I’ve been lurking over the forums lately, and I can’t stop laughing at some threads. They start by saying, “I applied to XXX university and recently got a B or C at the end of the midterm, HELP will I be rejected?” It seems that students these days all care about grades. Yes, grades are important. However what is important is the stuff you learned instead of making it like I mastered the material in 180 days. I never understood the purpose why kids freak out over grades. Can someone really explain this to me? I know the fear of failing is everyone’s nightmare, but if we don’t fail how can we learn from our mistakes. You don’t really need an A to impress the admission officers. Right now, I’ve been having physics tutoring and I feel more confident. I hope this experience I’m having with the tutoring will help me pass Physics over the summer.
We are not machines if you get one B, or C in a class be happy. However, the grade won’t be the reason they reject you.
Some people have internalized “smart” as part of their self-image and so failure doesn’t feel like a small mistake, it feels like an existential crisis.
Some people generally pick up things quickly, meaning they get frustrated when they encounter difficulty.
Some people have personalities that make them prone to catastrophizing. High school grades affect choice of college then college grades then jobs then quality of life and suddenly they’re picturing the absolute worst possible scenario.
Of course those aren’t fun or healthy ways to live. (Speaking from experience.) But it’s also not advisable to swing too far in the other direction.
I recently read an article on how our generation of millennials are obsessed with perfection. We are too harsh on our ourselves and expect just gratification after things that do not really measure success like grades. The article also discusses how millennials have a hard time finding jobs because of the same reasons.
A TON of scholarships have GPA requirements, especially automatic merit scholarships at the state schools I’m interested in. A few too many Bs, and suddenly I’ve lost $20k at a school I’d really like to go to.
Sadly, the escalating cost of a college education has put enormous pressure on students to achieve the coveted 4.0. When attending your own instate flagship can cost over $100,000, students justifiably feel the need to achieve perfection in hopes they can win or maintain scholarships and land good internships and jobs. Very sad
The forums are a small subgroup that is not at all representative of the general high school populations. As you’d expect with the theme of this forum, it attracts a lot of kids that obsess over getting in to highly selective colleges and obsess over the more objective parts of the college admission, including getting all A’s. There are many contributing factors to why this subgroup exists – societal and family pressure, unrealistic views about the importance of going to specific colleges, internalized pressure including self perception, grade inflation, decreasing college acceptance rates each year, etc.
All it took to keep me happy in school was not getting an F. That attitude may have been passed down to my kids, since as long as they were getting decent grades, we were all OK with it. They were B/B+ students, and I was glad they weren’t always stressed out about having to get an A in everything. Neither of them are doctors or lawyers, but they seem to be happy and well-adjusted.
To me, I don’t understand kids who can get As even in classes they don’t like. I got As in classes I liked but Cs, Ds and even Fs in classes I didn’t like or hated. I had 800 in SAT math but got a C in Calculus BC class as a Senior after I got into an Ivy. I managed to convince my Calculus teacher not to give me a D so the college would not rescind acceptance. She took pity on me and gave me a C, and I went to an Ivy for free because my parents were poor, and at that time, top colleges actually viewed Asian applicants as URMs. I told my kid I applied as an URM but you are considered an ORM. I found out in college that I could breeze through English Lit major with almost all As by reading books, writing 5 page papers and sitting around and discussing obscure topics from the books trying to look very serious. That’s where I learned to bulls**t and connect to people which served me well in my business.
P.S. At a law school, I also persuaded my Real Property professor not to give me a F so I could have enough credits to graduate. That bulls***ng skills I learned came in very handy. I also quoted several poems to convince my now wife to go out with me.
I think ultimately, it is often not good to be able to get As in classes you don’t like because it deadens your senses to why you should study something, i.e., you enjoy learning that area, not to get good grades. I am also surprised that more kids are not undecided about their majors when they enter colleges because to me, colleges should be the place to try out different areas and find an area that you enjoy. My kid got Bs in two classes in high school that he found out he didn’t like: Biology and Calculus. As a result, he decided not to go into college as a pre-med. it’s a pity in some sense because I feel he has a great demeanor to deal with patients and staff.
