I recently read
the post in the title of this blog entry at the Freakonomics blog, which I frequent. I love the question and have wondered myself some of the of the following related questions:
- Do grades measure our understanding or ability to learn?
- How fair is it to compare grades of different students from different schools, classes, teachers? (Some teachers are "easy" and some "hard".)
My biggest question though is: how much does school prepare us for what is to come? High school to college can be a difficult jump, but I found that being one of the top students by grade, timely completion of assignments, and understanding (in my estimation of course) did not prepare me for:
- Looking for a job.
- Interviewing well.
- Being a programmer in the real-world.
I should not expect class work to prepare me for looking for jobs and interviewing, but I would have hoped that my view of life after school would have been clearer than it was. Perhaps the onus is on the student, but I think teachers can do a better a job of preparing students for careers rather than being good test takers.
2 comments:
Major programs should require students to have real-world experience as early as possible. That should continue until graduation.
BYU CS majors could be required to do internships at places such as Novell. Real world experience, and Novell would get the chance to meet potential future employees.
That being said, academic grades can be indicative of dedication and understanding...but more is needed.
What's ridiculous is that I earned all A's in my education classes...and I spent much less time and effort in those than in my science classes--where I often earned B's and sometimes C's. Not all majors are created equal.
The real gripe I had about my degree program (Electrical Engineering) was that we never had to solve any open-ended problems. Yes, we had to solve problems, but, from the beginning, we knew there was a solution, and we knew the solution was based on whatever concept we'd just learned in class.
A good education (especially in college, but also earlier) really has to include open-ended problems that require creative thinking, where you have to sit down and really analyze the problem and come up with a good solution. To me, that's the real difference between school and the real world.
I've heard that a big part of problem solving is recognizing patterns - seeing a problem, recognizing how it is the same as another problem that has already been solved, and being able to tailor the existing solution to the new problem. I think school starts to teach you this, but only makes you take a few baby steps.
Most real-world problems don't fit into textbook categories, so textbook solutions don't usually suffice. Especially in engineering, a solution almost always involves trade-offs: cutting back on functionality to save on budget, removing features to make a product more robust, backwards-compatibility, etc. I never had to solve a problem in college that required any sort of design sacrifices.
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