<p>@moscott - I think you’re getting way too far into the weeds trying to plan your son’s HS career to maximize his college chances at an Ivy. The kid is in 8th grade - you need to relax.The world will not end if he doesn’t wind up in HYP.</p>