I’m not saying that I am one such student (too early to tell at this point), just that I heard about it from counseling services. The description I am given is that there are students who have perfect (or near-perfect) grades in both undergrad and grad school but can’t hack it in research.
Now, I understand that sort of cases exist, and why these cases exist (part of which is field-dependent, part of which seems to transcend disciplines), but neither the existence nor the reasons behind these cases say anything about their prevalence. How common are those cases in the humanities? Social sciences? Life sciences? Physical sciences? Engineering? Arts? Other disciplines?
Are there fields where such cases occur more often than others?
Yes, I understand that people whose greatest intellectual weakness is a lack of creativity account for why these cases happen, but knowing the main reason why doesn’t tell us much about how often they occur, no more than it tells us about the distribution of these cases among disciplines…
I guess I could fall into that category. Good GPA, 800s on two of the three GRE sections, but I wasn’t all that great at research in cell biology. Finished the Ph.D. (20 years ago) and took time off from research before becoming an adjunct. In retrospect, I think one of the big reasons for my poor research performance was a lack of confidence (which tends to quash creativity) and deep, deep dislike of debate. One needs to debate and defend the research, and I HATED that so much. Now, with 20 years more life experience, I think I would be much better at both, but I’m happy with how life turned out .
It’s impossible to say how often this occurs because no one collects data on this kind of stuff, as far as I know. It’d be difficult to measure, anyway: what does “can’t hack it in research” mean? Does that mean that they can’t perform basic research tasks, or they can do that but can’t do their own independent research? Does it mean they can’t win grant money to fund their brilliant ideas? What about the students who are adequate to good but not great, and realize that “adequate to good” is not enough for a successful academic career? Do they count?
I guess the more important question is…why does it matter what the prevalence is, or how it compares across fields? What is that information useful for?
I took “Can’t hack it in research” to mean, more or less “can’t solve a basic research problem”, almost like “can’t perform basic research tasks”-level.
I would excuse a high prevalence in a discipline (e.g. nursing) if said discipline usually taught so to prepare graduates to go into jobs right out of undergrad (and usually are successful at attaining jobs in that discipline out of undergrad) and said jobs used skillsets that were quite different from skillsets used in research.
I believe such information could be used to refine either graduate admissions standards or approach to undergraduate education (given the realities of a discipline, of course)…
Perhaps we are are talking about students who excelled in course work, but who didn’t do well completing a PhD dissertation, or they completed the dissertation but were not able to publish research afterwards. This is similar to noting that some students do well in regular coursework but have difficulty completing an independent study. Research can be a very lonely business and not everyone is good at managing their own progress in the absence of external deadlines such as exam dates and due dates for papers. It isn’t so much that some people “can’t hack research,” but I am guessing that the counseling staff that the OP mentions was referring to the fact that perfect grades don’t predict who will thrive in a research environment in which there might be a lot of autonomy and researchers are expected to set and satisfy their own deadlines without a lot of oversight. And not everyone wants to have a job like that.
Oh, is this supposed to be a theoretical discussion then?
Nursing has an entire research branch, and most undergrads of any major intend to go to work post-college, not graduate school. I don’t know why this matters - someone with a BSN should be well-equipped to head off to a PhD in nursing if they wanted to be, just like someone with a BA in philosophy or a BS in chemistry should be able to get a PhD in their field with the write credentials.
Mmm, I don’t necessarily think so. There is always going to be some number of people who leave doctoral programs. First, you have to walk before you can run; there are many students who will be great at the basic things but not good at the higher-level research that comes with graduate school. The ones who can’t do basic research tasks don’t even make it to grad school, so refining the curriculum in that direction is not going to help. Secondly, lots of people leave programs for other reasons. In fact, I think most people who leave PhD programs could finish them intellectually, if they wanted to. But often they don’t want to - they lose interest, find something better to do, change their minds, etc.
on pure numbers alone yeah, sure, it occurs a LOT more in the humanities, just bcos “near-perfect grades” are more rare in STEM fields, which have pretty strict curves for the first couple of years. Profs in Frosh & Soph Chem, Bio and Calc, for example, are more than happy to award C’s, D’s, and F’s. Such grades are more rare in Lit/Hume.
The solution, I think, is to require prior ‘research’ for nearly all PhD applicants. Of course, that will never happen bcos the Unis need the cheap labor.
And they wake up and realize that a tenure-track faculty position just ain’t in the cards.
My husband helps run a research-based startup. They do hire some undergrads to help with research. But, he says that it is a difficult transition for many to go from problem sets where the professor creating the problems knew that there was a solution to each to trying to create instruments that work on the nanoscale, where you don’t know if the laws of physics are going to let you do what you want to do. I suppose that undergrads in engineering and physics could face a similar problem if they transitioned to grad school without significant hands-on experience. But, internships and undergrad research are not pretty much required for grad school admissions in the sciences and engineering.
I understand as much. But I do know that two additional ingredients are of prime importance: the advisor and the project.
The only number I’ve read to this effect was that the cases where people fail quals (I don’t remember the number offhand though) or fail courses/did not maintain satisfactory grades (~2%; Lovitts, 2001) are a minority.
It is true that the leading causes of not finishing a PhD (in any order) would involve professional issues, a poisonous relationship with one’s advisor or funding issues.
But those with the “near-perfect grades” in STEM fields are rather likely to end up in graduate school, compared to those who don’t quite have “near-perfect grades” but still can get 3.0+ nonetheless, because they are more likely to even obtain research experiences as undergrads.
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