What do you think about grinders?

Roger_Dooley
Fri, 25 May 2012 12:16:23 +0000

Grinders, heroes, subs, hoagies… all the same to me… oh, wait, I just read the post.

I think there are two separate categories being addressed:

1) Students who may not be as intuitive or high IQ as some but who get good grades by dint of hard work in and out of the classroom.

2) Students who game the system by taking the easiest path to a high GPA. In unweighted GPA schools, I’ve seen valedictorians who never took an honors or AP course. As the OP points out, weighted GPAs can also be gamed.

There’s no doubt an overlap of these groups, but it’s far from 100%. I don’t find the first group problematic. In real life, hard work and diligence often lead to greater success than raw smarts. The second group is a little tougher to pin down. On one hand, what they are doing amounts to running a marathon and taking a few shortcuts to lower one’s time. On the other hand, if they are playing by the rules they aren’t really cheating - the system itself is flawed.

No grading system I’ve seen always produces results that everyone would agree are fair. The good thing is that high school GPA will be forgotten shortly after graduation, and very few students won’t get into a good college because of some other student’s course schedule.