<p>I read the college choice chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath book.</p>
<p>His two example students seemed to have rather fragile egos. One went to Brown and got B grades in chemistry. The other went to Harvard and got a B- grade in quantum mechanics. Both apparently abandoned their science career goals, although the latter one went to law school and into a tax law career (apparently he did well enough at Harvard to get into a highly ranked law school and did well enough in that law school to get a law job).</p>
<p>Now, is a B grade really that bad? Yes, grade inflation at those schools means that a B grade puts one in the bottom half of the class, but is the bottom half of Brown or Harvard really that bad a place to be?</p>
<p>Haven’t read the book…is the context that these 2 students abandoned their science career goals BECAUSE OF these grades? </p>
<p>If that’s the case then it seems silly. Getting a B, even if it puts you in the bottom half of your class at a top rated school, shouldn’t push a student to dump their career goals. Personally I think that this is a reaction to the way kids have been raised over the past couple of decades…we have raised a generation of “trophy kids” (read the WSJ article “the trophy kids go to work”) that have unrealistic expectations, are overly focused on grades/scores and have never really experienced failure because their teachers and parents gave them all gold stars for everything and didn’t grade papers in red ink anymore. </p>
<p>I think it’s important to teach our kids that success in the real world, in all reality, has very little to do with raw intelligence & grades (in most fields outside of academia). As long as you have a certain baseline of intelligence for your field your success is really dictated by your soft skills, your work ethic, your connections & network (great points on this by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman in his book “the startup of you” and in all reality this is the only REAL benefit / differentiator of going to an Ivy+ as the network you build is much better than at most universities and will pay dividends in the future) and many times just being in the “right place at the right time.” Just look at the stats from the book “The Millionaire Mind” - the average millionaire in the US had a college GPA of 2.92 and an SAT score of 1190 (of 1600). :)</p>
<p>It certainly did seem from the book chapter that the B grades, or the academic struggles in class leading to the B grades, were traumatic for those students who were used to being top students in high school.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>However, 1190 from before the recentering is equivalent to 1260 today. Either score is an above median SAT score. Also, if the average millionaire went to college, that itself is more above average in terms of educational attainment than it is now, since fewer people went to college back when the average millionaire (middle age or older) went to college. And 2.92 was a more respectable college GPA back then when there was less grade inflation.</p>
<p>Of course, there are plenty of other things that one needs to be financially successful, and the point that one does not need super-high academic achievement to be so is still valid.</p>
<p>His point is that it is not the grade that makes the kids feel inadequate, but the view of yourself in context with your immediate peer reference group (your school) instead of the view of yourself in context with a large reference group (the population as a whole, or all math majors in all universities). So yes, if you are in the bottom quarter of your class at Harvard math, many will feel rather defeated, even though on a pure aptitude level, they may be equivalent to the top quarter at Podunk U math, where those students are feeling pretty proud of themselves. It’s hard to know the large reference group when you don’t see the large reference group.</p>
<p>If a club baseball player is put on a professional baseball team, does that club player feel as fragile as the student? Do they ignore their own internal comparisons? Do they keep playing ball and enjoy it? Should they for the love of the game? I don’t know the answer. But I know that a club baseball player is a much better player than the majority of the population.</p>
<p>I have not read the book, but I would not take Gladwell’s tenets very seriously. He latches onto a few ideas, runs with them, and finds dramatic examples to back them up. </p>
<p>Should really bright kids go to “easy” schools to protect their fragile egos? How ridiculous is that? Most really bright kids are “smart” enough to know if they are in an easy class and are breezing through, just as they may have done in high school. They might appreciate the easy “A” but also realize that it was not earned with much effort, and that their peers at more challenging schools have a much more difficult time.</p>
<p>Let me give an example (I know it’s n of 1, but still a personal example). My son took linear algebra at a local college during 12th grade. The college is probably ranked as average in terms of difficulty. The class was SOOO easy for him. He apparently never did his homework, was able to do all of the work in class, got an “A” and his only interesting challenge was doing extra credit assignments. He was the ONLY student who took on the extra credit assignments. There were graduate students in this class, along with upper level undergraduates. He felt that he was so understimulated in this class, that when he went away to college at Brown, he took linear algebra again. It was so much harder there, that he got a “B” in it. Although he was not pleased with his grade, he was very aware that he was with his peers and deserved the grade he got. His poor study skills from high school probably held him back, along with the fact that he was never challenged before and never had to ask for help. A new learning experience. </p>
