Every so often on some form of social media you'll come across an impassioned rant arguing that grades don't measure intelligence and that kids don't care about learning, just their grades. There's some validity to that claim so lets start by addressing it.
Let's make a claim: if grades measure intelligence, then people with good grades are intelligent. We know this to not always be the case. There are smart people who don't get good grades, and not so smart people who get good grades. I'm sure, if pressed, all of us could think of a few examples of this. And yes some people place too much of an emphasis on grades, and often times students don't have good teacher who keep them engaged in the subject matter. Students become disinterested and don't care about learning what they are being taught.
So then why do grades matter? Why does every college care so much about our GPA? Why do employers want to know what grades we got in college? Why do my parents care so much about my report card?
While not perfect, grades DO provide an objective analysis of how well you've understood the subject matter being taught to you. Tests are almost never perfect but still obtain a very solid baseline of your understanding. Daniel Tosh had a funny bit in one of his stand-ups about bad test takers:
"Don't you love it when people in school are like, 'I'm a bad test taker.' You mean you're stupid. Oh, you struggle with that part where we find out what you know? I can totally relate see, because I'm a brilliant painter minus my god awful brushstrokes. Oh, how the masterpiece is crystal up here but once paint hits canvas I develop Parkinson's."
Obviously that's very generalized but how else can somebody understand how well you understand derivatives and integrals without seeing you derive and integrate? You can memorize law all you want but we can't understand how much you actually know until you can apply it to scenarios. There are billions of people in this world, and there simply has to be objective measures of one's abilities.
Humor me with the analogy of GPA and life. In life we have plenty of things that we don't want to do but must. Taxes, jury duty, interviewing for jobs and the like. In college/high school we have to take classes we don't necessarily want to. We may not be interested in them but we need them for our major or our core to graduate. Not wanting to do something isn't an excuse to not get that thing done. Life tosses us problems and we need solve them within the framework we are given. For example, in life we need to do taxes within the framework of the law of the country we live in.
The same thing holds for grades, we need to get good grades within the guidelines set by the college we are attending. The most common way to get good grades is to pay attention, do your work on time and study for the exams. Sure there'll be a class that you can BS the paper for, or only study the night before and still get an A in and that's fine. But the fact is you won't be able to do this for the majority of your classes and maintain a respectable GPA. For the most part a good grade in a class indicates that you understood the material, were able to prove that to a teacher and that you worked hard (to some degree) to achieve those things. In other cases a good grade means you understood the framework of the class, and manipulated it to your advantage to get a good grade. Again, this holds for a minority of the classes depending on where you go to school but we've all probably had a class like this.
What this shows is that the critics are right, grades don't measure intelligence. They measure how well you are able to adapt in a class, understand it's material, how well you work and how well you succeed given whatever parameters there are in the class.Yes, an intelligent person with poor grades probably won't get into a great college or get glossed over on some job applications. That's because intelligence without the accompanying effort is useless to employers and colleges know if you didn't work hard in high school you aren't going to magically flip a switch and succeed at Ivy-League level work.
Intelligence as it pertains to being successful at life goes way beyond schoolwork, but the ironic thing is that grades tend to correct for this on some level. It not only measures your ability to work, but also your ability to solve the "problem" of getting a good grade in a class. This is much more useful as it mimics, to some extent, your ability to succeed in college and in the work force.
Anybody who makes decisions based off numbers knows making decisions off a single metric is ineffective and often dangerous, depending on the decision you're making. Your GPA doesn't define who you are nor is it the end all and be all metric of your abilities. With that being said however, in a world with 7ish billion people there NEEDS to be objective measures to separate people based on their abilities. Grades, with all of their flaws, still remain an extremely viable resource for colleges and employers looking for driven people to join their ranks. There are people who succeed outside of the school environment, Zuckerburg, Gates, Jobs, etc. but for the majority of us simpletons it's much easier to play with the cards we're dealt as opposed to changing the game entirely.
Let's make a claim: if grades measure intelligence, then people with good grades are intelligent. We know this to not always be the case. There are smart people who don't get good grades, and not so smart people who get good grades. I'm sure, if pressed, all of us could think of a few examples of this. And yes some people place too much of an emphasis on grades, and often times students don't have good teacher who keep them engaged in the subject matter. Students become disinterested and don't care about learning what they are being taught.
So then why do grades matter? Why does every college care so much about our GPA? Why do employers want to know what grades we got in college? Why do my parents care so much about my report card?
While not perfect, grades DO provide an objective analysis of how well you've understood the subject matter being taught to you. Tests are almost never perfect but still obtain a very solid baseline of your understanding. Daniel Tosh had a funny bit in one of his stand-ups about bad test takers:
"Don't you love it when people in school are like, 'I'm a bad test taker.' You mean you're stupid. Oh, you struggle with that part where we find out what you know? I can totally relate see, because I'm a brilliant painter minus my god awful brushstrokes. Oh, how the masterpiece is crystal up here but once paint hits canvas I develop Parkinson's."
Obviously that's very generalized but how else can somebody understand how well you understand derivatives and integrals without seeing you derive and integrate? You can memorize law all you want but we can't understand how much you actually know until you can apply it to scenarios. There are billions of people in this world, and there simply has to be objective measures of one's abilities.
Humor me with the analogy of GPA and life. In life we have plenty of things that we don't want to do but must. Taxes, jury duty, interviewing for jobs and the like. In college/high school we have to take classes we don't necessarily want to. We may not be interested in them but we need them for our major or our core to graduate. Not wanting to do something isn't an excuse to not get that thing done. Life tosses us problems and we need solve them within the framework we are given. For example, in life we need to do taxes within the framework of the law of the country we live in.
The same thing holds for grades, we need to get good grades within the guidelines set by the college we are attending. The most common way to get good grades is to pay attention, do your work on time and study for the exams. Sure there'll be a class that you can BS the paper for, or only study the night before and still get an A in and that's fine. But the fact is you won't be able to do this for the majority of your classes and maintain a respectable GPA. For the most part a good grade in a class indicates that you understood the material, were able to prove that to a teacher and that you worked hard (to some degree) to achieve those things. In other cases a good grade means you understood the framework of the class, and manipulated it to your advantage to get a good grade. Again, this holds for a minority of the classes depending on where you go to school but we've all probably had a class like this.
What this shows is that the critics are right, grades don't measure intelligence. They measure how well you are able to adapt in a class, understand it's material, how well you work and how well you succeed given whatever parameters there are in the class.Yes, an intelligent person with poor grades probably won't get into a great college or get glossed over on some job applications. That's because intelligence without the accompanying effort is useless to employers and colleges know if you didn't work hard in high school you aren't going to magically flip a switch and succeed at Ivy-League level work.
Intelligence as it pertains to being successful at life goes way beyond schoolwork, but the ironic thing is that grades tend to correct for this on some level. It not only measures your ability to work, but also your ability to solve the "problem" of getting a good grade in a class. This is much more useful as it mimics, to some extent, your ability to succeed in college and in the work force.
Anybody who makes decisions based off numbers knows making decisions off a single metric is ineffective and often dangerous, depending on the decision you're making. Your GPA doesn't define who you are nor is it the end all and be all metric of your abilities. With that being said however, in a world with 7ish billion people there NEEDS to be objective measures to separate people based on their abilities. Grades, with all of their flaws, still remain an extremely viable resource for colleges and employers looking for driven people to join their ranks. There are people who succeed outside of the school environment, Zuckerburg, Gates, Jobs, etc. but for the majority of us simpletons it's much easier to play with the cards we're dealt as opposed to changing the game entirely.
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