For the motivated student wanting to follow an academic career, the standard plan of action is: work hard to get good SAT scores, get admitted into a good college, work hard to maximize overall GPA, work hard to get good GRE scores, and then hope to get admitted into a good graduate school. Unfortunately, there is a subtle flaw in this scheme of things which limits the potential academic accomplishments of the student: the negative effects of working hard.
Specifically, working hard for extended periods of time on things mainly as means to some other end – in this case admission into graduate school – can seriously harm the long-term ability to enjoy research work. This begs two questions: what are the harmful effects of such hard work, and how do they limit one’s academic career.
Consider the set of courses (together with the grades attained) that a recent good computer science graduate of LUMS took during his four years: Logic and Critical Reasoning (A+), Composition and Writing (A+), Islamic Studies (A+), Microeconomics I (A+), Microeconomic II (A+), Macroeconomics I (A+), Macroeconomics II (A+), Principles of Finance (A+), Development Economics (A+), Principles of Economics (A+). Intro to Political Science (A), Human Behavior (A), Communication Skills (A), Pakistan Studies (A-), Domestic Violence (A-), Gothic Fiction (A-), Philosophy of Education (B). And this does not include around twenty-five computer-science and four mathematics courses. What is one to make of this academic record?
A decade ago, my reaction on seeing this transcript would be first of awe, and then an unabashed admiration for the person and the effort involved. Today, my response is a feeling of distant exhaustion, followed by a pang of sadness for such mindless waste. I now explain my reasons.
Given such a wide variety of courses, it is hard to believe that any normal undergraduate student would like and enjoy more than half of those courses. Which, of course, is perfectly fine: one goal of a liberal arts education is to provide a wide variety of different areas to develop a good breadth of knowledge etc. But there is no reason to do so well in all these courses (other than the already-stated external motivation). For each ‘A+’ grade, one would have to spend more than a hundred hours reading material which is not interesting, spend more than thirty hours attending classes which are not exciting, spend long evenings grinding out empty essays instead of spending time with friends and family, spend long hours sweating and straining to do well in exams which themselves meaning nothing, spend hours and hours peeking around to see where ones lies ‘relative to the mean’, and so on. And this continuously for a period of at least four years. And this is precisely what is harmful: it demands an amount of will power and self-control which exerts a terrible toll to the psychological health of the individual in the long run:
“The complete control of impulse by will … is not really desirable. A life governed by purposes and desires, to the exclusion of impulse, is a tiring life; it exhausts vitality, and leaves a man, in the end, indifferent to the very purposes he has been trying to achieve.” – Bertrand Russell
This phenomenon, of tiring out of will-power due to excessive strain on it, also applies to graduate study. Graduate students in most universities have to pass a comprehensive ‘qualifying exam’, consisting of topics from all major sub-areas of the field. This requires many months of dedicated study; even a year or more for some, as the consequence of failing – being dropped from the programme – is rather dire. In fact, many aspects of this qualifying exam, and the preparation for it, mirror the grade-chasing, GRE acing, thoughtless racing mind-set of an ambitious undergraduate. The course exams, GRE, the graduate qualifying exam – all these test the student for certain specific qualities, which are often antithetical to a fulfilling life dedicated to research in a meaningful way. This is articulately described in the wonderful book “Disciplined Minds” by Jeff Schmidt:
“However, the student who loves the subject and is not alienated from it is profoundly affected by the qualification process. The process of preparing for the qualifying test, because of the kind of questions on the test and the way they must be answered, tragically alienates this student from his or her own field of interest. The test emphasizes quick recall, memorized tricks, work on problem fragments, work under time pressure, endurance, quantitative results, comfort with confinement to details, … and it de-emphasizes physical insight, qualitative discussion, exploration, curiosity, creativity, history, philosophy and so on”
In discussing this with several top undergraduates over the past few years, I find that almost all are fully conscious of the ‘alienated’ effort they are putting in to get high grades. But they all insist that it is a temporary phase, and that they will ‘really really’ start working when they finally get into graduate school. Far be it from me to belittle their youthful optimism, but invariably Nietzsche’s warning – ‘he who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.’ – springs to mind. Schmidt puts it elegantly:
“Students should not cavalierly label their alienated labor as merely temporary, as instrumental to get the degree but easily reversed afterwards. Performing intense alienated labor for an extended period of time changes the student. It dampens his creativity and curiosity, clouds his memory of his original interests and ideas and weakens his resolve to pursue them, while getting used to doing protracted, disciplined labor on assigned problems. It is empty rhetoric to tell the student who has gone through the qualification process that he is free now to pursue in his career his original goals, for he is now a different person …”
A physical analogy for this situation is that of a spring. It can be stretched occasionally for very heavy loads, or often for light loads. But if stretched too much for too long, it loses its elasticity, and cannot return to its original shape. And remains distorted and disfigured. And so it is with students.
