Are Straight A’s the Road to Success?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/opinion/letters/top-grades-education.html

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To the Editor:

As a valedictorian and straight-A student through grad school, I saw myself in “What Straight-A Students Get Wrong,” by Adam Grant (Sunday Review, Dec. 9). A focus on grades led me to play by the rules, check boxes and value external validation. It’s taken decades to find my own North Star, invest in relationships and question the system that bred me. However, I’d like to add three points:

First, striving for academic excellence has real value: It builds work ethic, habits of aiming for ambitious goals, and, most important, intellectual growth. These still matter.

Second, with exceptions like Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King duly noted by Mr. Grant, underachieving in school does not necessarily promote success in life. There are countless ways to get B’s and C’s without building the “creativity, leadership and teamwork skills” that Mr. Grant rightly acclaims.

Last, we must fundamentally reconceive the focus, design and assessments in our school system, such that doing well equates to more holistic success factors that truly prepare students to thrive today and transform tomorrow.

Jeff WetzlerHastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.The writer is the co-founder of Transcend, a national nonprofit that promotes school innovation.

To the Editor:

Adam Grant sets up so many straw man arguments that one hardly knows where to begin. How about with his claim that job performance at Google does not correlate with college grades? Well, just try getting an interview there without good grades from a strong undergraduate computer science program.

Also weak is his dismissive claim that “straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams.” You could describe the same phenomenon by saying these people learn fast and remember what they read.

And Mr. Grant claims, with no evidence, that getting top grades “requires conformity.” I would argue the opposite: Those who aim high have little company and must often toil alone as they face the challenges of reaching their lofty goals.

And let’s not forget the glaring fact that straight-A students are often really smart.

Blake MagnusonEvanston, Ill.

To the Editor:

I was a straight-A student at the University of Virginia (class of 2016). I worked hard in my classes and I spent a fair number of beautiful days inside studying. I also played guitar, wrote a book and had a fulfilling social life.

I believe that Adam Grant makes two errors. The first is assuming that the pursuit of a 4.0 requires “cramming information and regurgitating it on exams.” I majored in international relations and physics, and in neither discipline did my professors expect me to memorize vast reams of material. In fact, in physics, I was explicitly told never to waste time memorizing formulas that I could simply look up.

Dr. Grant’s second mistake is more serious: He regards the pursuit of a 4.0 as a self-inflicted obsession. I cared about getting a 4.0 because I worried about my prospects after college. While he asserts, “Really, no one cares,” in every graduate school application or scholarship form I’ve submitted, there was a prominent place reserved for my undergraduate G.P.A.

Ben HarrisWashington

To the Editor:

While Adam Grant is right to highlight the problematic culture of academic perfectionism and G.P.A.s, his proposed solutions, such as eliminating pluses and minuses from letter grades, do little to challenge our antiquated system of using grades to assess student performance.

Several colleges, including Hampshire College, assess students with narrative evaluations instead of letter grades. Narrative evaluations shift the focus from academic achievement to learning and growth.

I should know. My perfectionism and pursuit of A’s led me to overextend myself and drop out of high school. I eventually attended Hampshire College, where I was able to focus my studies on problems I wanted to solve, questions I hoped to answer and skills I wished to learn.

Since being freed from grades, this high school dropout has gone to both medical school and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Raphael SherakBoston

To the Editor:

As a former teacher of very bright students, I couldn’t agree more with Adam Grant when he writes of his dismay as students obsess over getting straight A’s. Yes, students should attend to their curiosity and make time to smell the flowers.

However, I for one am grateful that there are doctors, carpenters, car mechanics, dentists, law enforcement officers, lawyers, judges, plumbers, architects (you name it) who do obsess about getting things just right, who “settle into the system instead of shaking it up.” Very few will become another Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling or Martin Luther King, and getting relatively poor grades won’t propel them to become so.

Hoyt TaylorPittsboro, N.C. The writer taught at Groton School for 28 years.

To the Editor:

For 12 years, I have silently carried the shame of graduating high school with a 2.1 G.P.A., a feeling that has transcended the ink on my transcript to how I see myself within the world. After high school, I had no intention of going to college. I was happy with that because I believed I would fail anyway. When I was 17, I became a father. It propelled me to attend community college, but the insecurity from high school constantly ruminated in my mind as I transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, then earned a master’s degree at U.C.L.A.

Today, I can see that my grades do not define me and my potential. Thank you, Adam Grant, for showing that I shouldn’t carry the stigma of my G.P.A. around as an indication of who I am, my worth, whether I will succeed or what I can achieve.

Alex SernaSan Juan Capistrano, Calif.The writer is executive director of Breakthrough SJC, a nonprofit that guides low-income students through college.

To the Editor:

I am probably one of the straight-A squares whom Adam Grant talks about. I’ve gotten only two A-minuses in my life from kindergarten through Harvard. Now, I am a medical student.

Perfectionists are squares who follow all the rules. Society needs us, too. We are weirdly detail-oriented, and that works well in a field where details are the difference between life and death. We might not be the visionaries who will fundamentally transform the world, but we sure can keep a lot of the wheels rolling so that there is something left to transform. And I will admit, grade-grubbing perfectionists can be an annoying bunch.

So go forth, my fellow straight-A students! You are valuable, too. Just try to be better humans while you are doing it.

Arifeen RahmanSan Jose, Calif.

To the Editor:

What straight-A students get wrong is not, as Adam Grant purports, a drive to do well. It’s an inability to cope with coming up short.

The real test of a student’s character is how one deals with falling short of what one asks of one’s self. It is not a sign of strong character to resolve not to work hard under some pretense of self-development: to strive for “getting at least one B before you graduate.” The test is whether, in striving for A’s, one can receive a B and keep chugging in pursuit of a challenging goal.

Perfection in anything is a foolish goal, and it is important to balance work and play. But I don’t think it’s impossible to do extremely well academically while challenging one’s self and enjoying and developing one’s self socially. I like to think I’ve done it thus far.

Philip BrainKansas City, Mo.The writer is a sophomore at Kenyon College.

To the Editor:

I grew up working class in small-town Pennsylvania. We had family problems with drugs and depression. Neither of my parents earned college degrees. And according to my own father, I would never amount to anything. When I arrived at Cornell, I was unsure of my abilities. The overwhelming majority of my classmates were rich kids. They came out of private schools or great public schools in affluent suburbs. I expected everyone to be smarter than I was.

After my first semester, I quickly realized that my affluent peers were neither smarter nor better than I was. I graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a G.P.A. of 3.9+. I left Cornell with no doubts as to my abilities or intellect. I needed that competition and validation. Besides, academic competition was never nearly as stressful as poverty.

Jonathan E. PollardFort Lauderdale, Fla.

To the Editor:

Adam Grant’s idea that the highest grades don’t determine life’s success has already been realized by heads of astronomy departments. It has been noticed for some years that there was little or no correlation between graduation and subsequent success and a student’s grade on the physics Graduate Record Exam.

It has been accepted that once you pass the 50th percentile — and some say the 30th — GRE grades don’t matter, so they mostly aren’t being required anymore. It is your independent work with advisers and your stick-to-itiveness that are more important.

I’ve seen great success among many of the 200 astronomy and astrophysics majors at Williams during my time here, without a noticeable correlation with grades.

Jay PasachoffWilliamstown, Mass.The writer is chairman of the astronomy department at Williams College.

To the Editor:

I once heard the grades paradox expressed this way: “The A’s get hired to teach in the universities, and the B’s get relatively good jobs working for the C’s.”

Rob ColterToronto