One of my biggest frustrations with academia was the tendency to place emphasis on work. I've heard that this can be different at other institutions, but most people I've talked to generally agree that emphasis in college was placed on work.
Here's a recurring example: I'd often get a lower grade than other peers who "worked harder", even though my final grades or output were very clearly of a much higher quality. I generally didn't have much use for going to class, as I could learn what was presented much more efficiently on my own.
Not that I really cared about getting a B+ instead of an A -- if I did, I would have gone to every class. But it seems like the emphasis on work gives students the wrong priorities.
There seems to be two inputs to value: work and ability. If you have less ability, you can compensate by working harder than average. And if you have above average ability, you may tend to work less.
Note that ability doesn't necessarily directly translate to intelligence, and that I'm not downplaying hard work: those who both work hard and have ability will produce the most value.
But by putting emphasis squarely on work, academia is punishing those with above-average ability. My experience in college was that both the top 5% and bottom 5% of any given class did the least work, but doing less work was uniformly regarded as bad.
In the real world, though, value is most important. As an example, let's take two people who make pottery. One is a natural artist, and makes beautiful pottery. The other tries really, really hard, but the pottery isn't great. It may not be "fair" to the person who tried hard, but the beautiful pottery will be sold for much more money, as it's of higher value. What really matters to people is how much value you are providing them, not how much work you put into it.
I'm also not saying that ability can't be learned: in the above example, ability may represent both natural artistic abilities and learned skills.
It seems like a much better system would be to judge on value, and compare the final output. Those with less ability would be required to work harder to produce the same value -- they won't be taught that hard work without value is OK. And those with above average ability wouldn't be weighted down performing bullshit work; they'd have more time instead to focus on projects more interesting and useful to them.
8/20/2007 10:27:17 pm
Enjoyed the post, nice work.
Marcos Toledo
8/20/2007 11:45:34 pm
I, too, agree with the author. I also see people trapped forever in the "but I worked really hard for this!" thing well long after they've left school.
gene
8/21/2007 12:46:32 am
Hmm, imagine if you were both talented and worked really hard. The value you would create would be far beyond the average. Why use talent as an excuse to be lazy?
augustus
8/21/2007 01:28:11 am
David, Some of us are blessed with more ability than others. We therefore have more responsibility to produce better outcomes. My approach is to take on only those tasks that nobody else can do; to tackle only what others think of as the impossible. This has proven to be most rewarding. 8/21/2007 06:50:15 am
The biggest real world example of this is the 40 hour work week. 40 hours of "effort"-- measuring how much time you actually spend WORKING (or how much output you produce) is oftentimes an afterthought. 8/21/2007 03:12:07 pm
While I largely agree with you, it's pretty hard for the education system to function like that. Judging value is pretty hard beyond our current testing system, which is not without flaws. It would at the very least require a drastic overhaul in our education system.
Stephen Hebert
8/23/2007 02:51:25 pm
You definitely misunderstood college. (You may be confusing them with vo-tech schools, which are actually oriented to catalyse a person into someone immediately fit for a professional position.) College is not intended to emulate the professional world - if it was you would not have had to take two foreign languages, two Sciences, and a load of Math and English regardless of how superfluous. 8/23/2007 03:31:28 pm
@Stephen: It sounds like what you really are concerned with is that your classes weren't/aren't challenging you enough. And that everyone gets graded against each other when it would be much more helpful to each student to be graded based on their own improvement during the class, do you agree? When we don't need to work hard to understand the material all it really means is that we're not flexing our brain muscles, we're coasting and getting weaker.
Hal Needham
12/14/2007 12:08:28 am
David, Comments are closed.
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