{Essay} Why Grades?

Cross posted from my personal blog. The {Essay} tag that I use denotes at least a week of research and thought; minimally, also one round of editing. Do note, too, that this was originally written for a Malaysian audience.

Do grades matter as much as our parents say they do?

One thing we know for sure is that grades are important. Our parents reward us when we ace exams, and so we have been conditioned to think that scoring As in school are important achievements worthy of our time. And for the most part, this is true: the approval of our peers and our parents and our teachers depend largely on our grades. So grades do matter. But there's an interesting assumption to examine here: why do grades matter so much? Are they still as important now as they were 50 years ago? And perhaps - more importantly - why do so many of us accept grades as the de facto indicator of ability, without ever questioning the underlying logic of our grading systems?

I've been thinking about these questions for some time now, and I think I've come to some reasonable conclusions about them. My contention is that grades are no longer as important as they once were, and the implications from this idea are rather exciting, and scary, both at once.

Where Exams Come From
Exams and grades are relatively new things to the human experience. It wasn't until the industrial age that schools - and by extension exams - became commonplace.

The first society to implement examinations were the Chinese. Beginning with the Sui dynasty, candidates from all over China would gather to take the Imperial examinations, held once a year, every year, in order to gain entrance to the state bureaucracy.

There are two important things about exams that we must recognize began with the Chinese Imperial examinations.

The first is that the Chinese examinations served as a filter for the Imperial government. They made no pretense to be anything otherwise. And to this day exams still do act as filters: there are only so many jobs in companies and governments, and so therefore there must be a way of separating the good from the bad, the capable from the uncapable. Exams are that 'way', and they serve exactly that purpose.

The second thing may surprise you, and it is this: what the Imperialist Examinations focused on were Confucian classics. You may wonder at that, and rightly so: what does a study of the classics have to do with state management? And the truthful answer is ... well, not much. Apparently the Chinese government thought very highly of it - they considered learning the classics to be a good sign of intelligence, and if you excelled at it then you must certainly be clever enough to manage a state on your own.

Was that a valid idea? I think there's something to it - the British colonialists had a remarkably similar mentality. Do well in Latin, they say, and we'll give you a colony to rule over for us. And that worked out pretty well for them.

Where Exams Go Wrong
Those base assumptions that the Chinese Imperialists had are things that we've carried with us, even to this day. Exams are supposed to be good filters, and they are supposed to be indicative of our ability - even if 80% of what we study would never be used in our actual jobs.

But is this true?

If exams are good filters of society - how, then, do we explain the many people who do well in school, but not as well in life? And how are we to explain away the weird outliers that defy what we know of examinations - Steve Jobs, for instance, or Bill Gates, or Richard Branson? If exams are good filters, these outliers shouldn't have had happened in the first place. And if they really are good filters, everyone who scored good grades would be just as successful outside of school as they were in it.

We know that some straight-A students make for terrible employees; why is that so?

Perhaps a better question to ask is this: what exactly is it that grades measure? If exams are a filter for weeding out the good from the poor, then surely there must be something that they measure that's so valuable to future employers. If you could figure that out, perhaps you'd be able to get more mileage from your examinations.

I suspect Paul Graham has the best answer to that question: grades measure future performance. Employers are interested in future performance. They can't test everyone themselves, by putting people in the job one by one until they find the best guy, and so they rely on the next best thing - grades.

But the problem with grades is that grades aren't always a good indicator of future performance. In fact, they can sometimes be particularly bad. Grades are the results of exams; exams are a filtering system for future performance, and so therefore exams - being a system, like all systems - can be hacked.

How can exams be hacked? By its very nature, exams are particularly susceptible to people who are good at ... well, exams. In Malaysia, scoring well in exams is usually a direct function of one's ability to absorb certain facts in order to vomit them out later onto a test paper. If a student gained the skill to do exactly that - he would do well for all his exams, regardless of whether the exam was history or chemistry or math. And, yes, you'd think this would be different for subjects like math or physics, where there's thinking involved, but you'd be surprised. I remember being shocked when I first came to NUS. My discrete math teacher was a Frenchman, and the math he taught required creativity - something I had never experienced before. It was amazing and beautiful to see that coming out from a high-level math textbook, and also rather scary; scary because it wasn't particularly hackable.

Is it really a problem that grades are not good indicators of future performance? The answer to that is yes, it is - because it is no longer universally true that grades are the 'next best thing' for measuring performance. Grades were never a good indicator of future performance to start off with, and they are beginning to seem obsolete. What has changed?

The Decreasing Importance Of Grades
It would be wrong to say that companies have wised up to the inaccuracy of grades. For the large part, this change has been due to a shift in economics as opposed to a conscious, calculated decision by market leaders.

The global economy today favours smaller companies over big ones. There are many reasons for this, but the basic ones are obvious: due to globalization and cheaper logistics, it now makes more sense for companies to outsource some tasks in order to stay focused on their core competencies. This has been a relatively new phenomenon. Never before has a smaller company been able to take on a bigger company - and win. If you don't believe me, consider: in the past, railways would purchase steel refineries to manufacture the steel required for their operations; today, it outsources such operations to external - often international - companies. And this is but one example, in what is a remarkably outdated industry. The effects are far stronger and more powerful in technological companies. But, bearing these differences, what does this mean for grades?

