What would be your advice: Persevere or cut your losses and move on?

Parents Forum
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This discussion made me think of this article from the current issue of the Stanford alumni magazine that suggests that “perseverance” is really about engagement, because college science and engineering classes are taught so poorly:

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=91851

What does accomplishing the incredibly hard task of getting a good grade in a traditional lecture course actually prove, given that apparently most people in these classes don’t learn the material? It probably indicates that later in life you’re more likely to tolerate spending hours on a treadmill. Either literally or metaphorically or both.

This is what I got out of the previously referenced essay from the Harvey Mudd graduate: “I’ve completely forgotten everything I learned, but after doing this really hard thing, I feel really good about myself. Keep at it and you’ll feel the same way!”

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@eclpts: That’s an extremely good talent to have in life, BTW. People who can do that tend to be more successful and happier.

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Hunt is right in #57, although both the effect that I mentioned and the effect that he mentioned operate at the same time, on top of each other.

For example, in a three-quarter class, if the people who scored 65% overall in the first quarter, moved on to the second quarter, and changed nothing, their predicted score for the second quarter would be 42.45%. They might cut their losses at that point, rather than continuing to the third quarter where their projected score is 27.5%. If they were still in the class, it would make the student who started at 80% and has now dropped to 51.2% look better.

Persevering without changing anything is unlikely to work well, if things weren’t going well at first. Recognizing the need for change and making it is not super-easy.

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I’ve known some of these Don Quixote types in real life and I gotta say- other than conceding that they “never give in, never give up” which I guess is some sort of value on the Protestant Work Ethic ladder, I have to wonder why. (they are not all Protestants- I don’t mean this in a literal or anti-religious way).

What’s so special about becoming a computer scientist that someone who has no obvious aptitude for it and has to struggle through it should be the poster child for persevering? Go be a Kick^&* urban planner or sustainability expert or nurse practitioner or media relations manager.

It’s nice to say that with X number of hours anyone can become an expert at anything, but what’s wrong with steering kids towards fields where they have obvious talent and aptitude instead? I know someone who went to Vet school the hard way. Undergrad- that’s four years. Then a post-bac program- another year. No admissions to US Vet schools, so a year “on the beach” while applying overseas. No decent options for post-grad so stayed overseas for that country’s version of a residency, then back in the US and essentially repeating the residency all over again. Now working part time as a vet at a big box store and living hand to mouth while paying off the loans and applying all over the country in the hopes of getting a full time job at an animal hospital. Current job is more like a cross between a vet tech and a groomer btw- with compensation to match.

Nobody had the wherewithal to sit this person down about 10 years ago and say, “I know you love animals but there’s got to be something else you love”? Don’t the first 12 rejections from Vet school seem like a sign from the universe that persevering may be exactly the wrong next step here???

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@eclpts Thanks for a fabulous article.

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@eclpts and @consolation It is a good article. Maybe why MIT moved toward engaging students by learning through problem solving group activity. Olin College of Engineering also does much of its learning in groups where students are engaged.

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@eclpts: @bernie12 would agree with your Stanford article.

Especially with the internet and lectures and notes online everywhere, charging thousands of dollars for a lecture class is almost a crime. I went from a HS that, when I went, was at the forefront of educational experimentation, and went I went to an Ivy-equivalent, the lectures felt antediluvian. As if, instead of progressing, I was back in the Middle Ages. Seminars, Oxbridge-style tutorials, case-study classes where the prof asks questions, flipped classes/experiential learning, even TA sessions where students ask questions. Those are worth attending a college in person for. Lectures are not.

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@PurpleTitan : I wasn’t all that great in undergraduate either, but I do appreciate having taken good courses that actually challenged me to do much more than memorize and pretty much regurgitate content or solving of algorithmic problems. You of course had to have a knowledge base achieved through some memorization, but I took many courses and professors (that would be considered by most students very challenging) that not only taught content but thinking and problem solving skills and were usually not taught in the pure lecture format. There were many elements that emphasized more engaged forms of learning. So even from courses that I did not score super well in, scoring a B grade actually meant a whole lot more than scoring an A in some courses. Scoring even in the B range in these courses meant that you had a solid amount of content mastery and skillsets that others would not have gotten from simpler courses. I do not regret going to Emory and being very imperfect (and choosing courses I wouldn’t be perfect in). I actually retained a substantial amount of content and skills and they have come in handy in research and even PhD interviews.

So I don’t know what this “scraping by” means. If I didn’t do well in simple courses of my STEM majors and was putting in a lot of effort, I would be discouraged, but since I was, for the most part, doing pretty well in courses that really demanded high level thinking skills that I use today, then I can’t really complain. I do feel like I am one of those people who acquired aptitude in particular areas and it took more than a year to do it. I think I was also just fortunate to not take too many STEM courses where people near the top were not breaking a sweat (and in some I was near the top). It is a completely different scenario to take easier STEM courses and instructors (very possible in the life sciences) where indeed most students are easily making B+ and higher and a student to be trying but not keeping up. The few times I dropped a ball in an easier course (some sort of B) was because I was putting in very low to literally no effort (was having personal issues or diverting effort to courses I enjoyed more).