I felt a great sense of liberation when I got my first D in high school and my first F in college because after that, I took classes I wanted to take and studied because I was interested in classes instead of trying to get As in classes that did not interest me.
Unfortunately, this is true. I honestly don’t care if my kids don’t make straight A’s as a matter of principle. But, if they want to attend even our flagship, they need money. And, at most state universities, that money only comes with high grades and high test scores. So, we tell them if you want to stay home and commute to local school, you’re OK. But, if you want to go away to State U and live on campus, you must have some merit money, so you must have the grades. If you want to go to Meets Full Need LAC, you need the stats to get in so you must have the grades.
The average GPA at some schools is so high that a few Bs or even one C can decimate the chance for merit money or admission to a prestigious full needs met school. So yeah when 100’s of thousands of dollars are at stake no wonder kids obsess. They aren’t being crazy or ridiculous.
Getting good grades in something you don’t like takes hard work and time management skills. How is that not a good thing? You’ll have to do things you don’t like for your whole life – do you really want to instill “I don’t like this part of my job, so it’s okay to do it badly” as the attitude to have?
^^I get what you are saying @bodangles, and don’t entirely disagree.
That being said, my husband - who is very much like our son (or more correctly our son is like him) - dropped out of college after his first year because he was forced to take gen-eds like art history. He absolutely hated college.
He is the hardest-working person I know, and very successful. He has the same physics/math/statistics brain that our son has. He just cannot read quickly.
I do believe in playing to strengths. Some people are more cut out for the “school template” than others.
My brother dropped/failed out of two colleges and never got a college degree because he “didn’t see why he should have to take humanities classes.” Losing some great scholarships in the process. Now as in his late middle age, he looks back and very much regrets the better career he would have had had he not done that.
One of our three kids did this. She went to her classes and read the books. After that, it was pretty easy for her. Math assignments that take others two hours might take her ten minutes. She reads fast, she writes fast, she thinks fast. Many other parents on here have their own similar kids as examples.
When I went to college I was envious of people like that because I had to work so hard. It has been interesting to watch.
It’s a bigger problem around these forums than in real life, but it does happen out there as well. The fact is that the closer you get to the very top of the heap, the less there is that separates students: these two kids got a 4.0, but that one took three more AP courses and got a 3.98, and that one over there got a 4.3 because her schools weights grades. Most kids are not defined by the difference between a 3.3 and 3.4 GPA, but when trying to get into elite schools or earn high dollar scholarships there’s a real gap between 3.88 and 3.98.
And it’s kind of hard to fault the schools, because there are a ton of very highly-credentialed kids out there these days. This pressure has created some very hard characters that do some very hard work. The survivors of this environment are pretty impressive, and they make up the competition for anyone who wants to get into that level of school. On the other hand, kids wouldn’t live this way if they didn’t have to, so there’s a place here for both sides to step back and relax a bit. But the cost for kids to blink first is incredibly high since they only get one shot at college and the merit money that makes it less unaffordable, so somehow I think we have to get the schools to help out. Some are, with test-optional admissions, but more change has to come. Good luck, as it’s a hard road to navigate.
Getting A’s means learning the material/mastering the skills presented. Disliking material is not a good reason to not learn things. I certainly dislike the lawyer’s attitude regarding only doing the work when you like it. I would not trust that person to be diligent about my affairs if some aspect did not interest him/her. I dislike people who manipulate the system as well.
Doing one’s best, including spending time at unpleasant tasks, is admirable. Also, the best students likely do not spend that much of their time getting the work done for classes they dislike. On this forum you see comments from the students and parents who bother with CC.
Remember, for all their high grades these are HS students without the wisdom of years. Their whole world is getting into college and their whole future depends on it is the mindset. Easy to dismiss once you have made it into your career.