Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Escaping High School

skunkledger.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 276 posts

Re: Escaping High School

#61

Post by compiler-guy »

hardware2win wrote: post #26
ameister14 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. They aren't worthless. Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school. So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.

In my country higher edu institutions look at final exam scores, not grades. Grades are terrible due to bias, difficulty when it comes to comparing them and lack of transparency. At best they show effort (or "caring" parents) >Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher Thats why there should be fair and transparent exam after college :) Th…

Tests have their own sets of problems too. A single, high stakes, high pressure test to determine everything is just as absurd as grades, and tends to bias for those who have time and money to prep.

I prefer wholistic evaluations. You are more than both your test scores and your grades and your school and your demographics. But if you put them all together one can get a decent picture.

Re: Escaping High School

#62

Post by arebop »

treis wrote: post #56
ameister14 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's little evidence that where you go to school matters. That's not quite true. There is little evidence that if you go to Penn instead of Penn State you have different results, but there are caveats. First, you have to be able to get into both. [edit]The studies control for selection, so the ones showing no increase in wages are studying the same cohort at Penn and Penn State, but there are more students at Pen…

Penn's not really the level of school that will be that much better over a flagship state school. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, and maybe a few more are that level.

The median Penn grad ends up making a bit more money than the median Stanford grad and less than the median MIT grad. They all make considerably more than a Berkeley grad, who makes considerably more than someone from Iowa State University.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

Re: Escaping High School

#63

Post by seanmcdirmid »

hardware2win wrote: post #26
ameister14 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. They aren't worthless. Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school. So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.

In my country higher edu institutions look at final exam scores, not grades. Grades are terrible due to bias, difficulty when it comes to comparing them and lack of transparency. At best they show effort (or "caring" parents) >Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher Thats why there should be fair and transparent exam after college :) Th…

The USA used to be a hybrid, but many schools are getting rid of looking at (ACT/SAT)test scores and that leaves them with just grades.

Re: Escaping High School

#64

Post by kodah »

dweekly wrote: post #37
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is almost certainly not worth your time to try to be in the top 10 in your class. Nearly everyone is much better off doing other things with their time than studying to try to get an elite college for a good deal. There's little evidence that where you go to school matters. If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be…

Somewhat surprisingly, the impact on lifetime earnings of attending an elite college is nil for men but strong for women. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25315

Women use their credentials more than men because they say a subset of men don't respect them without their credentials being aired. If that's true then it makes sense that the benefit to men is nil because they're viewed competent by default whereas women have to prove competency. Somewhat anecdotally people regularly confuse me for a mathematician although I lack any degree. I just like math and using it to prove my point; plus I'm kind of a late bloomer to math so it's more relevant to me than rote.

Re: Escaping High School

#65

Post by onos »

tallanvor wrote: post #42

"Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence ... I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories." This pretty much says it all right here. The author comes from an incredibly privileged background and clearly believes they are smarter than people who have spent their lives studying education. How we educate children isn't a perfect system, but ed…

Don’t agree, I think it’s a very good list of well intentioned advice.

Eg try to become an apprentice to someone talented. This would indeed be extremely valuable to anyone trying to learn a skill. The author then goes to great lengths giving advice on how to land a position like that when young.

Re: Escaping High School

#66

Post by seanmcdirmid »

argiopetech wrote: post #55
hardware2win wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd like everyone who makes this claim to try submitting resumes of a fresh college graduate with a lo Even better - Ive found my first software job during 1st year and nobody asked me about grades, but this is not US. Learn your stuff, have interesting stuff in CV and it should be doable, right?

I am in the USA and have not shared nor been asked my GPA in any job interview.

I throw my university GOA on my CV because it looks good without taking up much space, but is ultimately meaningless at this point. No one asked for it, no one probably cared about it, but it is still something I’m proud of given the struggle in earning it.

Re: Escaping High School

#67

Post by hardware2win »

compiler-guy wrote: post #61
hardware2win wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country higher edu institutions look at final exam scores, not grades. Grades are terrible due to bias, difficulty when it comes to comparing them and lack of transparency. At best they show effort (or "caring" parents) >Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher Thats why there should be fair and transparent exam after college :) Th…

Tests have their own sets of problems too. A single, high stakes, high pressure test to determine everything is just as absurd as grades, and tends to bias for those who have time and money to prep. I prefer wholistic evaluations. You are more than both your test scores and your grades and your school and your demographics. But if you put them all together one can get a decent picture.

While tests arent perfect, then they are at least fair, transparent and almost bias free unlike other methods.

>tends to bias for those who have time and money to prep.

Hmm?

So you have time to do various stuff for grades, but dont have time to prepare for exam?

It feels like copy pasted argument from discussions about exams in general, not when comparing them with grades like we do.

>But if you put them all together one can get a decent picture.

Concrete things, please.

How would you evaluate person.

Re: Escaping High School

#68

Post by aidenn0 »

hardware2win wrote: post #45
aidenn0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is "unpredictably effective" - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not. This is also a place to tailor things. If you are particularly good at learning ahead of time, then you can learn a lot of things "just in case" at a low cost, increasing the chances that something you learned is useful. If you aren't especially good at i…

>I'd like everyone who makes this claim to try submitting resumes of a fresh college graduate with a lo Even better - Ive found my first software job during 1st year and nobody asked me about grades, but this is not US. Learn your stuff, have interesting stuff in CV and it should be doable, right?

I actually had a low C average, and I only got my first job because I didn't put my GPA on my resume and one company forgot to ask me my GPA; the interviewer later confirmed that they would not have moved on to a second round (much less hired me) had they known my GPA.

At e.g. a college job fair, not having the GPA on the resume jumps out immediately and the recruiter would ask me for my GPA and write it on the resume if it wasn't there. With the GPA on my resume, I had several recruiters say "You might want to save this for another company because we aren't calling you back with that GPA" and hand me my resume back. This included, with zero exceptions, every SV company at the CS job fair at my college.

After the first job, you are much less likely to be asked for GPA, but it does still occasionally happen.

Weirdest (right out of college) interview was where I had gone through all the stages, including a multi-hour on-site, they were talking salary range, specific roles, and when I could start, but then they had to fill out a form for HR. The dialogue was roughly:

Interviewer: You're coming right out of school, right?

Me: Yes

I: Okay, I need your GPA

M: 2.2

I: Oh. (long pause, looked very uncomfortable) alright then.

They suddenly switched from being obviously ready to hire me to perfunctorily filling out the form.

Re: Escaping High School

#69

Post by joenot443 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #13
Tade0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right after getting his master's degree my friend's father stood before a choice: accept a desk job paying X a month, or make X per job installing and repairing A/C units. That MSc at least helped tremendously with branding - people could lay their trust in that when he was still starting out.

A family member just paid $500 for someone to come replace a $35 capacitor on their central AC compressor, after I explained how they could do it themselves in 5 minutes.

I think the vast majority of people go their entire lives without doing any kind of circuit level repair work. It's just not a skill most folks acquire. I can't think of anyone in my extended family who could replace a capacitor, half of them wouldn't even know what that means.

Re: Escaping High School

#70

Post by stainablesteel »

tallanvor wrote: post #42

"Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence ... I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories." This pretty much says it all right here. The author comes from an incredibly privileged background and clearly believes they are smarter than people who have spent their lives studying education. How we educate children isn't a perfect system, but ed…

or they're just being honest, it was a nicely written piece and no one knows everything

educators are garbage because they don't work empirically, they experiment on kids and the experiments have been failing since the 60s, causing mass amounts of fatherlessness but none of them are even willing to see themselves as the issue because no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible

Post reply on HN