Abe is 6 years old. Most kids in his grade 1 class can count to 20 but Abe cannot. Therefore Abe will never go to law school because law schools only want top students.
Alex is 18 years old. They tried their hand at driving a couple times and almost hit a tree. Therefore Alex will never learn how to drive.
I hope most people will find these two inferences absurd. What you perform at 6 is not an indicator of what your abilities are as an adult, and there are so many ways a driving lesson can go wrong. But many people still subscribe to the same underlying reasoning without realizing it.
This post is in honour of my so-far most liked tweet, where I out myself as a C+ student, as I explain to you why thinking of me as less deserving of graduate school because of my grades reveals the above reasoning.
As a straight C+ student myself, I'm constantly baffled by my students not happy with a guaranteed B because they want As.
Wanna start some sort of "proudly being average" movement.— kinozhao (@kinozhao2) November 25, 2020
Many people “liked” it, presumably because it’s unexpected. But why, though? I got C+ when I was 20 years old. Now I’m 30 and towards the end of my PhD. I was also the best at mental arithmetic in my school when I was 10.
Ah, you say, but 10 was so long ago. 20’s different. 20 is when you can tell if someone is a Smart Person (TM) or not. It’s like height. Your height at 10 is not very indicative of your final height, but your height at 20 is your final height.
There used to be a theory in psychology where people’s brains stopped developing when they are 20, then people thought hard about it and realized it’s dumb and dropped it. Sure, if by “development” you mean that babies don’t have as fine-grained brain structures as adults, then that’s right. But if you mean neuroplasticity, that’s wrong. If you mean learning, that’s absurd. My grandma learns a new set of dance moves every month.
So it makes no sense to say that “knowledge” is flexible at age 10 but gets set in stone at age 20. Maybe you mean “intelligence”, the magical thing that limits what you can achieve in life. I’ve written about “talents” before on this blog, but here’s another angle.
Suppose we think intelligence exists and is genetically predetermined, and that, no matter what I do, I will not be the next Albert Einstein. Put in this form, it’s not that implausible. No matter what I do, I will never win the Olympics in sprinting. Let’s roll with it for now.
The thought must be something like this: if you got a C+ in undergrad, you have shown yourself to be intellectually not capable for grad school (or whatever), so it really is surprising how far you’ve come.
Suppose there is such a thing as intellectually not capable for grad school (which I happen to think is less plausible than not capable to be Einstein). To say that if you have this capacity you would not have gotten any grade less than an A is to place a lot of faith in people doing the grading. If you are a teacher, ask yourself: whenever you give out a C grade, do you think to yourself “I have gathered enough evidence to determine that this student does not have the mental capacity to be a doctor”? (If you do, I’d like to see those evidence; also you shouldn’t be a teacher.)
If teachers are not at least 90% reliable at determining whether students’ grades tightly track their innate intellectual capacity, then why do you find it surprising that someone who has gotten a low grade later achieves something?
Ok. Maybe it’s not about intelligence per se. But grades must mean something, right? Teachers don’t give them out at random, so they must mean something. What can they possibly mean if not intelligence?
One person asked me “How did you C+ your way into academia?” Great question. My first instinct was to say “I worked very hard”, which is a lie. I did do work, but not harder than others. Everybody works hard in graduate school.
A more productive question is probably: why did you get an C+? The expectation here is that I have lost whatever it was that caused me to not get an A, which is why I’m allowed to get As now.
People glorify “working hard” in the same way they used to glorify intelligence. The thing is that if you think intelligence is not genetically ingrained, it would be bizarre for you to think that working hard is.
There are many reasons why someone might choose to work hard or not. Some of these are glorified, like high career aspirations. In my case, my parents have always emphasized being happy over achieving great things. They were very glad that I got into a good school on my first try, and they went out of their way to tell me that the only expectation they had was that I graduate and don’t get into drugs. C+ was enough to graduate and I did not get into drugs (which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with drugs). I didn’t feel the need to work harder.
Another factor is that people might be bad at working hard. Although I don’t consider working hard as a capacity, I don’t consider it as a simple choice either — it’s a skill, and some people are better trained in it than others. In my case, I’ve always gone to boarding schools but, contrary to popular belief, boarding schools don’t actually teach life skills. When I had to live alone for the first time in college, I was horrible at it. Most of my energy was devoted to keeping myself from starvation, which I succeeded. I also managed to keep myself from depression, eating disorders, or a whole host of other stuff that disproportionally affect 20-year-olds, which was very lucky on my part. Unfortunately, it did mean that I didn’t really have any energy left over for “working hard” at school.
The last I’ll talk about is that, to get good grades, you not only have to work “hard”, you also have to work “in the right way”. When people say “you got a C+? You must not have worked hard”, they imply that if I did work hard, I would’ve gotten an A. That’s just absurd. It’s especially absurd in my case since our grades were assigned relative to everyone else in the class, so if more than 10% people work hard then math dictates that at least some people who work hard will not get As. It’s also absurd as a general rule in life and people believe it have had very fortunate lives. (There’s nothing wrong with it, by the way; I’m happy for you.)
As a matter of fact, I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in all the above three aspects, in that I’ve only had mild versions of them. I didn’t work hard because my parents had low expectations, not because I had to work full time to support a family. I didn’t know how to work hard at school because feeding myself was hard enough, but I did manage to do that with my mental health intact. I had trouble navigating university-level expectations but I do not have a learning disability. I have since met people who had to deal with all kinds of severe versions of above and still managed to achieve great things. Some of them also had low grades; some of them did not. It really is a matter of luck.
Luck, my friend, is how I C+ my way into academia.
Of course luck isn’t the only story. Another very important aspect of it is interest. It turns out that I’m interested in it enough to spend time trying to figure these things out. And it turns out that, if you spend some time, you might succeed. I succeeded in figuring it out during my master’s.
Late in my undergraduate career, I considered going into special education. As part of a class I took, the professor invited three autistic adolescents to share their experience in the classroom. One person told us this story (the details are fuzzy now but the gist remains):
When he got to grade 10, he still couldn’t read. He could do math and other things alright but could not read a single word. People around him decided that this was just part of his autism and that was that. He went to an integrated school but sat out of English classes to do other things.
One day, he was walking down the school hallway and saw a classmate reading a comic book. He asked what it was and asked his mother to buy some for him. He got really into it. He spent 15 hours from dawn to night reading comic books — just the pictures, since he couldn’t read words — everyday. At some point, he started to wonder what the words said, so he sought help from parents and teachers to decipher words in his comic books. Within a year, he changed from a 10th-grader who could not read a word to an 11th-grader who was fully caught up to reading and writing such that he could attend regular English classes.
He showed us a thick novel he brought with him to read on his way there. He was on track to take the Canadian Diploma exam by the end of grade 12 and apply to universities. He might go into literature.
We like to tell grandiose stories, like how we knew from the dawn of times that philosophy was our calling, that we were brilliant diamonds, which we tirelessly polish to finally shine at just the right times to end up where we are. We think those who are not like us are not as deserving — or, rather, we worry that if we don’t think this, we would have to admit that we ourselves are not as deserving as we think. But we really are just all doing whatever we can. Sometimes our best falls short; other times our mediocrity is enough.
Grades do tell us something: they tell us whether a student has mastered whatever the class is trying to teach. They don’t tell us why someone succeeds or fails at such a mastery, and they certainly cannot tell us whether this person will succeed or fail in the future.
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