Schmidt writes for American graduate students, but these harmful effects are amplified several times over for those doing their undergraduate studies in Pakistan, for two reasons. One is that for the lack of a social safety net, the consequences are far more severe. Many students will identify with his description:
“The prospect of failing the qualifying test frightens the student, even the student who is the best at answering the kind of questions used on the test. The student is frightened because his desired future as a professional in his field of interest is at stake. But he is also frightened because society does not guarantee his material security…It seems possible for the individual, if suddenly of no value to employers, to go overnight from a job to walking the streets, from being somebody to being nobody, from living in the suburbs to living on skid row, left to suffer and struggle for survival among the desperate at the bottom of society. It doesn’t matter that such individual downfall is very unlikely; by simply featuring the possibility, the system announces the fundamental insecurity of the individual. This insecurity unrelentingly haunts the student studying for the qualifying test. The student sees professional training as his chance for a secure future, with status and non-alienating work, his chance for a life free from the threat of a nightmarish trip to the bottom of the heap …”
The second reason goes as follows. In general, there are so many students applying for graduate school with great grades, high GRE scores, that for graduate admission committees to distinguish between them becomes almost impossible. For example, historically the GRE scores of Chinese students are so high that many departments are forced to have different criteria for them compared with other applicants. Here, those doing their undergraduate studies in the US have a strong edge which the ones in Pakistan do not: a recommendation from a famous professor.
Randy Pausch, in his famous “Last Lecture”, is not hesitant to state that he got rejected from CMU, and got admitted only because his undergraduate advisor was friends with the chair at CMU. This offers a way out if one is an undergraduate at a place where there are well-known academics. A strong recommendation letter from a well-known academic can go a long way towards securing admission into a great graduate school. So instead of having the pressure to ace a large variety of courses, one just has to, in the final year, decide a possible area of specialization, do well in those courses, perhaps do the final-year project with the professor. Even if one’s general grades and scores are not through the roof, a strong recommendation from a good academic can have an overwhelming effect – more so than high
grades in courses or high GRE scores.
This, in itself, is a good reason for any department to have a strong emphasis on research. If it has faculty known for their research, this provides good students with an alternate way to get graduate admissions, without the enthusiasm-destroying effect of the mindless rat-race for grades and GRE scores.
For the current students, it is a classic catch-22 situation: either one does well enough in course-work to get admission into graduate school, but that process damages the ability to perform well, in a meaningful way, in graduate school. Or one devotes the time to meaningful pursuit of individual interests, but then with the not-so-great grades risks getting ‘stranded’. I think it is an important question which deserves more thought than it has currently received. I suffer to see bright energetic students go through all this, but for my part, I see no way out of this for them.
This charade is perpetuated even through the early years of graduate school by providing students with a GPA. I have found the most common, and natural, misconception of fresh graduate students is that their GPA is any sort of indicator of their success. It’s a cruel misdirection too; understanding what success means in your research area is usually a subtle concept that takes years to discern properly. Many doctoral students don’t understand it until well into the twilight years of their program, chasing their GPA for the first few years of their doctoral study.
