<p>[Do</a> Good Grades Predict Success? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog](<a href=“Freakonomics - The hidden side of everything”>Do Good Grades Predict Success? - Freakonomics) </p>
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<p>Good grades imply that you have decent organization, can get things done on time and can execute reasonably well. Those are nice attributes to have. But it doesn’t mean that folks with poor grades won’t be successful. There can be a lot of reasons why one doesn’t get the best of grades.</p>
<p>After you reach a certain level of basic smarts other things are easily more important. Social skills, thinking outside the box thinking, leadership, etc.</p>
<p>It depends on future profession. If one dreams of becoming an MD, for example, he will not get accepted to Med. School with less than stellar grades. He will have to start dreaming about something else where he still migh be very successful.</p>
<p>There are some areas with very low barriers to entry. Like the 16-year-old kid that started up the browser that hundreds of millions of people use today. He went to Stanford for a little while and then dropped out to do more interesting things. He said that his grades weren’t all that good at Stanford.</p>
<p>There is a difference between “high scorers” and “high achievers”. Yes, the groups do intersect, but at other times they are vastly different. Some high achievers work really hard to get every point on that transcript. Some high scorers just sit back and it comes naturally. Depending on your field, that sometimes doesnt’ work in real life.</p>
<p>Success in a career and success in academia (=“good grades”) are two different animals. The former is more complex, as barrons noted. This is one reason why the ivies, for example, look so carefully at extracurricular accomplishment: that has been shown to be more predictive of success (inclusively) after college – a consideration which is very important to U’s like Harvard.</p>
<p>That 16 yo kid must have had good enough grades to be accepted to Stanford in the first place - or they saw something else in him - the potential he obviously had.</p>
<p>“That 16 yo kid must have had good enough grades to be accepted to Stanford in the first place - or they saw something else in him - the potential he obviously had.”</p>
<p>He co-invented an incredibly popular piece of software and that was before he applied. No clue on his high-school grades but they might not have been that good. If you’re spending huge amounts of time writing software, then it’s understandable that your grades slip.</p>
<p>“Would a different system with less emphasis on conformity produce more of our best and brightest?”</p>
<p>I think so. I’m not at all surprised that an accomplished designer (of anything) was less than stellar in school.</p>
<p>I remember reading in a book that there is NO CORRELATION between academic and professional success. The account I read cited 30 or 40 studies that all indicated no correlation.</p>
<p>Many people who think outside of the box and are non-conformists struggle with the whole concept of trying to do things the way some administrator or teacher thinks they should be done. Some conform enough to excel grade-wise, others cannot play that game very well. Those people turn out to be innovators who create new products and technology that can change our world. In any case, I think we can all agree that regardless of grades, successful people are usually hard workers who put a tremendous amount of energy into their projects/careers. And others, like one ex-NCAA football player I met, get their cushy VP jobs because of things that have nothing to do with what they studied in school or getting good grades, but then they take full advantage of the opportunity to succeed in their chosen field.</p>
<p>This point is most significant:</p>
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<p>Good grades from a good high school are good predictors of good grades in college and graduate school.</p>
<p>Success in life is harder to predict.</p>
<p>We have a friend who is a CEO of a large international company. He confided that he graduated undergrad 2nd to the bottom of his class. He also said that when interviewing and hiring, he would rather have a well-rounded B/C student with personality, ability to work as a team, and leadership skills than the A student lacking those qualities. Now, if he can get it all in the package–a no brainer.</p>
<p>It is like everything else, there is no single correct answer because grades may be driven by all sorts of things. The smart person who had to work to pay for school may have C’s, the not so smart person, who navigated the college with easy courses with A/B’s. However, relating to the experince of the OP, I was told this story.</p>
<p>The A students will go on to become teachers (mainly because it is easy for them)
The B students will go on to become bureaucrat (e.g., gove type workers)
The C students will be the pool from which the millionaires come from.</p>
<p>No scientific proof here, just story.</p>
<p>hikids, I’m sorry but whoever told you that “story” is someone whose broad generalizations I have no respect for. Is this a ‘study,’ a private hypothesis, or a tiny sampling of anecdotes?</p>
<p>Truth Squad:
In my area, the bureaucrats are derived from the high school C students who then got 2-year comm. college degrees. The majority of bureaucrats I know are the least accomplished of any group.
The high-achieving, brilliant A students went on to the professions: psychology, law, medicine, etc.