However, in the life sciences, I must say that among many who appear to have “aptitude” based upon their transcript, many do not have aptitude of the form that translates to success in working in or doing research in the field. Many life sciences majors make it very easy to dodge challenging course work, even at elite schools. Many students can just find the instructors and courses that, say, emphasize lower levels of cognitive complexity comparable to high school life sciences courses and almost cruise their way through (it may be why even grades have been found to have limited reliability for success in graduate school research for STEM and why some programs put a premium on previous research experience and seemingly harder upper division and graduate level course work). Many imperfect engineers and even physics, and chemistry majors, due to more stringent course requirements often end up much more “tested” in their field and you have many more students with solid skill sets for a job or graduate student who are nowhere near the top of their class. In such a case, a rigorous education from some selective college can be beneficial if you can just do okay. Doing merely okay in some departments is indicative of a very respectable level of training (as in perhaps much better than that some top students receive in less rigorous programs, and trust me I know) especially if they are getting references and rec. letters from instructors who vouch for the intensity of their courses.

Also, as suggested, aptitude is relative. You may have aptitude in something, it just won’t be aptitude relative to a particular student body relative to a particular point in time. Again, I was a case that needed development and now I am good enough to tutor (and indeed do so) even many of the things I may not have scored an A in (not only that, I tutor the students for the same instructors). Having a rigorous program definitely made me better and I did better over time. Also, developing a desire to learn many things on my own (like through reading primary literature and books in fields) helped a lot so passion plays a role. If my course work was my only means of gaining ability in my areas of interest and I pretty much just disengaged it outside of class, I would be pretty useless and would have forgotten everything.

Also, American U’s use lecture too much do to efficiency. It is pretty hard to turn back because students actually do tend to like it precisely because they basically do have to “learn” less and certainly do not have to engage the material as much in and outside of class. It is hard to break “cram culture” and get students to commit to more time on task (which those other methods require or strongly encouraged). For flipped classrooms, a point of resistance comes from the fact that students naturally perceive teaching as the teacher talking at them the whole time especially if it is what is happening in other courses they take. Students feel only as if they are learning when being told to do or how to do or think about something. Self-directed learning with some guidance is a pain for many.

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@denydenzig You may find this article, originally published in the WSJ, interesting:

http://www.hseverywhere.com/index.php/blogs/139-students-pick-easier-majors-despite-less-pay

Laszlo Bock at Google thought she was making a serious mistake, but I think she made the correct decision.

Prof Kenneth Andersen explained why STEM grade so harshly here, and his advice to his daughter is precious:

http://volokh.com/2011/11/09/reforming-higher-education-incentives-stem-majors-and-liberal-arts-majors-the-education-versus-credential-tradeoff/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+volokh%2Fmainfeed+%28The+Volokh+Conspiracy%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

I think the way to go is to know what you want out of life, then design a realistic method of getting there.

There is no correct answer to your questions, only trade offs.

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@Canuckguy : The thing they mentioned about professional schools is what I postulate as well and it is kind of embarrassing if you ask me. Surprise, surprise, will value superficial success if it helps their rankings. Sounds like many elite undergraduate admission schemes now-a-days but much worse.

“getting Cs in these subjects probably means you didn’t learn anything substantial at a level you could understand and apply”

Again, this makes you question the grading standards and level of assessments in these so called difficult courses at some elite institutions. If this is true, then I am very familiar with how the instructors write exams any graded work. They pretty much put items on there that they expect B and C students to get (like basic understanding from notes and problem sets) and then a chunk on the assessments that only very top students will get that involve more critical analysis, extrapolation, and even creativity. This scheme is super common. And then they put the grades on a curve (because mainly only a chunk of the students will be able to crack the section with higher level thinking so averages may be low and the students who make the biggest dent in it get B+ and higher). More rigorous and better instructors would get the class to the point where a majority of questions could be written at a solidly high level such that a passing grade (B/C range) would not suggest the claim in quotes above (basically, just to pass, you have to acquire some very solid problem solving skills). However, many STEM instructors know that they are not effective at teaching in a way that goes beyond emphasizing content knowledge and thus you are left with the status quo of students who already have high enough ability of figuring out higher levels of thinking on their own not only being and upper ends of the course but also being the only ones who demonstrate substantial learning gains in the course. The others may as well have taken an easier instructor who did not assess the higher level cognitive skills.

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@Canuckguy Did not get the reference to the Google person. Can you please explain?