Nice article, Nabil. I’ve a few comments that I provide below.
The article hypothesizes that aiming for good grades in uninteresting, unexciting, etc., courses degrades the ability of students to perform well in graduate school. As an alternative solution, it recommends students to pursue their interests even if they have to compromise on their grades a bit because they could still get into a good graduate school with a good recommendation.
While I agree with the latter suggestion, I do not agree with the initial premise of the article. I think if courses degrade the ability of students, they primarily do so, because of the way they are designed and taught and not necessarily because they appear uninteresting. Therefore, I think it is equally important, if not more, to emphasize on designing courses in a way that promotes (creative) thinking, facilitates inquiry-based learning and engages students. I feel that grades, despite being a means to an end, serve an important purpose; they provide an incentive for students to work. Professors can effectively use this to channelize the energies of students in meeting the goals of learning. Also, it must be kept in mind that undergraduate education is not only targeted toward producing researchers or academics, hence, it must cater for a much broader range of skills and career paths.
The article assumes that there is an inherent tussle between aiming for good grades and pursuing your interests i.e, aiming for one somehow causes one to compromise on the other. I think this is slightly exaggerated. I’ve come across a number of students who have exceedingly well in both these things. They did exceedingly well in their undergrad, pursued their interests and then performed really well in graduate school and research. Once may argue that such people may be rare but it does suggest that the tussle isn’t inherent.
Nabil, The article touches on many different aspects but like any work that tries to find causal co-relation between a certain set of efforts and as complicated a thing as “succeed in a meaningful way”, it falls short in a number of ways.
Firstly, I disagree with the conclusion of your article since it’s unsubstantiated.
You wrote in the conclusion, “either one does well enough in course-work to get admission into graduate school, but that process damages the ability to perform well, in a meaningful way, in graduate school”.
During your entire article you never explained the connection between the cause and effect part of your conclusion above. Your article focuses on undergrads having to work hard to ace course work in all sorts of different subjects or grad students working for qualifying exams. How does that affect their ability to ace in graduate school “in a meaningful way” is not in anyway deducible from your article.
You also wrote, “But there is no reason to do so well in all these courses ”
I fail to understand why ? The purpose of undergraduate education is to prepare well rounded individuals who can apply themselves in multitude of ways. Being well rounded comes from actually learning about Gothic Fiction and struggling for that understanding in a similar fashion as one would strive for understanding Computer Architecture. I fail to understand why is there anything wrong in seeking this path and how being well rounded would hurt me in grad school. My only regret going through grad school was not getting a chance to go through undergrad with as much choice as is available to a US undergraduate. I ended up studying Research topics in Convex Optimization (a research project based course) and philosophy in the same quarter. Doing good at both of them didn’t seem to hurt my research goals.
On the other hand, if I take say Gothic fiction just to satisfy some liberal arts requirements and sail through Gothic Fiction to get a C, then I am not really interested in being a well rounded individual and perhaps have already chosen my calling in life.
For all such students, you wrote, “it is a classic catch-22 situation” i.e. they are forced to do good in these courses against their desire. They are forced to get good all around grades to enter a prestigious graduate school.
I do not think that is a valid proposition either. All top graduate schools in the United States would easily trade GPA for any credible research work or publication of any sort. Additionally, many graduate school applications ask you to enter GPA earned in Math/Science courses in addition to overall GPA.
In Summary, I don’t think there is any hard choice here for Undergrads of our day and times. I don’t see the dichotomy in getting high grades and preparing for graduate school. They can choose to do either or both. If they like to learn and experiment with all sorts of things, they have an opportunity to do so and do well at all those things. If they have chosen their path, they can excel by doing research in their areas of interest and demonstrating other things that graduate admission committees look for. A 3.0 overall GPA with high math/science grades plus two research journal publications would not lag behind a 4.0 with no research experience whatsoever in graduate admissions.