The B students went in a variety of directions, often achieving much more after graduation than before, including in the arts – the oft-forgotten and under-appreciated field on cc.</p>
<p>But my experience is no more helpful than your “story.”</p>
<p>Millionaires sometimes start from “nothing” (i.e., C grades), but even more often start with “something” much more important: connections. Millionaires often are born, literally. That’s why your “story” has no validity.</p>
<p>Grades taken only in themselves are predictive of nothing, positive or negative. It’s a stupid piece by Kimelman.</p>
<p>And an even stupider comment by your “friend” that assumes that teaching is “easy.” (Not if it’s successful it isn’t.) I may be unusual in my profession in that, although I find fewer & fewer true peers in it, I graduated 4th in my class from an extremely rigorous, large private school, was offered to skip classes several times, & have always been at or near the top of my class, including in grad school. Yet education continues to be my passion. I’ve been told often that I could have done other things in life – including law-- and I agree. But I preferred greater challenge, more passion, & the greater opportunity for career growth that my profession offered.</p>
<p>Thanks Epiphany! Why does the teaching profession continue to be devalued?</p>
<p>I think for a variety of reasons, Guillaume – many of them relating to the preference given to the <em>system</em> as opposed to the product & process. The public school systems in many states are simply broken, period. There is no other way to put it. They are poorly managed, unwieldly (too often), driven by conflicting priorities which result in a disjointed product, and in some cases are very, very politicized.</p>
<p>Thus, public education in <em>general</em> deserves some of its “bad rap.” However, looking at specific publics in certain states, the broad brushed negativity is not deserved & is sometimes even based on outright ignorance & superficial understanding. Further, switching to the privates now, most teachers in most of the secular privates absolutely rock. Many of them are between competent & brilliant. They are both capable & dedicated. Some teachers in some of the religious privates (particularly some Catholic independent schools) are right up there with the best of them in selected publics & secular privates.</p>
<p>An additional reason – besides the ‘systematizing’ of education which, when flawed as a system, detracts from education itself – is the increasing cultural diversity of our nation, combined with the politicizing of that diversity, so that differential needs are not confronted honestly & addressed, be those language, social, & more. It is very difficult to teach successfully classes which are maximally diverse in every category – academically, culturally, & more. Private industry itself knows how to segment for efficiency & success, & does so. But again, when politics are injected, the success rate diminishes.</p>
<p>Finally, there is a mutual dynamic between teacher shortage & broken systems, forcing an even greater lowering of standards in hiring. Personally, I don’t want to work with peers whose standards are not my own; it’s not satisfying. I like to work with a crack team. That’s how I started in education, & that’s why I’m in the private educational sector now.</p>
<p>Methinks the book was biased somehow (and I’d love a title to this book) as I’ve read a bit on this topic myself and have seen studies where a positive correlation was found (along with some where the correlation wasn’t statistically significant, but none where there was a negative correlation such that C students would <em>as an entire group</em> out-earn A or even B students) and doubt I’ve seen as many as 40 studies on the topic, so it seems suspicious to me that the authors wouldn’t have found any with a positive correlation.</p>
<p><a href=“http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:BsoRZ6EDTfwJ:www.calpro-online.com/eric/docgen.asp%3Ftbl%3Dmr%26ID%3D115+high+school+GPA+and+career+earnings+correlation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a[/url]”>http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:BsoRZ6EDTfwJ:www.calpro-online.com/eric/docgen.asp%3Ftbl%3Dmr%26ID%3D115+high+school+GPA+and+career+earnings+correlation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a</a></p>
<p>" Rosenbaum (2001) also found a correlation between high school GPA and earnings for HSB (High School and Beyond study) students. Overall, HSB associate and bachelor’s degree completers received about 10 and 15 percent higher earnings, respectively, than high school graduates without degrees. However, bachelor’s degree completers with high school a GPA of C or lower enjoyed only a 4.3 percent increase in earnings—and associate degree completers with a high school GPA of C or lower earned 7 percent less than those with no degree."</p>
<p>Then there is the business of how high school GPA is correlated to level of education attained after high school, and level of education attained is correlated to career earnings. You don’t need higher level math to figure if A tend to lead to B, and B tends to lead to C, A will tend to lead to C.</p>
<p>[Undergraduate</a> Borrowing](<a href=“http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:yw_n2oupoCcJ:www.nasfaa.org/Annualpubs/Journal/Vol36N2/UndergraduateBorrowing.PDF+high+school+GPA+and+career+earnings+correlation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=35&gl=us&client=firefox-a]Undergraduate”>http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:yw_n2oupoCcJ:www.nasfaa.org/Annualpubs/Journal/Vol36N2/UndergraduateBorrowing.PDF+high+school+GPA+and+career+earnings+correlation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=35&gl=us&client=firefox-a)</p>
<p>" students with a high school GPA of B+ or A- were significantly less likely to plan to attend graduate school than their counterparts with high school GPAs of A or A+.</p>
<p>“The degree aspirations as freshmen were another sig-
nificant predictor. Students who had low degree aspirations as
freshmen (bachelor’s degree) were 13% less likely to plan to at-
tend graduate school than students who had high degree aspi-
rations (professional degrees such as medicine or law). Students
with master’s or doctoral degree aspirations were 10% less likely
to plan to attend graduate school than their counterparts who
had professional degree aspirations.”</p>
<p>Good grades are a good indicator for future success according to the education statistics I once studied. Of course, the definition of “good” in both places has to be defined specifically. It does not mean that every or a vast majority of good students are going to be successful, nor does it mean that any given poor student is not going to be successful. </p>
<p>It makes sense that a good student will do well in life. The skills needed to do well in school are often the same ones to be successful. Though, they are not the only things a person needs for success, they are certainly most helpful. The very things that kept my kids from being better students are the same ones that are causing them issues in life. Organization, efficiency, discipline, neatness, care, motivation, focus, consistent effort are all important in being successful and those who are too way off in any of these areas are going to have problems from those deficiencies.</p>
<p>My college GPA was a full point higher than DH’s. (me = 3.8, DH = 2.8) We were both liberal arts majors. When we got married, my salary was about 10% higher than his. Within 3 years, his was earning twice as much as me. Then we had our first baby and I took 8 years as a SAHM, followed by 10 years of working part-time. As a result, my current salary is about 1/9 of DH’s.</p>
<p>I’d say grades had very little to do with either of our future “success.”</p>