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The presence of AP doesn’t necessarily prove one is better prepared for college, especially considering quality of AP instruction varies greatly between high schools and instructors and AP courses are not always comparable to its supposedly equivalent actual college class.

One case I’m personally familiar with was an older college classmate who was floundering in a social science major related to history because despite receiving a 5 on APUSH from a respectable mid-Atlantic boarding school, he had so many gaps in US History knowledge that I had to give him a crash tutoring course so he could avoid crashing and burning in his major courses. He would not have had such gaps if he had taken our college’s US history survey courses.

Had an older cousin who graduated as an engineering major from with a cumulative GPA ten-thousandth of a point below 3.0. Caused him serious issues landing his first engineering related job in an era when most of his classmates already received job offers as early as the second-half of their junior year.

However, after working for a few years, his work experience ameliorated the effects of his mediocre GPA to the point he was admitted to several EE Masters programs on his employer’s dime. Ended up finishing his MSEE with only one grade below -A(It was a B+) from Tufts and he did it without having to pay for the vast majority of it*.

  • He did have to pay 20% of the cost of that one course for which he received that B+.
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@cobrat Wait? Social sciences used to give low grades where when you went to school? Was it recent? Because today, if you have even decent writing skills, many such instructors will give solid grades. I’ve only encountered a couple of instructors with a distribution of grades in a class where students were pretty much doing the work. In most social science courses today, it seems like lack of effort is usually the cause of a less than A/A- grade, not a lack of knowledge. You can get away with quite a few things. If anything, writing quality and ability separates the grades.

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I attended undergrad in the mid-late '90s and yes, social science and humanities classes did hand out C/C- and failing grades.

Some like that classmate took far longer than normal to graduate due to being placed on academic suspension(flunking too many classes) and/or parents forcing them to take mandated gap years when they received too many C-/C grades. Knew of a few who were academically expelled as well in a wide variety of majors including humanities/social sciences.

One college classmate who was repeating an advanced Poli-sci seminar because he flunked it before was overjoyed to receive the final grade of C+ on his seminar paper as that meant he could walk and actually graduate that year.

And this wasn’t only at my college or during my time, either.

Several years after I graduated in the end of the '90s, while waiting to see a grad Prof for something I happened upon an irate undergrad at an Ivy who apparently mistook me for the US History survey course TA who awarded him a C on a term paper.

Couldn’t help reading it considering he rudely thrust the essay in question right in front of my face.

And yes, the content, analysis, and writing quality were so abysmal that I actually felt his TA was being too generous and told that idiot undergrad as much. He apparently had the benefit of an elite private NE boarding school education considering he kept mentioning it along with wearing something with his boarding school’s name.

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@denydenzig Here is the Bock interview:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a-job-at-google-part-2.html?_r=1

My opinion is that the woman was struggling for academic survival; she had to move on. It was not a case of a B vs an A+.

@bernie12 My solution to Andersen’s credential to education trade off would be a college exit exam. I always find it odd that we put so much effort into admitting students… but not “exiting” them.

In my time, the toughest course social science students had to endure was a course on descriptive statistics. You would be amazed at the number of students who struggled with that requirement.

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@cobrat : There are still some professors like that at my school. I remember going to pick up my Arab-Israeli Conflict (hosted by history department) final paper/exam (which was weighted most of the grade) and fortunately I did well enough to get an A- but I was surprised the amount of C (even some C-) grades I saw. However, this was rare in history. There are maybe like 2-3 other instructors I know back there who gave students C grades. However, it is political science and psychology that still have a surprising stronghold of instructors who do so. Interesting, in political science, it is many of the those hosting survey courses (one difference about being at a private schools is that even the large survey may still be small enough to have a discussion section and significant writing requirements. I’ve looked at great public schools like say Georgia Tech and they have the standard large lecture: “here take the multiple choice exam” paradigm because the section was so large) and these series of upper division professors who teach “law” related courses (like on the courts and civil liberties). Psychology at my school had a more neurobiology/science/clinical lean so many of those courses are much more challenging than elsewhere (many elite schools also typically place a heavier emphasis on reading primary literature and data analysis in psychology courses than straight up textbook learning).

In addition, @Cannuck hinted at, both of these departments have methods courses (with psychology having the worst reputation perhaps because it wasn’t just a statistics course but actually had them carry out the surveys and studies they were interested in) that had a bad reputation. I wonder if the reputation was warranted because now there is a new statistical inference introductory course being required by many of the social science departments there and many of the social science students struggle through that (admittedly it is a stats class with a lab section that requires students to learn R and is less based on plug and chug and more on experimental design issues and understanding data. The plug and chug stats class in the math department was eliminated as a result so students can no longer run to that joke).