@Khurram: Your response hints that you have not yet supervised any research students :) … Nabil is implying that mindless hard work (perhaps requiring a conformist personality) is a hindrance for research. It is perhaps impossible for a reasonable student to be interested in *all* of the undergrad courses…
I like the quote, “he who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster”. Losing your creative edge through undergrad education can be a serious problem.
I agree that mindless hard work and a conformist personality are certainly not the traits you want in a researcher. However, I am not sure whether we can make a general statement that students with good grades are more likely to fall in this category.
First, I don’t think it is right to assume that high GPA requires mindless hard work. In fact, good instructors make an effort to ensure that mindless hard work (e.g., rote learning) doesn’t pay off and only those who truly understand the material get good grades.
Second, working hard (not mindless hard work) on seemingly uninteresting things is also important. As pointed out in earlier posts, undergraduate education is mainly about breadth and preparing well rounded individuals who can do well in a variety of roles (pursuing research being one of them). There are not many freshmen who are certain about their post undergraduate plans — suggesting them to only work hard on ‘interesting’ things may not be a good idea.
I would go on to argue that even in a research career it may be useful. I’ve often heard people saying how useful some of the seemingly boring undergraduate classes turned out to be for their graduate research (concept of core courses
also stem from this — even if some courses don’t seem interesting to a student at that time they may likely pay off in the long run).
Finally, in some specific types of research (e.g., large systems research, inter-disciplinary research etc.) you are likely to encounter small sub-problems that may not interest you but are critical in order to achieve the larger research objectives.
@Sohaib:
Guilty as charged :) I have not supervised research though I have been supervised so I can stake some claim to knowing this space :)
“Anonymous” pretty much covered what I would have liked to say but I would add a few points.
As I mentioned in my reply to Yaser’s posting, if undergrad courses promote a conformist attitude then that’s a problem of curriculum development and needs to be fixed there.
We need to keep something in mind. We are talking about undergrad courses here and not rocket science. A reasonably intelligent and well rounded individual will do good at a very wide variety of introductory undergraduate courses. Acing Economics 101 is not the same as acing “Random Matrices in Communications: Learnings from Particle Physics”.
It is indeed impossible to like all. But even without liking, an intelligent undergraduate can choose not to do too bad with some hard work. Also I am not sure about LUMS, but my guess is that if somebody is taking Gothic Fiction, they chose that class out of a bunch of others on offer and hence they at least have some degree of liking for the material.
> A 3.0 overall GPA with high math/science grades plus two research > journal publications would not lag behind a 4.0 with no research > experience whatsoever in graduate admissions.
This is actually not true. These days the best departments get many applications from undergrads firing on all cylinders: they have near perfect GPAs, near perfect GREs, research papers, and stellar letters of recommendations. It is *very* rare that students are accepted without outstanding GPAs, simply because it is difficult to do outstanding undergraduate research work without supervision.
I agree with Yaser’s point. Just adding my own observations on this:
It’s right that top universities do give significant weight to research exposure (in addition to other factors). In many cases, research exposure does not result in publications and that’s considered perfectly OK. Universities are not looking for established researchers — they just want to ensure that you have the right qualities to excel in research. Unfortunately, for many students from Pakistan, publications at reputed places is the only way to prove that they have these qualities because their undergrad university and recommenders are not well known.
Also, as Yaser pointed out this mainly applies to top programs (MIT, Stanford etc.). In general, you can possibly compensate one deficiency by excelling in something else. So undergrads who read this shouldn’t be discouraged — you can still enter a good grad school even if you don’t have a near perfect GPA or no research experience.
I would agree with your assertion but that was not the point.
My comparison was between two individuals with certain traits. Somebody firing on all cylinders including high GPA “and” some sort of research work at undergrad would be somebody that I would certainly prefer over the two hypothetical individuals in my initial posting. But then that person is an outstanding individual since that person happens to be well rounded in addition to showing promise in research.
