I agree 100% with @Hanna and it should be said that if adulting and meeting deadlines is your goal, then that’s the way to do it. Conforming. Meeting expectations set for you from others, from past precedent.
The vast majority of people want this. The cookie-cutter approach to life. It yields predictable cookies.
I would add only that there are other goals. And to change paradigms, to change thinking, to create real movement in the world (in art, culture, science, business, etc.) it takes understanding the goals that Hanna describes AND the ability to think beyond them – to be creative and to take risks. Often the risks are HUGE and the risks must be undertaken for years if not decades for anything to come to fruition. The risk taker has to assume all of the time that he or she will fail, must fail many times over. “I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that it won’t work,” T. Edison.
Most people do not want to take on those risks, they want to conform, they want to LEARN to conform and tp lead ordinary-extraordinary upstanding lives, rather than extraordinary-extraordinary lives that may fly high, but may also crash upon the rocks.
All I’m going to add today is it was fun watching students pull from all their algebra neurons to add and subtract, then simply, rational equations without common denominators. I loved wandering around and watching how their brains tackled various set ups since they weren’t “cookie cutter” in the least. Several intelligent questions were asked. Many of them will do quite well in the future. It wasn’t so much fun watching those who just gave up and said, “Eh, I’m passing anyway.” I can’t really fathom how the latter group was more creative either.
Someone who wants to change paradigms needs to be able to figure out when to follow the rules and when to push the boundaries, based on each situation.
Stephen Smale is an interesting example. He got some Fs in college and almost flunked out yet has gone on to be one of the top mathematicians in the world.
I agree that for medical school you need good grades. That encourages students to take easier classes wherever they can. I don’t think that is right.
Medical school has other issues that almost seem perverse. I will admit I don’t know much about medical school. I know a kid who went to a very top school as an undergraduate. He was phi beta kappa and got a perfect score on the MCAT. He took a year off just to fill out the applications because they take so much time. He also didn’t have the money for the mandatory visits so he had to get a job to pay for his plane fares and visits on his year off. Is medical school pretty much only for the well off? I would love to hear what other posters have to say about this.
But note that he did attend college and PhD study in the 1940s-1950s (before grade inflation).
https://career.berkeley.edu/Medical/AppCost mentioned that the cost of applying to medical school in 2014 was $7,520 (though applicants from California probably face higher costs than those in some other places due to sending more applications and having higher travel costs). Note that most applicants are unsuccessful, and most successful ones get only one admission, so they have no choice about whether to choose a less expensive / less debt medical school. Of course, those form wealthy families who are willing to help with medical school costs can graduate with lower debt.
I teach at a large public research university. We do not have any weed out classes that are intended to be weed out classes. In STEM fields, we have a structured curriculum in each major, divided into four years of progressively more demanding courses. A student who imagines that having done well in the first year or two, he/she can just coast through the “easier” courses to follow will be deluding himself/herself. A student who has not done well in the first year or two, who imagines that those were the “weed out” courses, and that the subsequent courses will be easier will also be deluding himself/herself. The grades do tend to be higher in the later courses; that much is true. But normally that happens because students who would not be able to do so well have dropped the major.
Thinking like a conformist is not helpful in getting through a quantum mechanics class. It is definitely not helpful for research in the field.
At the university where I teach, we have many support structures to provide special assistance for students who are struggling with their classes. Some students who are running into trouble early in a semester (including juniors and seniors) take advantage of the opportunities for help, and do fine. Sometimes they need to re-orient their approaches to learning.
There is nothing wrong with having a 4.0 in college, attained sensibly. Setting the actual goal of maintaining a 4.0 will almost always cause a student to emerge with a lower-quality education than the student could have had, though, due to the GPA protectionism that almost always follows from that goal.
My theory on the emphasis on grades for med school admissions: Physicians do not want anyone to be provably intellectually superior to the students they admit. So A grades in “lite” STEM courses are preferable to A-/B+ grades in the courses that STEM students who plan to go to grad school in a STEM subject take. There’s no way to prove how the pre-med student would have performed in a more challenging course. Hence there is no student who is demonstrably intellectually superior to the pre-med.
The smartest person I have ever known is my good friend that I first met as a freshman in college. We were both part of the 1% of the students that received the college’s highest merit scholarship. He came in from high school with a 4.0 GPA, whereas I came with lower grades but higher test scores.
Over the next four years, he graduated with a 4.0 in the same demanding engineering program that I took, perhaps one of a few to do so among the 6000 students in our class. On the other hand, I barely maintained the 3.5 I needed to keep the scholarship. And during that time, he was also the president of two clubs and had a great social life.
Afterwards he joined a startup company and helped make it successful. He then took the money and bought an oceanfront property in California, where he is enjoying a quieter and extremely contented life.
So yes, sometimes the straight-A students really can have it all.
“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.”
There’s conforming to expectations (call it showing up and doing the work, best you can.) Then there’s conforming to the model of great researcher, open, diligent, creative, brilliant, etc.). Whatever. The point is, life does require some playing by the rules, following order. Nothing to fear in that. We rarely get to do just what we want, with no respect for the order of things or order in our work.