*Nonetheless, today, I think, even among Ivy leagues that graded harder in the 90s, the types of courses and grades y’all mention seem much rarer in social sciences outside of economics. This can even be said for the better southern schools which in the 1990s had much lower grades than today (more than .1 lower). I wish the rise could be explained by higher scores, but again, I do not think we are talking about classes that pre-dominantly use just exams (specifically multiple choice) to assess. In STEM, many professors see the same performance today for the same or lower level, so any increases to mean grades there is just flat out grade inflation. Amazing that some professors will still go out of their way to say: “no they are just smarter!”. Perhaps their own class is so easy that an increase in already high SATs would directly correlate with grades in the course which, a scenario which raises more questions than answers.

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@bernie12

The funny part is the Poli-sci seminar Prof with whom I took the course where several classmates flunked before and/or received C level grades wasn’t considered the hardest Prof/harshest grader. If anything, he was regarded as one of the more easy-going Profs in the department regarding those areas.

Also, some English lit Profs I’ve had were harsher graders and much more likely to ding you for minutiae.

Still a miracle how I ended up with an A in the class considering I never considered myself a great writer for English lit and I’ve always had issues studying poetry and that made up a sizable chunk of the course. The grade distribution in that course leaned heavily towards B-/C/C- direction with some failures on the final grades distribution posted in the department.

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@cobrat : Wow what 2 decades will do! Well, but ya know, maybe I should just go with the naysayers on this one: “Your classmates and you were just much dumber in the 90s. Not only would you not be accepted today, but it would be impossible for y’all to compete against our current recruits” lol. Classic. That is basically what the “but they are just so smart today” argument says. It is just so much more comforting.

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Funny part is such parents/current undergrads to make such assertions are effectively insulting many Profs/TAs who are teaching and providing academic help as requested…along with workplace supervisors/business ownerss they may end up working with after they graduate.

Hopefully, they keep that in mind before putting their proverbial foot in their mouths as that idiot Ivy undergrad did when he mistook me for his US History Survey TA nearly a decade ago.

Still am puzzled how he managed to get admitted considering that essay in question would not only have been flunked with a 0 by my public magnet HS teachers, they’d also order him to restart the entire essay from scratch.

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@cobrat : Probably their board scores lol. Speaking of that, hasn’t the SAT been recentered or changed many times anyway since then to either become “easier” or to provide a more crunched distribution near the top (and thus at top schools)? Like the latest one makes it out of 1600 again (I looked at Emory’s, and as of last year, the bottom quartile of matriculates shot up by 60 points versus the old and the top quartile 30. For those who reported old SAT, the range was 1290-1500 an improvement from previous year but the ones who took the new got 1350-1530. I think that difference is insane. So Emory, on the new system shoots past a 1400 median nicely, but isn’t there yet on the old. Other schools must be at like a 1600 then lol), which means the score out of 1600 is generally higher than the old. if you just take two of them. Score ranges at elites will appear even more compressed and many were already pushing nearly perfect averages. It just looks like a tool of limited use beyond a certain score. Like if 13 something is the bottom quartile at a school, that student can likely still do the work solidly depending on which majors they choose and what instructors they take, or they may be very little correlation at all beyond that level (there will be some because many top scorers may also have special attributes and aptitude in certain disciplines, but most schools, even elites are not recruiting a really large portion of these more academic admits in the first place. The STEM schools may be, but not too many others) because again, hopefully all the instructors are not giving multiple choice as the primary form of assessment. The elite schools, especially if a medium sized private is supposed to (excuse me, claims to) provide a more intimate education that rebuilds or builds upon the standard HS way of learning and testing. Beyond a certain threshold, maybe AP scores, subject tests, and accolades in certain types of disciplines should be a better proxy for aptitude or “grit” in an area.

Again, I think this explains the phenomenon of some schools over-relying on the SAT/ACT in admissions but not necessarily matching up to the academic intensity of other schools who have traditionally had that score range (or again, even rigorous lower score range schools). Some other schools may have just taken into account more “raw talent” in certain subjects, so can cut some slack on the SAT/ACT and bank on the students pursuing studies in their area of strength as based on SAT2, AP, and extracurricular engagement. Thus at these places, many instructors can pitch the courses pretty high and still expect students to put up a good fight academically without the whining and complaining. At some places, regardless of scores, students are just less tolerant or comfortable with being challenged at very high levels. They aren’t used to it (having to very deeply engage a subject and even struggle with it to succeed).

I wonder how different schools select for this mixture of “grit” and talent. As alluded to above, I have my ideas, but I wonder what it really looks like in an application and why some schools choose this route of selection and others choose a more superficial route. The latter appears to pay off in short term but then has diminished returns later. Perhaps schools that employ the latter really just want to “kick-start” themselves again and then fix other things later (minus say Chicago, which had great academics already but just wanted to join the popularity contest that is the rankings game. Some schools look like they want to jump the gun.).