What you are alluding to is the problem of admissions being competitive at Stanford, MiT, CalTech, CMU etc. and that is a given. The cream of the cream will usually be good at quite a few things. If an individual intends to compete with this bunch for the top most universities, they need to be outstanding in some way. They can still be competitive with this bunch without a super high GPA as long as their research work shows that they were indeed working hard doing something else.
The underlying assumption being that the courses that are being taught are taught in a way that encourages thought and hard work instead of mindless hard work. If that is not the case, then it’s not a problem of negative effects of high grades but a problem of curriculum development.
I am speaking from the gut (In Texas we think there are more nerve cells in the gut than the brain ;) ): Creativity and laziness go hand in hand. Extremely hard working people surely win out but they also create a big problem. They choke the area of research with incremental works … make simple problems and simple solutions look stellar. The hard workers exploit more and explore less … I think good research comes from more intelligent exploration and less exploitation (of known ways to publish a paper).
I dont agree with your point of view.
This workload that in your opinion strains a student and disillusions him of his long term goals is incorrect.
From O/A Levels to SAT to Undergrad/Grad school the competition becomes tough and considering the current trend with the passage of time it is getting tougher for new students.
With growing awareness regarding competitive education, students comepting equally in greater numbers from rural areas plus some other small factors contribute to this system getting tougher. This is trying for the student but it is the need of the hour.
This system mimics the real life and prepares the individual from what lies ahead, a much competitive and comparatively lawless dominion, which we can call the practical life.
Balanced life is a blessing at every stage. In under grad many students loose their balance to get high grades and this eventually start reflecting in their personalities even after they finish graduate school. I agree with Nabeel that undergrad students must focus on their core area, try to perform best in their projects, and with balanced extra curricular activities they will have better to get into grad school and to survive life happily afterwards.
An excellent article, reminds me of the quarter end speeches I used to give my Mom,I agree completely but somehow the strategy of working only on your core strengths does not work out so well.
It is a classic Prisoner’s dilemma game, if everyone co-operates and stops competing across the board, we will have an automatic distribution of talent to the respective fields. It is what is termed in economics as Specialization, it is the same concept that creates the benefit in trading goods and services. If every one chooses to specialize in the one thing and only one thing in which they are the best, it will be best for society as a whole. However, there will always be those who will choose to “cheat” and compete across the board for whatever reason.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. Let me put in my 2-cents.
I wrote the effects of courses etc. specifically on those that are going for graduate school and its long-term effect on their research motivation. I agree that for those going into other professions, other considerations come into play and maybe the current system is near-optimal (though I would disagree there as well).
I certainly did not mean to say that aiming for good grades has to be inherently uninteresting, unexciting etc. for the student. And agreed, professors can put in effort to make the courses interesting and fun.
Sure, a student should take a wide variety of courses as I listed in the example, and even find most of them interesting and fun. Nothing wrong with that. But if the student gets, say, an “A+” in every such course, I would be very very hesitant to buy the explanation that he was “simply interested and excited” about each such course. There are several reasons for that:
First, an “A+”, by definition, is given to less than 5% of the class. So trivially every student who is interested and excited will not get an A+ grade. What nets the A+ grade for the student is overwhelming effort. Lets say, hypothetically, that this is prompted by overwhelming interest. And so if someone gets an A+ for most of his undergraduate courses, it would seem that he is overwhelmingly more interested in such a large variety of courses than anyone else. Either he is a modern-day renaissance man, or there are other forces at play than interest and excitement.
Second, in our current world, for the 18-24 crowd, I have to say that there are tons of more interesting things than most, if not all, interesting courses. Ever watched an episode of prison break? house? lost? hanging out with friends? going out? sports? I could go on and on. I find it hard to believe that a student “driven by interest only” would find such a large variety of courses overwhelmingly interesting, but none of the above pursuits? I would think that students might find some courses interesting, as well as some of the above.
