Coyote Blog

What's the average class size for HBS? I think I would like this a lot in courses with >50 people, but I think it would be a disaster for a 15 person seminar.

Ah, but since the grades are arbitrary, at least between schools, they are effectively meaningless as a basis for comparison. In fact, you could have learned all the material, but since you didn't stay after school to clean the chalkboard, your grade is lower than your intellectual equal.

School isn't about learning. It's about submission to authority. Learning something is a happy coincidence. As the Old Man put it to me, the purpose of school is to get a degree. No more, no less. It's the very antithesis to learning.

It's amusing to me to interact with recent college grads, as they think they know everything. It takes a year or so for them to learn that they know nothing, at least for the smart ones.

All I can say is in comp sci there weren't any give gimmes where I went. Some courses are harder than others, so some courses may have a higher percentage of A's than others. The hardcore math courses like advanced analysis of algorithms or cryptography were very hard (at least for me), and to pull off a C+ took lots of studying.

Forcing the curving of classes simply doesn't make much sense, as you get further along in the program to 3rd and 4th year courses you've already culled out much of the herd that will never graduate and your left with mostly motivated and good students. Failing 10 or 15% of them just because doesn't make much sense.

If a course is properly designed, it should be perfectly acceptable for everyone to receive A’s or F’s. It should be based purely on performance instead of the need to always fail a certain percentage.

It seems kind of funny that many people would oppose quotas for hiring minorities, but would find it perfectly acceptable to have quotas for grades in a course. Many of the arguments against quotas for minority hiring would work perfectly well for arguing against mandatory curving of courses.

Grades and GPAs are interesting, but ...

As an operations manager at various levels for 31 years, I have interviewed hundreds of soon-to-be college graduates, experienced individual contributors, and managers. What do I really look for in candidates?

- Is the candidate's education relevant to the job requirements?
- Has the candidate completed any project courses that had a required deliverable that he or she can describe in detail?
- For an inexperienced and less experienced candidate, how has he or she used their education in practical ways?
- Does the candidate consistently deliver quantifiable results important to whomever his or her internal and external customers are? This questions is certainly relevant for inexperienced candidates.
- For the inexperienced or lesser experienced candidate, who paid for his or her college education? If the candidate worked to earn money for college education, how heavy was their work load? Is it possible to explain a lower GPA if the candidate was working and developing useful skills for working as a professional? "Work" in this context can include unpaid volunteer work or lowly paid internships.
- Does the candidate have internal motivation and drive, or "fire in the belly"?

The typical internal or external recruiter doing screening interviews is unable to assess these traits. Resume screening software is also unable to assess these.

Grades and GPAs correlate well with intelligence. Intelligence is a very useful trait, but given a hard choice between hiring a very intelligent candidate or hiring a candidate with wisdom and lesser intelligence (lower grades and GPAs), I prefer the latter.

Among law schools, only a handful try to move to a pass-fail-honors system. Even at some of the best law schools, most of the first year classes are curved. The reason is to provide employers with a way to differentiate graduates. Whereas most law firms would be happy with most graduates of Yale, Harvard or Stanford, they want to filter out some graduates of Georgetown or UCLA. Even the best schools outside the top 3 have to have some way to approximately rank their graduates. Most law schools have an explicit rank for their students (though mine does not, employers have a sense of the distribution).

The worst schools have the strictest curves, with the worst students failed out so they won't fail the bar and tarnish the school's record. They also use curves to push some scholarship students out of qualification for their scholarships.

Law schools are themselves a sorting mechanism, and the GPAs are a further sorting metric for employers. A given top-shelf law firm would be happy to hire a Yale graduate from the lower part of the class, so they can roll the dice based on the limited knowledge they glean from the . That same firm might be fine with a graduate of Duke or Penn who graduated in the top third, or UCLA in the top fifth, or WashU in the top tenth. Without some way to distinguish students, law firms find it harder to know who is a top third student and who is a bottom third student. If one school adopts a weak sorting system (blurring the lines between bottom third and top third) while the others maintain ranking, it's less of a gamble for employers to find skilled graduates at the curved school.

The emphasis on grades and the school is overblown. As a young engineer, I thought that a person from a prestigious university and an advanced degree was automatically a better engineer. Wrong!

Every graduate from a recognozed engineering school has the basic training for their profession. What they do with it afterward is the issue. Some really dive into their work, make every assignment into a study project, and steadily improve their skills. After twenty years, they are way ahead of a person with a PhD from MIT who rested on his oars. Interest in one's profession, initiative, imagination, study, and hard work eclipse the more obvious attributes over time.