<p>Suggesting that students go to less challenging schools just to boost their egos and get better grades, IMO, is misguided.</p>
<p>Also, the same chapter about college choice makes the common inaccurate assumption about all STEM majors being similar in academic and labor market characteristics.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>GPA gaming is probably important for pre-med and pre-law students, though. However, it is not necessarily true that the less selective school will result in higher grades, due to differences in grade inflation.</p>
<p>Well I do know a kid who got less than stellar grades at Princeton who decided he wasn’t smart enough for Neuroscience and ended up a psych major. He should have graduated two years ago, but still hasn’t written his senior thesis. His mother is convinced that Princeton’s lack of grade inflation damaged his fragile ego. Honestly though, most kids survived Princeton just fine. He’s one of those over-helicoptered kids. My son meanwhile went off to a top program in his field. After one semester on the Dean’s List quickly learned how to stop getting straight A’s and graduated without any honors at all, but did do what it took to get his dream job. He’s always worked very hard at the things he cares about and has never made an effort to get a better grade for any kind of gaming the system. To a fault at times - but it was amusing to hear his AP Bio teacher talk about how he was one of the few kids who never bothered with extra credit opportunities. He thought his grade was good enough and he preferred reading computer science manuals than do extra labs.</p>
<p>A B grade is not a bad grade if your goal is to graduate from college, and many careers only require a college degree. If one wants to find employment as a physicist, however, this really requires a PhD. And if you want to go into academia, you need to not only get a PhD, but a PhD from a good or top graduate program. For admission to those sorts of programs a B-, even at Harvard, is not good.</p>
<p>I have not read Gladwell’s book, but I think it is far more likely that the students in question found fields that they were good at. I was an undergraduate physics major for a while, and discovered that while I enjoyed physics I was a B physics student. I found a field I enjoyed and was able to do well in, well enough to go to a top 5 PhD program.</p>
<p>I’m not actually convinced that the grade inflation is the entire story about why a B feels like such a bad grade. I think that in general, as college admissions have grown more and more selective, and drawing from larger crowds, the top colleges tend to only admit the type of people who did extraordinarily well in high school. So many colleges point out they could fill whole classes of people with 4.0’s, and maybe they don’t but many come close. I’m not sure that was the case “back in the day” when it was more a question of social class. In other words I think that colleges these days have a lot more kids who haven’t gotten anything below B+, or A-, or even A in their high school days.</p>
<p>The inherited-SES-elite part of the class tended to end up at the bottom, trying just hard enough to make “gentleman’s C” grades. That meant that the academic strivers got the B and A grades (and B back then meant better than most, rather than bottom of the class).</p>
<p>I got this book for my sister for Christmas.
She is a college drop-out (not because of grades, it just wasn’t for her). I will have to ask her her thoughts on this when she finishes.</p>
<p>I don’t think a B grade is particularly bad, period. I prefer that my doctor actually learned something in medical school. I truly do not care what grade they got. If they are competent enough to pass the medical board and be hired by the practice I go to, then that’s about all I care about. 18 years after I graduated with my engineering degree (not from an Ivy), I don’t remember what grade I got in each class, and day to day or career-long, it doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>My high school sophomore took Calc 3 last term at the local liberal arts college. Throughout the term, the class shrunk in size. He knows one kid received an A, and he got the next best grade - an A-. It’s his first non-A or A+ grade and while he was bummed, he didn’t find it unfair. He’s taking diff eq with the same prof next term, because he likes how the guy pushes his students to really learn the material. It’s tough for him, but he came around to the idea last year that school isn’t just about grades- it’s very much more important that he master the material.</p>
<p>One area where I agree with this author is that HYPS etc. are not a good choice for anyone with a fragile ego. They are humbling places. Virtually everyone there will face either a handful or a slew of significant disappointments in the academic and extracurricular spheres. As these things go, I was wildly successful – I was a 3.9 student in a highly desirable singing group, and I got to be a tour guide. But I still got shot down on many things I really wanted that I thought I was well qualified for (theater roles, summer teen mentoring job, Let’s Go editing position, etc.). Some of these were pretty painful rejections. If you can’t let those failures roll off your back, there’s no way to be happy there.</p>