This is interesting. I'm told that med schools tend to treat college grades as a better indicator of med school success than MCAT scores. I don't know if there's a study to back it up, though. http://chronicle.com/news/
In my experience, the high test score, mediocre grade student is one of three types once they get to college, broken down as such... -70%: Smart, undisciplined students with no time management skills. Likely will not do well initially in college because they won't turn stuff in on time and will miss class, two clear ways to trigger automatic grade reductions. About 50% of these will learn through some type of shock (in my case, going from an A- to a C based on one final exam) that they better learn to manage their time. The other 50% will continue to annoy their young professors until the professors realize that giving these students Cs and Ds assuage their own latent fears that they are an easy grader. 25%: Bored high school student engaged in all kinds of wildly creative stuff outside of the high school classroom (much of it creative, but terrible art, fiction and poetry). They will generally do well once they realize they can take classes that interest them (or seem to based on brief course catalog descriptions). The exception is when they end up in a class with a low tolerance for creativity, ie organic chemistry, which they will bomb spectacularly. 5%: Dumb, but very rich kids with very expensive test prep tutors. They will not do well. As opposed to the poor test score, high grade student, who works very hard but doesn't test well on standardized tests. They will rarely fall below the B- line because they will come to class, do all the work, and not subject their professors to long soliloquies about the psychological barriers that prevented them from finishing their five-page paper exploring the differences between the immigrant as uprooted and the immigrant as transplanted. The paper might not be great, it may just repeat the arguments, but it will be done. And the better of these students will do far better than just getting their work done. In short, the ceiling's about the same but the floor is much lower for the high score/bad grade student.
Well, it doesn't seem all that surprising to me. HS Grades reflect upon more aspects of a person's character and potential than any one-off test will over do.
Which is more important to success both in college and in life than potential is. Universities are filled with the so-called "cascading failures" over here. Kids who breeze through HS, getting great grades throughout without any effort necessary. Most of them end up in one of the top four or five university programs and fail miserably, believing they'd get away with the same attitude they had during HS. They then change their course to a less demanding program, and more times times than not, fail again. This continues until they either drop out of college altogether or they eventually end up with a degree that is far under their maximum potential. Meanwhile, I knew a lot of kids who had to work hard all through HS to get B's and thrived in a university atmosphere.
I disagree with this entirely, if the grades are in difficult classes*. Potential is not innate intelligence, but intelligence combined with the ability to apply it. Good grades in difficult classes generally reflect a functional combination of the two factors, that's why they serve as a better predictor of college performance than standardized tests. *Thanks for this important caveat, quentin.
Potential is highest level of ability you CAN attain IF you apply yourself. If you don't apply yourself, the potential doesn't change. The PERFORMANCE changes [see bolded above]. Hard work doesn't raise potential. It only helps you realize that potential. Performance is not potential.
I think I disagree about the hard work not raising potential (I'm thinking out loud ... or whatever you call it when you type and think) because it assumes potential (which I think stands in for 'intelligence' in the post above) is static. I think this is best shown in writing. Writing well takes a lot of hard work, too many students assume an innate ability to write, and get frustrated. But writing well is more about learning argument structure, presentation, etc., none of which comes innately. All of those are the product of hard work writing and reading good writing which students imitate. I know from reading my writing across years (that kind of thing happens in grad school) that my writing has improved dramatically, but it's improved because of the hard work I've done in thinking about my writing and looking for models that I like. One of my pet peeves is the grade complaint that begins with 'I put a lot of hard work into this,' when the paper's not very good. I can only grade the finished product, not the work that went into it. But I have seen student writing improve pretty dramatically when they work hard to engage the criticisms that I and their fellow students raise. And this seems to carry over from one paper to the next, but without the hard work of engaging those criticisms, their potential as writers wouldn't improve (I've seen the students who work hard at writing but then don't do the hard work of engaging critiques, which means their writing remains pretty much the same). So I think that hard work, directed at developing particular skills and abilities, does raise potential. Now, as to what high school grades have to do with this particular formulation, you got me. I think high schools are not doing a particularly good job of teaching writing, and almost no one teaches how to rewrite, which is more valuable in a way.
Part of the reason for using standardized tests is that they provide a means of comparison between schools. If you assume a more or less standard distribution, you can tell how much better a school/college is as opposed to another one by looking at the results of their students who've applied to the school and have done so in the past. That being said, I have to agree with needs generally, especially with his initial post. I ignored attempts to do REALLY well in high school because I knew that schools I wanted to go to (like Columbia or U of Chicago) wouldn't have given me financial aid anyway. So instead I took college classes in subjects I liked and did well on standardized tests. However, lots of other kids I knew who had somewhat similar credentials ended up dropping out after a year or two due to doing nothing but getting stoned and assuming professors would give you extra credit work to make up for bombing exams. Students who had always studied well may keep puttering along with Bs, but they'll never actually stumble so badly as to drop out. I think that some very smart kids who flame out dent the overall numbers - I suspect the distribution of grades for high test score lower grades students in college has a pretty fat tail. That being said, however, I do believe that generally high standardized test scores do indicate a decent amount of innate intelligence.
I think needs's point can be summed by thusly: how do you tell exactly where potential ends and performance begins?
Sometimes, but not always. Sometimes classes are "hard" because they require a lot of work which isn't necessarily difficult. Like, say, the bar exam which is an easy exam which requires massive amounts of memorization.
