A decade ago, at the end of my first semester teaching at Wharton, a student stopped by for office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. My mind started cycling through a list of events that could make a college junior cry: His girlfriend had left him; he had been accused of plagiarism(剽窃). "I just got my first A-minus, "he said, his voice shaking.
Year after year, I watch in dismay(郁网) as students go all for straight A's. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue(控告)their school after falling short. All hold the belief that top marks are a ticket to best graduate schools and high-paying job offers.
I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a 4. 0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the connection between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and unimportant within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance. (Of course, it must be said that if you got D's, you probably didn't end up at Google.)
In a classic 1962 study, a team of psychologists tracked down America's most creative architects and compared them with their technically skilled but less original matches. One of the factors that distinguished the creative architects was a record of grades. "In college our creative architects earned about a B average, "Donald MacKinnon wrote. "In work and courses which caught their interest they could turn in an A performance, but in courses that failed to strike their imagination, they were quite willing to do no work at all. "
This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2. 65 G. P. A. , J. K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.