In my opinion, for a student following his interests, a GPA of 3.0 (B) to 3.3 (B+) is what I would expect. For really gifted students, perhaps up to 3.7. But a 3.90+ GPA just requires too much effort for me to accept the interest motive. So I disagree with you – there is an inherent tussle in getting an A+ grade in over 15 courses, and pursuing your interests.
A more reasonable explanation is that the student is imply responding to the short-term incentives the current institutional structure is providing them: a great GPA goes a long way towards admission to graduate school, which in itself is a good way for material prosperity. It is not a co-incidence that most academics all over the world come from the middle class.
It’s an ugly scene at a narrow gate for every student.
Let me also put two quotes that I left out, because they were somewhat tangential to the article, but which I also found interesting:
Despite the disreputable source :), I feel what the unabomber says has some merit:
“Science and technology provide the most important examples of surrogate activities. Some scientists claim that they are motivated by “curiosity,” that notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on highly specialized problem that are not the object of any normal curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a mathematician or an entomologist curious about the properties of isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is curious about such a thing, and he is curious about it only because chemistry is his surrogate activity. Is the chemist curious about the appropriate classification of a new species of beetle? No. That question is of interest only to the entomologist, and he is interested in it only because entomology is his surrogate activity. If the chemist and the entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to obtain the physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their abilities in an interesting way but in some nonscientific pursuit, then they couldn’t give a damn about isopropyltrimethylmethane or the classification of beetles. Suppose that lack of funds for postgraduate education had led the chemist to become an insurance broker instead of a chemist. In that case he would have been very interested in insurance matters but would have cared nothing about isopropyltrimethylmethane. In any case it is not normal to put into the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that scientists put into their work. The “curiosity” explanation for the scientists’ motive just doesn’t stand up.” –Unabomber’s Manifesto
The second is another quote from disciplined minds:
“Students finishing the ordeal of professional training often appear to be pressured and troubled, as if under some sort of unrelenting duress whose source they can’t pinpoint. Anyone who has been around a university graduate department or other professional school has undoubtedly seen many such students. These students end up doing much of their work while in a state of physical and mental fatigue, precluding the creativity and enjoyment that were once their priority. They are no longer the upbeat students who entered the professional training program. Students who were adamant in not wanting to become cogs in the machine, students who would join the system only on their own terms, students who stood solidly behind their own goals for society — many of these students now have a tired, defeated look about them, and an outlook to match. Many are now quite willing to incorporate themselves into one or another hierarchy, and to put up no resistance there, overt or covert, as they help do the work that furthers their new employers’ goals.
The willingness shown by the new graduate to function harmoniously with the system is usually not the disingenuous kind shown by people who have fundamental reservations but who are reluctantly going along with the only choice available. The new graduate often feigns reluctance so as to maintain appearances, but it is usually painfully obvious that deep down something has changed. The individual has taken a step toward adopting the worldview of the system and goals compatible with the system. Students who once spoke critically of the system are now either silent or fearfully “fair and responsible” in their criticism. They are careful not to be provocative — not to do or say anything that might displease individuals in authority. Any opposition is now sufficiently abstract and theoretical to not be provocative.”
I find the above discussion both interesting and scary at same time. It’s scary because students like me are the focus of the whole discussion and our future in research seems bleak. However, I’d like to point out something which I think is being overlooked in the discussion so far. I think it’s incorrect to assume that getting A’s and A+’s requires a lot of extra effort from the student, effort that the student can put elsewhere. From my personal experience, in a quarter based system based on relative grading its fairly easy to get grades with minimal effort and without really knowing anything substantial about the course. There are tricks and techniques to ace tests and to get grades. So a student smart enough to know the system can get these grades with a certain minimal level of effort and this minimal level varies from person to person. Obviously, this makes me wonder which scenario is worse: A student who is used to put in a lot of effort (but just for the grade) or one who is used to getting the grades with minimal effort (and thus not familiar with putting in sustained hard work)? Sadly though, both scenarios seem to offer bleak future for students wanting to go into research careers.