It turns out that it is easier to measure performance in a small company, as opposed to a big one. If you do well, the company does well; if you do badly, the company does badly. This is not so for large corporations. In a large corporation, individual performance cannot be easily measured, because the organization is so large that your individual contributions do not have a significant effect on the bottom line. Graham points out this is why grades have been so important to employers for the past few decades. The harder it is to measure individual performance, the more important it becomes to predict it. And because the economy has been dominated by large corporations for the past few decades, it used to mean everything to do well in exams.

But this is fast becoming history. Grades matter less when you can directly measure what they are made to predict - which is real performance. Why bother with an indicator when you can gauge the real thing? Larger corporations are adapting in order to enjoy the benefits of being small - Google, for instance, forms small teams of engineers to develop and test new products, and presumably gauges performance based on those smaller teams.

If this seems a little incredulous to you, consider: just 50 years ago it was enough to get good grades to get a good job to retire comfortably. This no longer holds true. Today, we are not only aware of people who have succeeded despite dropping out of college, but I have friends in NUS - in Singapore, even, a very exam-oriented country - who have either skipped college altogether, or who plan to drop out of school to do their own startups. And in big companies, there are now performance reviews, where before there were none. It used to be that seniority was all that mattered; young associates accepted a lower pay because they had to pay their dues, their times had yet to come.

It seems to be uncomfortably real that grades are beginning to decrease in importance. At the very least, they no longer hold the make-it-or-break-it quality they once had. And so, if this is true, the trend begs the question: what does this mean for our students?

An Exam-Oriented Paradox
One important thing we must remember is that for certain countries, the old model seems to hold true. In Japan and Korea, for instance, if you earned good grades, you are still able to score a stable, quality job in a salaried company. And to that end both countries have very competitive exam-oriented systems, and a high density of cram school to boot.

Would this state of affairs last forever? I doubt it. It turns out that smaller companies are also more efficient companies, and globalization cuts both ways. Sooner or later, the Korean and Japanese corporations would have to outsource their operations, and therefore split into smaller, independent units, if they are to keep up with more nimble competitors. And even if they refuse to do so, current economic forces make it feasible to start small companies, particularly those built around the Internet. While Asian countries currently enjoy the luxury of the sure grade and the stable job, it is something that may not last for much longer.

Unfortunately for us, however, the Asian model of education is still optimized for this old economic model. Malaysia isn't by far the only country with an exam-oriented society. There is nothing wrong with doing well in exams; it is when exams become the focus of a society's expectations that things begin to go wrong.

The problem with exams - particularly in Asian societies - is that the examination often becomes an ends onto itself. People say that the purpose of school is to learn new things that you may put to use good later in life, but this isn't true. What you're really going to school to learn - if you're in an Asian country - is to learn how to do well in exams.

There is a simple test for this: ask yourself if studying equals learning in high school. If it isn't, and you aren't doing much learning while you study, then there is a disconnect between the two. The truth is that schools spend a lot of time teaching us how to do well in exams. 50 years ago, this made a lot of sense, but today such time is better spent perfecting ideas that would come in handy in a performance-driven world.

In Malaysian high schools, for instance, we should stop pretending that the school is there to teach us good things. They are not. The Malaysian education system, from ages 6 - 19, is designed to teach you how to do well in exams. Learning math and science and all that jazz is secondary to that one core purpose. And this is - sadly - the truth of the matter; it is why we have tuition; it is also why we have shiny ads advertising 'exam-grade' pencils and erasers on television; all of it is what it means to live in an exam-oriented society.

Creativity
There is something that must be said here on creativity. For all the noise our education system makes about creative thinking, and critical thinking, their models of teaching such forms of thinking cannot be conceptually further away from the truth.

I began this essay by asking a series of interesting questions. I examined why grades mattered so much, why grades are so important to us, and why they may be irrelevant to a reasonable assessment of success in the real world. There is one question, however, that I have neglected to answer, and that is: why do so many of us accept grades as the de facto indicator of ability, without ever questioning the underlying logic of our grading systems? I believe this to be the most important question of them all.

One reason for this may be that we have been conditioned to think, since young, that grades are the be-all and end-all of our childhood existences. But there comes a point in time in which we are old enough and wise enough to challenge our own assumptions. So now the question: why do so few of us challenge this assumption in the first place?

I suspect the main reason for this is that we are taught, since young, not to think for ourselves. We don't hear that outright, of course. No teacher actually tells us not to think for ourselves. What they do tell us, however, that has the same net effect as telling us not to think, are things like "That's very good dear, but it's not what the examiners are looking for" or "That's not a proper exam answer". I suspect that each time our teachers tell our children that, they lose the ability to think laterally, to think critically, and so gradually they don't bother to think in terms of truth at all.

End
Grades are important as measures of cognitive ability. But do grades matter as much as our parents say they do? The truthful answer is that no, they don't, not anymore. Grades don't matter as much as real-world performance does, and as it becomes easier to measure performance directly, grades will matter less and less.

But is this an excuse, then, to score bad grades? The truthful answer is that I don't know. It probably depends. It is certainly a better use of your time to go out and build things, and learn things, as opposed to spending all that time learning to score well in exams - a skill with admittedly little real-world application. But on the flip side of that coin, grades - and by extension exams - are important elements in the learning processes of our education systems. It feels like a cop-out to take such a stance after 3000 words or so of argument, but this is the truth. Just be sure that you are studying for the sake of learning, and that exams are an indicator of that learning; and not the other way around.