Med school asks for kids who can take that next leap in challenge. Not only the class or book learning in med school, but the myriad observations and decisions required to be a good doctor. An ongoing lust to stay current. That’s a sort of conformity, too.
You don’t necessarily want that kid in the back row, head down, being a creative genius, doing the minimum to get an A.
@websensation: In post #48 above, you wrote that your engineer friend went “to a top evening law school”.
What is “a top evening law school” ?
(I had to use google to find a list of part-time, evening law school programs.) Regardless of where your friend attended law school, it is difficult to accept that the most he derived from the experience was that the profession was primarily about “paper pushing”.
Med school is actually not that hard. I would not call it a “next leap in challenge,” in the way that research is. Even in an MD/PhD program, the PhD’s are usually “lite” doctorates. There are probably a few exceptions, driven by the individual. But programmatically, they are not that demanding.
I work in part with med students. Trust me, this is more than grades in med school classes. No need to compare what’s “harder.” Different pursuits, different requirements, and more.
Let’s not forget that the refusal to follow the rules characterizes not only the Steve Jobses of the world but also common criminals and those nasty neighbors who throw their trash on your lawn.
Creative geniuses take risks and stand apart from the rest of us because they are geniuses, not the other way around.
I was just listening to an interview with an author who passed high school by the skin of his teeth, went to community college, and as a transfer at a 4-year college, discovered that he loved historical biblical studies. He ended up getting a PhD in the field from Brandeis. He didn’t even finish high school Spanish, but now does scholarly research on Hebrew, Akkadian, Aramaic, etc. He learned to follow rules when he cared about the subject! For obvious reasons, these stories particularly resonate with me.
“However, even with all of these effects, median grades are often in the high B or low A range at highly selective private colleges, with very few earning C grades.”
Highly selective private colleges with their fluff grading is a very small percentage of med school applicants. These are schools where giving a C to an athlete requires approval from the chair. This is the non-aggression pact between professors, students, admins, and parents, you give only As and Bs and we won’t complain about paying 70K or ding you on the evaluation. That is not weed out, I agree. I know the counterpoint - these are all Einsteins or Pasteurs, or Gauss’, i.e. the greatest mathematicians and scientists of all time, so you can save that, I’ll concede it.
I’m talking about classes where Cs are the most common grade given out, Ds and Fs 20% of the class, 30% of the class get Bs 10-15% get As. I’m not saying this happens at every STEM class in state flagship, but it’s still common. And this used to happen in private colleges too when graduation rate wasn’t that important.
@QuantMech We do not have any weed out classes that are intended to be weed out classes. But normally that happens because students who would not be able to do so well have dropped the major.
That’s exactly what weeding out is, getting kids to drop the major, so maybe you don’t have weeding out classes, but there’s weeding out going on.
@Publisher Georgetown, one of few top law schools that had evening program. I guess my friend, a very humble guy, didn’t find law challenging intellectually. He got into early to HYPM, got almost all As at MIT, did masters at MIT and then did very well without trying hard at Georgetown evening law program. And he never practiced law. I just went to law school to learn the essentials, get a degree and set up my own practice. Never cared that much about GPA and just worked a lot while barely passing; I used to tell my friends that I was saving my energy and effort the later real world.
I don’t think I said that the most my friend got out of the evening law school program was that the law was primarily paper pushing. I just think he didn’t find it that challenging even though he was good at it. He learned that he didn’t want to practice law even though he found it easy to do well. He was the type who would get As at both MIT and Harvard Law but not in English Lit.
@websensation: I do not believe that Georgetown Law ranks the top 5%–this is according to the Registrar’s Office at Georgetown Law Center… My understanding is that Georgetown only designates “top 10%”. However, this is off topic so feel free to message me if you want to discuss further.
As I stated in the post you quoted, less selective colleges where a smaller portion of students do A quality work tend to give a smaller portion of A grades. Similarly highly selective colleges where a larger portion of students do A quality work tend to give a larger portion of A grades. Gradeinflation.com suggests little pattern between rate of grade inflation and selectivity. However, the public schools tend to have lower average GPAs than private schools of similar selectivity. There have been many threads in which pre-meds discuss whether it is easier to get straight A’s at a less selective college that gives A’s to a smaller portion of students or a highly selective college that give A’s to a larger portion of students. Most posters on this forum seem to believe the less selective college and/or less rigorous courses is the easier way to maintain straight A’s. I think it’s far more variable.
According to gradeinflation.com, the rate of grade inflation at both public and private colleges has been increasing average GPA by ~0.1 per decade on average. For example, across all surveyed colleges they mention in 1973 ~30% of grades were A and ~9% of grades were D/F; while 40 years later in 2013 ~45% of grades were A and ~8% of grades were D/F. While some specific colleges are higher or lower than this average, I doubt you’d find many colleges that give more D’s/F’s than A’s in classes with large enrollment (including pre-med classes) at any level of selectivity.
It does look like many of the mostly flagship-level public universities listed have grade distributions with more than 10-15% A grades in typical pre-med courses.
