A couple of days ago, TOA posted some thoughts on why the GPA system does not reflect how success is measured in the real world. Today, I’m back with a hypothetical example to further illustrate how GPA isn’t the best way to approximate real world success.
Let’s say we have a school with one hundred students. They all take five courses and score a ‘B’ in the first semester of each for a GPA of 3.0.
Next, suppose a new kid moves to town. He gets one ‘A+’ and four ‘C’ grades for a GPA of just above 2.5 in the second semester. Everyone else continues to get a ‘B’ average to maintain their 3.0.
Now, consider what happens when the third semester rolls around. Let’s say the students all want to study and improve their scores. The new student can help all the others in the one ‘A+’ subject while every student can help the new student in the four ‘C’ subjects.
If we set up a marketplace for tutoring services, how much could the ‘A+’ student charge? What about the ‘B’ students? The marketplace would look like this:
1) 1 ‘A+’ student demands 1 tutor in ‘C’ subjects – supply is 100 tutorsThen, we would apply the basic laws of supply and demand:
2) 100 ‘B’ students demand 1 tutor each for five ‘B’ subjects – supply is 1 tutor
1) Supply = 400 > Demand = 4… price goes downIn this extreme example, the ‘A+’ student is going to basically auction off tutoring services to the highest bidder. And guess what? The price is going to go up and up and up…
2) Demand = 500 > Supply = 1… price goes up
The other side of the coin is just as interesting to me. The ‘A+’ student will need four tutors, one for each ‘C’ subject, and there will be one hundred students capable of filling the demand. There will be another auction, reader, but the direction is going to be in reverse – the price is going to go down and down and down…
Do we see now why the relationship between school and real world success isn’t as close as many like to portray? No? Not yet, eh, reader? Maybe the idea of ‘a tutoring marketplace’ outlined in my over-specified hypothetical high-school isn’t as compelling as I thought. You drive a hard bargain, reader, so let’s try this example instead...
Suppose we have some sort of highly competitive post-graduate program, maybe an MBA sort of thing. The students are all highly driven, intelligent, and so on. In the first semester, they all get ‘A’ averages.
Now, let’s say a hypothetical student comes to a realization – if everyone gets the same grades, how will employers pick out the next hire? And the short answer is: they can’t because everyone has the same attributes. This student decides to differentiate a little and goes for an ‘A+’ in a favorite class – let’s say it's related to supply chain operations – and gets the top grade in the second semester. It comes with a cost, though – the rest of the grades fall off, let’s say down to a ‘B’, and now this supply-chain wizard of a student has the lowest GPA in all of the school! So, what next?
I see two scenarios. In scenario A, the student blindly goes ‘into battle’ in the job market armed with the lowest GPA in the class and a string of excuses – eh hem, excuse me, explanations. This student may or may not get a job. The one thing I know for sure is that, in the event of a tie with a fellow classmate for a given role, this student will probably not get the job (since the classmate has a higher GPA and should therefore win the ‘tiebreaker’).
In scenario B, the student is more tactical with the job search and goes for roles where the ‘A+’ is relevant. This student also may or may not get a job. But the considerations are different here – things like expertise in a specific skill are more important factors. And if there is a tie with a classmate, the tie now goes to our hypothetical student (who has a higher skill-specific grade of ‘A+’ than the classmate’s ‘A’).
When I think about this scenario long enough, I start to wonder if this isn’t one of those cases where the example is actually less clear than the reality. The job market, after all, is merely a series of skill alignments with open opportunities. The faster a prospective employee starts to create differentiation from the competition, the faster this prospective employee will find a good match of skills with opportunity. It might pay off right away in the initial job search after the graduate program or it might pay off a decade later when a former classmate remembers to hire the one student who was in the 99th percentile for a specific skill. The key isn’t really when it pays off but rather cultivating the mentality of differentiation by learning to become comfortable with performance variation across your entire range of skills.
Of course, the case for the ‘well-rounded’ student will always remain a strong one. But ultimately, I think the students who seem forever capable of working anywhere risk never discovering the ideal role for them. A perfectly smooth puzzle piece doesn’t lock in very well to any jigsaw puzzle, you know?