I was so confused when students in a first-year college seminar I was teaching kept asking for extra credit opportunities. Now I get it. And no, I didn't give them any.
How about... Effort x Ability = Performance The less effort, the more ability you need to reach the same level of performance and vice versa. If effort were absolute [i.e. - perfect], then... ability = highest potential performance. You know Nice, I'm pretty sure both of us have more important work to do...
At least where I went to school, the easier regular classes had the greatest amounts of work while AP was based more on tests and class discussion. One of the worst grades I got in high school was a regulars chemistry class sophomore year. I grew bored of having the class turn into a recurring review session and gave up.
Just hypothesizing here, but this just might be one of the reasons course grades (might) act as a better indicator of college success: they're longitudinal measures capable of capturing things like attention span and the warts and wrinkles of study habits in the "real" world as opposed to the world of college entrance test prep courses. And in support of needs' comments about potential, there are developmental changes that can occur (such as learning how to read science texts, work as a member of a study team, take notes, etc.) that I think have a foot squarely in both the "ability" and the "performance" camps.
Yeah, but in AP classes (theoretically designed to emulate a college environment), I found it much easier to pay attention and do well. Teachers didn't stop to go back over concepts, and in most cases it seems like they replicate the "sink or swim" atmosphere that is prevalent in college (I'm guessing here, I actually don't start until the fall, and the school I'm going to is hardly a typical college). So grades might indicate your ability to persevere through situations you really don't want to be in, but I don't think it's necessarily an indicator of intelligence, because the environment based on the class difficulty also varies heavily.
I agree with that. My ability to sustain my grades is directly related to not ever being satisfied with my performances and taking pride in the time when I have received exemplary marks on difficult or time-consuming assignments. For me, nothing is better than getting an A+ when the rest of the class struggled. And, it isn't about the grade. It's my unwillingness to accept a mediocre grade b.c everyone else has. RE:Quentinc You sound like any relatively gifted student that likes to be challenged. My advice is to find new challenges w/in easier tasks that make things more difficult. If anyone can get an A, strive to stand out amongst all the others.
While it's certainly true that college coursework, for the most part, expects you to bear more responsibility for your education than do HS courses, it's not necessarily the case that AP courses emulate this. Moreover, you originally spoke of a course that bored you to the point that you bailed on it, not one that mollycoddled you. However, my point was something different. The study suggests that grades in HS coursework do a better job of predicting college success than do grades on exams. Assuming this is the case (remember, it's just one study) I'm interested in why it's the case. We know that innate ability is one of these, but so (other studies tell us) also are things like cultural and economic factors. I'm speculating that course grades also encompass a lot of different things including the determination (or lack thereof) to wring whatever is worthwhile from a course that might be poorly taught or just on a topic that doesn't interest you, and that this is something that contributes to their (apparently) superior ability to predict college success. Because, unfortunately, this is a skill that will likely be called upon in college at some point. Students who didn't develop these and other, similar skills in HS tend to succeed less well than those who did, at least temporarily. Note also that the study authors do not claim that HS grades are more or less indicative of intelligence (and we should all keep in mind that the definition of what constitutes intelligence is still contested these days) than standardized tests. edit: by the way, Quentin, I think my first response to you might be taken as a slight against your capabilities and for that I apologize. Nothing could be further from what I intended or, for that matter, what I can guess about you based on your posts.
This is rather old news. There have been similar studies in the past with similar findings (just don't ask me to cite them). To me, the results seem logical and they make common sense. Of course grades are a better at predicting success in college. Potential (even if we go ahead and pretend that college entrance exams somehow measure potential, which couldn't be further from the truth) is just that, potential. It's not actual. It's a measure of something that possibly could happen. There is nothing to say that a student with tremendous potential to succeed will ever actually realize that potential. He can do so, but that has nothing to do with whether he will. High school grades, for the most part, are a measure of effort. Any reasonably intelligent student who completes all coursework, puts effort into projects, seeks teacher guidance and feedback, and studies hard for exams, will get good grades. In fact, unless the student is pretty irretrievably stupid, he or she will get by with an A- average at worst. College success is also, to a large extent, a matter of effort - particularly at the undergraduate level. Sure, there are some majors or disciplines which do require superior aptitude. I'm thinking of certain sciences, maybe computer programming or engineering. At the same time, there are scores of available majors in which a student can succeed with minimal innate intelligence. The students who have demonstrable success in completing their work to the best of their ability are going to do well in college, on the whole, regardless of how impressive that ability actually is. If they choose a major that presents too much of an intellectual challenge, most of them will switch majors. Among the high-ability students, you will find many studious hard workers, but you will also find every other type of student. In my experience, there is a limited relationship between potential and performance.
True, it almost entirely depends on the teacher and how serious they are of emulating the collegiate atmosphere that AP intends to create. But a large reason that it bored me is because the teacher was so deferential to students who clearly didn't show the effort and/or intellect to understand the material. I distinctly remember entering a unit of the class that required us to use material we'd learned about a month prior. Pretty much the entire class didn't "get it" because they failed to understand a concept the teacher initially assumed we would recall. So instead of saying too bad, he then spent a good week or two covering this previously learned concept a second time. I can't really comment on this antecdotally for obvious reasons, so I'll leave it to the people who have experienced a college environment. True. No worries. I didn't take it as such.