Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
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Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
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Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#2My grandfather once told me "I went to college and got a degree. I went back 10 years later and got an education".
Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#3It's best to become a member of a close group that is not only smart, but which has good values and is well connected to reality.
So long as you get a 3.5 GPA or above, you can, in the words of a fellow alum's mom, "pretty much do what you want." But what you want to do may not even involve that kind of GPA signaling.
If you really are smart, then you can figure out how to generate the right sort of signal for your purposes. You'll also figure out that you're not infallible and that there are others out there who are smarter than yourself. From this, it follows that durable signals need to be based on real underlying value.
Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#4I think employers reliance on grade and qualifications are more about eliminating the really bad hires than finding the best hires. It is good in a way though, just like having a body of work to show, a hiring process that comes down to how you solve a few problems in an interview can be really hit and miss and is hard to show your full abilities.
Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#5Well, at least I know the meaning of proactive, so personally I think smart.
You can't be proactive to solve the unknown.
Also the opposite of reactive is not proactive.
Apart from being pedantic about the word proactive, I also totally disagree with the premise of the article, some of the most inventive problem solvers I've met are lazy as hell.
Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#6In addition to execution, earning good grades require particular kinds of intelligence - among them recognizing the bounds of systems and social relationships.
Being smart isn't an achievement and hard work won't get you there. It is merely potential and without execution, it eventually becomes "wasted potential."
Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#7Schools are designed to provide education for the masses, just like jobs are designed to reward workers' efforts with money. Such schemes remove the low / high extremes (slackers / highly gifted people) by conforming them to a pattern which is proven to increase, in time, the average performance of people participating in them.
Was Bill Gates better off as an entrepreneur and a drop-out? Yes, he's a highly gifted individual -- for him the freedom to focus on what he does best allowed him to shine and get from life huge returns when compared to what the 'system' would have reserved for him. But for a significant part of the more average folks, we could have trouble stating similar things.
The question in the title is nothing more than a matter of risks and insurances against them: do you want to take the chance of dropping out of school and pursuing your raw intelligence/dreams or you want the overhead of an administrative process in order to get at the end some lose guarantees about your hire-ability and your skills... It's not an easy question and it depends too much of everyone's personal situation (parents support, wealth savings etc) to be addressed generally.
Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#8The most worthless, stupid people I know got straight A's their entire life.
Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#9The most worthless, stupid people I know got straight A's their entire life.
Smart people can get A's too, and tend to find it even easier than stupid people do.
Re: Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?
#10"Education is what is left after you've forgotten everything you've learned." -> Albert Einstein