What Straight-A Students Get Wrong

NYTimes - Linda Huang

The NYTimes article "What Straight-A Students Get Wrong" by Adam Grant is excellent and says so much. Here are a few quotes with lots of good embedded links:

“The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.”

“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.”

“Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.”

“. . . Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.”

“You gain experience coping with failures and setbacks, which builds resilience.”

“It might also help to stop the madness of grade inflation, which creates an academic arms race that encourages too many students to strive for meaningless perfection.”