Having said all this, it is still true that the smarter guy will do better, other things being equal. The problem is that the smarter guy does not always follow through in later life. Ideally, a person would attain the highest level of education that he is capable of, and then apply himself to his work with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, this does not always happen. Many smart people choose not to go to grad school, and many that do do not apply themselves afterward.

Russ R. said: "... The SAT, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT and GRE are all pretty reliable indicators that aren’t subject to inflation..."

Wrong.

The SAT was "renormalized" in 1995 for two reasons: 1. The increased numbers of students taking the exam lowed its average score and 2. If one compared the top few hundred thousand exam takers from each year in the early-1990s to the same number from 1970s and 1980s, the scores were lower. The post-1995 SAT average combined scores are about 100 points higher than the pre-1995 scores.

In 2002 the GRE discontinued the separate Analytic Ability section. That section had the highest correlation with success in graduate school.

The MCAT exams use scaled scores based on the previous year's results. The mean scaled score for each part is 8 plus/minus 0.3. The Association of American Medical Colleges does not release information on what it does to keep the mean scores near 8. My strong suspicion is that the exam is easier now than a generation ago.

The LSAT normalizes every exam. We do not know if today's LSAT-takers are doing better or worse than in the past. I suspect worse.

>>> As a young engineer, I thought that a person from a prestigious university and an advanced degree was automatically a better engineer. Wrong!

Indeed. I had a friend a year ahead of me that went to UF, a much more prestigious school than UCF, in Orlando, where I'd gone, in the same major, IT.

I can state categorically that, though he and I were about the same intelligence, I knew far more at the end of my Freshman year at UCF than he knew at the end of his JUNIOR year. Part of that was the teaching structure at UF being pretty much brain damaged, as you took your BS courses before your major courses, while UCF had no such structure. That, however, was not the sole reason by any means -- for various reasons, I transferred to UF for my Senior year. Although UF had as much or more stuff than UCF did to learn from, resource-wise, a lot more of it was sequestered away for the use of Teacher 'X's assistants and so forth, while at UCF, if you went looking for it, and they had it, it was pretty easy to get access. One of the benefits of "less prestigious" schools, along with the softer class-taking structure.

As an example, some years later UF was GIVEN a LISA after it was introduced. It immediately got locked in a room and only grad students got to use it... one of whom promptly set the floppy containing the drivers for the graphics tablet that had been provided with it on the tablet itself, inadvertently wiping it in the tablet's magnetic field... LOL.

LTMG: The companies out there are no longer looking for "can do" people, they pretty much only want to hire the people they already have. Seriously.

This from a recruiter I've been corresponding with during my current job search:
I used to recruit to fill permanent positions –and my clients were always hired people who ‘could do’ the job—of course they’d have required skills, but they’d consider the whole person and would hire someone who only met ½ the requirements if they had the right aptitude and attitude.

Now days, you not only have to hit every required skill, you also have to have used the exact same tools, in the exact same domain—they won’t hire ‘can do’ …only ‘have done’

She also noted this:
The resume is another case of ridiculousness. In the past, managers used the resume as a tool to see 1) what the candidate had done in the past and 2) how well the candidate communicated. Now they use computer programs to do word and phrase matches for the job at hand and if there is not at least a 60% match up—you won’t get an interview. Even if you come through that screen, if the manager doesn’t see reference to the skills needed within the top third of the resume, you won’t get an interview. So instead of getting a true picture of what a candidate has to offer, they’d rather read their own words back to themselves…

And then you wonder how it is that so many companies whine about "lack of suitable talent"...?

The talent is there, the idiot lazy POS HR managers won't do their ^@#@$^$#&^ jobs.

I've got 30+ years of experience with computers doing just about every job there is, from low-level hardware programming to internal and external tech support functions. It's a varied enough set that it's pretty clear my learning ability hasn't atrophied. I'm about as good a software tester as you could hope to find, and pretty damned good with SQL as well. I have excellent logistical and detail skills, my language skills are top notch, and I have both high intelligence AND at least pretty decent wisdom/common sense abilities.

Yet it's damned near impossible to find a job even though there are literally dozens listed in my general location that I could almost certainly be doing better than 90% of other potential hires after eight weeks... but few of them will even give me a phone interview.

It's ephing ridiculous. This country is getting more and more run by lazy, incompetent morons who've become the "flappers" for everything. Sooner or later it's going to bite us in the ass.