<p>Haven’t read the book…is the context that these 2 students abandoned their science career goals BECAUSE OF these grades? </p>
<p>If that’s the case then it seems silly. Getting a B, even if it puts you in the bottom half of your class at a top rated school, shouldn’t push a student to dump their career goals. Personally I think that this is a reaction to the way kids have been raised over the past couple of decades…we have raised a generation of “trophy kids” (read the WSJ article “the trophy kids go to work”) that have unrealistic expectations, are overly focused on grades/scores and have never really experienced failure because their teachers and parents gave them all gold stars for everything and didn’t grade papers in red ink anymore. </p>
<p>I think it’s important to teach our kids that success in the real world, in all reality, has very little to do with raw intelligence & grades (in most fields outside of academia). As long as you have a certain baseline of intelligence for your field your success is really dictated by your soft skills, your work ethic, your connections & network (great points on this by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman in his book “the startup of you” and in all reality this is the only REAL benefit / differentiator of going to an Ivy+ as the network you build is much better than at most universities and will pay dividends in the future) and many times just being in the “right place at the right time.” Just look at the stats from the book “The Millionaire Mind” - the average millionaire in the US had a college GPA of 2.92 and an SAT score of 1190 (of 1600). :)</p>