<p>Not true, well, not true in most cases. If you got this from people like Steve Jobs, Einstein etc. you’re wrong. They actually had EXCELLENT grades. But of course no one wants a nerd. But that doesn’t mean you are going to get C’s now everyday so you can be a boss lmao :)) </p>
<p>I would much rather hire a C student who has good social skills, is engaged in meaningful activities (not just the social scene), is passionate about something and has a sense of self, over a straight A, book smart-only, student. Look at the whole person, not just the grades. That’s the purpose of application essays, interviews, and multiple categories on a resumé. It isn’t just about grades. </p>
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This is such a false dichotomy, though. </p>
That may be true of managers in a non-professional type positions, but managers in professional positions typically delegate AND steer the ship. The delegation part is easy, it’s steering the ship part that takes special skills and intelligence.
I can definitely relate to this topic in my line of work though (engineering). I was the A/B student FWIW. It has been my experience that C students tend to have better communication, spatial, and general life skills which tend to make them good at strategizing. Being able to interpret and create strategies is important if you are leading a group of people. Not saying that A students can’t strategize, but often times they lack the life skills needed to connect the dots, so to speak.
I feel a little differently about C students in structural engineering, at least if they want to design structures! It’s a VERY technical field. You have to know math, science, computer methods, AND construction techniques. It’s challenging. I really don’t want a C student designing a high-rise office building that I work in!
And even if that student goes into management, I would be a little nervous. I really think he or she would not grasp sufficiently all the challenges the “grunt” engineers are going through, and would try to rush them and/or minimize the difficulty of what they’re doing.
This is pure silliness and bunk. Wealthy people from wealthy families often end up in leadership positions regardless of their grades. And if they know that is where they are heading, they may not push themselves. From an economic viewpoint, pushing themselves to make A’s makes little sense when they have nabbed the family-linked position without exerting that sort of effort. So it may look like those that partied hard and earned low GPAs get the better positions. But that works only if your family has clout to use their influence to get you positions-pukey isn’t it! They would have gotten them with A’s too-and probably have been better at their jobs. Now lets consider the A student. It is not as if getting C’s will enhance the chance for a management level job. That is an absurd idea. It is also not true that the typical C student is likely to be hiring the A students in the future. So the idea is absurd. I don’t think C students tend to have better communication skills, more interest in meaningful activities or anything of the kind. The average C student is better at watching more tv maybe. I’d say that the A student is usually better at just about everything than the C student. Naturally there are many ways to be an A student and many different types of A students. The posts above have stereotyped A students as nerds, bookish and lacking social skills-invoking an image of someone with Aspergers syndrome. That is a minute percent of the A students- it is exceeded, by far, by the C student who is an alcoholic.
@fractalmstr I’m pretty sure your observation is colored by some confirmation bias. “Communication, spatial, and general life skills” are all positively correlated with general intelligence, which is correlated with GPA, all other things being equal. If you’re smarter, you can probably communicate better, and your spatial skills are probably superior. If you’re harder working and got your GPA that way, you’d probably have a good work ethic and organizational skills, which presumably fall under the category of “general life skills”.
I’m sure there are legitimate reasons for people to get bad grades, but all other things being equal, it’s certainly not a good thing.
‘C’ students inherit companies from their folks. 'A" students might go to work for them but when they find that management can’t accept their help, they usually move on.
There are exceptions to the rule, but people who are good at school are generally good at other things that require intelligence. (see: g factor)
In my opinion, there are different kinds of C students. There’s…
-the C student who is too cool for school and cares about their social reputation more than their grades.
-the C student who tries really hard but cannot seem to learn as easily as everyone else.
-the C student who is too depressed to care about their grades
-the C student who is spending too much time at work/in sports/fulfilling personal obligations to have time to work on their grades
And more. Whereas I think A students fall in one, maybe two categories, there are so many varieties of so-called C students. I know someone who was dyslexic and tried really hard in school, but she was such an activist, and had so much determination and passion for the field she’s going into that I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up being a leader in the field. But I also know a C student who I doubt will finish college, if he ever ends of finishing high school. It just depends.
I think it just really depends on the individual and the job. It’s probably true that C students are more of a wildcard, since there are potentially a variety of different reasons of why they’re getting the grade they’re getting; they may be devoting their time to something worthier to their interests, or they may actually be not-so-smart people. Also, something like business may be more accessible through different types of smarts, while something like scientific academia may be more likely to have A students across the board.
Another thing I disagree about the implications of the statement is that I don’t believe getting the highest position possible is an objective indication of success; I know a family member who is incredibly intelligent and amazing at physics and math, but he is perfectly happy to work as an employee rather than a boss. I am an A student myself, but I have absolutely zero interest in becoming a CEO or something.
So yeah, to me, it boils down to who you are and what you want from your career.
People who are straight A students, usually don’t have much time to be social or develop contacts. So if you take a smart person who spends zero time studying and gets Cs, and builds good contacts and compare them to a 4.0 who spent most of their time in their dorm room studying, I would certainly take the odds on the C student.
But I’d probably prefer the odds of the person who had a balance between the two. Someone more like in the 3.5 range, who did study, but had a life outside of it.
In my personal opinion, there really isn’t such thing as a quintessential A nor C student. Of course, there are probably plenty of students whose abilities well-exceed what may be gathered by a transcript, as there are those who bust their asses for the 4-point weight of an 89.5 in every class. There are also students who fit into each category whose faults are not within their own control. I have brilliant peers with 2300+ SAT scores, but GPAs that pale in comparison due to learning/attention impediments that make it difficult to complete assignments on-time, memorize large sums of information efficiently in short periods, etc. Important to also take into consideration is the factor of how many students work jobs to support their families, and have arrangements where even sporadic, intensive studying doesn’t cut it. There isn’t a defining line between the two. Sure, you can take two (upper) middle-class kids of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, standardized test scores, and extrinsic/uncontrollable factors, place them in the same room, and ask why one has a 4.0 while the other has a 2.5. You’ll probably gather that the former places more importance on education, studying, staying on-task, paying attention during class, etc. Is that binary mentality really applicable to the reality of it all? Of course, it isn’t. Some straight-A students pick up the book once, and it’s right before exams mandated by someone or a company rather than their own instructor and unrelated to their actual grades. Plenty of C-students do work hard, but still have difficulty grasping certain concepts. They may even be challenging themselves in areas they already find arduous. As much of a cliché as it may seem, everyone has certain strengths and certain weaknesses. The conventional education systems don’t cater to everyone’s strengths or ideal learning settings. I personally learn much-better in classes where discussion-based learning is implemented. That environment may equally be someone’s road to a dreadful, unaccommodating class and experience.
This thread was started 2 years ago.
I would like to add a point here, that all C and A students cannot be the same.
You will find successful A students as well as unsuccessful A students. Same goes for C students.
We are humans, we change and adapt to different situations. The one who adapts better than the other, becomes the boss regardless of how much GPA he/she got.
Humans constantly evolve. This trait of ours is what separates us from lifeless robots.