I remember when i was in O levels the plan was if i could just get A’s here I’d get into a good school for A levels and be done with it. Then in A levels the plan was if i could just get A’s again I’d be in a good college and be done with it. Now in a somewhat good college the current plan is if i could just get a good GPA I’ll be done. I feel like chasing myself all over the place without really gaining anything. So i would say i agree with the problem described.
The article ends on a very sad note and the picture is indeed bleak. I myself am in the process of being ‘alienated’ and corrupted, so to speak, and being in my junior year I’m getting tired of subjects that are tangential to what i really like to study. The fear off course stays there and the dilemma is not easy to solve. All i can do is hope that i come on pure on the other side of this.
Some points I would like to address. I apologize if it feels like I’m cherry picking quotes out of touch with the overall context.
“I think it’s incorrect to assume that getting A’s and A+’s requires a lot of extra effort from the student, effort that the student can put elsewhere.”
It really depends. While many gifted students can manage A+ grades with minimal effort, in general it takes a great deal of dedication and nose to the grindmill. I’ve seen students take pride in sleeping only 20 hours a week to maintain their high grades, and all the extra-curriculars they feel necessary to get grad school admission. The problem is not so much the hard work in of itself, or that one follows a well-rounded set of courses – but rather that the motivation is often university policy, and grade maintenance, rather than genuine excitement. And that can have a depleting effect on one’s personality and core interests.
KZ made some excellent points as well, including:
The purpose of undergraduate education is to prepare well rounded individuals who can apply themselves in multitude of ways. Being well rounded comes from actually learning about Gothic Fiction and struggling for that understanding in a similar fashion as one would strive for understanding Computer Architecture.
I believe taking a broad range of courses is good – the problem is the grade motivation and drive over everything , including one’s non-primary interests is fatiguing. Aiming for a sure A+ goes well beyond the dedication level required merely for a decent understanding and enjoyment of material. It requires poring over texts for subtle inflections and comparisons, meticulously double checking bibliographies, making sure every assignment is triple proof read and carefully formatted – in general, making sure the entire course is conducted professionally; every concept , no matter how mundane thoroughly done. I suppose it could be argued that such skill is good to develop going into grad school – but again, it’s a very wearying exercise, and can kill the joy of even what on the surface is a welcome diversion from one’s primary field.
Personally speaking, I don’t see much wrong with a broad range of courses – it’s the compulsion that one has to push oneself to get the grade, rather than at one’s natural level of interest in the subject material. It isn’t simply a compulsion born in admission policies, or university course offerings – but also of the high value society places upon attaining distinctions, and the weight of such expectations placed on the academically talented.
A related talk by Ken Robinson about how traditional education system kills creativity.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Thanks for sharing such a nice video, actually it is a much more eloquent expression of what I left as a comment to Yaser :)
Nice article .. I can understand the basis of the article , and I agree that sometimes when students try too hard for grades they miss out on the important things in a course.Like how one would apply the skills acquired in a course in the ‘real world’.
It is really fasinating to read this article and all the points mentioned here by The author. Some of the points are so true and transparent. I will add few things here with due respect and kind permission from the the author, I myself being a graduate student at MIT and now working as a researcher in BMW AG technology group cannot agree more with Nabil but I also support the opposite stance. Honestly when I look at my graduating class students who were mostly All rounders like we have in Cricket you can say them Jack of all trades are either running companies or leading the top Global fortune companies in US. Especially after this Global recession People with with well round personalities were the ones to keep and hold the job and are now rising like never before. Here I will just highlight one thing which I mentioned in my book also that in this age of information most of Top schools strictly in applied research want well round students GPA above 3.00 good GRE score but most important element is your essay and your communication with professors. [apologies for typing with spelling mistakes I'm typing this on my blackberry with no spell check while waiting for my food plus noise at the airport]