Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?

Schools are designed to provide education for the masses, just like jobs are designed to reward workers' efforts with money. Such schemes remove the low / high extremes (slackers / highly gifted people) by conforming them to a pattern which is proven to increase, in time, the average performance of people participating in them.<p>Was Bill Gates better off as an entrepreneur and a drop-out? Yes, he's a highly gifted individual -- for him the freedom to focus on what he does best allowed him to shine and get from life huge returns when compared to what the 'system' would have reserved for him. But for a significant part of the more average folks, we could have trouble stating similar things.<p>The question in the title is nothing more than a matter of risks and insurances against them: do you want to take the chance of dropping out of school and pursuing your raw intelligence/dreams or you want the overhead of an administrative process in order to get at the end some lose guarantees about your hire-ability and your skills... It's not an easy question and it depends too much of everyone's personal situation (parents support, wealth savings etc) to be addressed generally.

My grandfather once told me "I went to college and got a degree. I went back 10 years later and got an education".

One of the smartest people I know -- he now works on the CMS at CERN, and can explain everyone else's work as well as his own -- got kind of crappy grades when we were in college. He was simply interested in other things.<p>He had a cartoon on his door, at one point. A figure walking down the street in the city. All the signage around him displaying "Lies". I thought it was excessively cynical, at the time. Over the intervening some decades, I've come to understand his point of view.<p>It's better to <i>understand the system</i>. Then make your own, informed choices. If you like doing something, do it. If you're doing it because someone told you there's an eventual payoff, beware.

Better for society: good grades. Means you might be productive.<p>Better for you: smart. You will be happier, or at least know the reasons you are unhappy.

Well, at least I know the meaning of proactive, so personally I think smart.<p>You can't be proactive to solve the unknown.<p>Also the opposite of reactive is not proactive.<p>Apart from being pedantic about the word proactive, I also totally disagree with the premise of the article, some of the most inventive problem solvers I've met are lazy as hell.

I think employers reliance on grade and qualifications are more about eliminating the really bad hires than finding the best hires. It is good in a way though, just like having a body of work to show, a hiring process that comes down to how you solve a few problems in an interview can be really hit and miss and is hard to show your full abilities.

In addition to execution, earning good grades require particular kinds of intelligence - among them recognizing the bounds of systems and social relationships.<p>Being smart isn't an achievement and hard work won't get you there. It is merely potential and without execution, it eventually becomes "wasted potential."

It's best to become a member of a close group that is not only smart, but which has good values and is well connected to reality.<p>So long as you get a 3.5 GPA or above, you can, in the words of a fellow alum's mom, "pretty much do what you want." But what you want to do may not even involve that kind of GPA signaling.<p>If you really are smart, then you can figure out how to generate the right sort of signal for your purposes. You'll also figure out that you're not infallible and that there are others out there who are smarter than yourself. From this, it follows that durable signals need to be based on real underlying value.

A not too smart "go getter" will always be able to do well at something. There's always a place for such people, and it's easy for management to understand how someone like that can bring value.<p>OTOH, a personal story:<p>In school, I got excellent grades up until lots of effort was required. At that point my grades went down drastically. This is what comes from being praised as smart, separate from results.<p>It took me a good while after I was out of school to really come to grips with things, and it's still a bit of a struggle. However, I <i>have</i> managed to make a career of programming. I try to play to my strengths, solving tricky problems that don't yield easily to hard work <i>alone</i>. This makes me fairly valuable, though I have to work hard to find employment where management realizes that there are roles for people like me. Currently I develop software in support of the science team on an active NASA space mission. If I can pat myself on the back a bit, that's not bad for someone who took an extra semester to graduate high school and never went to college.<p>So someone smart can learn to work harder and be results oriented, but without help from parents and school I think it's a lot harder and brings delays. What could I have done if I'd been praised for results rather than "being smart?" I don't obsess about that, but it comes to mind these days as I raise my child.

"Education is what is left after you've forgotten everything you've learned." -&#62; Albert Einstein

The most worthless, stupid people I know got straight A's their entire life.

Funny, earlier on HN was a headline that said to praise your children for their effort and NOT their intelligence.<p>Grades are a sign of effort. Effort wins most of the time.<p>What really surprises me about the wildly successful people I meet is that most of them aren't brilliant. But all of them work their asses off. Non-stop. I haven't met one who was brilliant and had a good work/life balance. Unsurprisingly, these habits often (but not always!) start early... Most of these successful people went to great schools and got great grades.

Has anyone actually run the numbers? Does GPA predict founder success? Do SAT scores? Does IQ? How much does each matter? Is there a negative correlation?

I'm sure people will say it in various ways, but one's path in life is (far) smoother if they have a track record - something people can see and relate to. It might be serial startups, it might be open-source success, it might be commercial success. Starting out, it's a transcript.<p>There's gobs of people out there. Differentiate yourself, so that people actually care when you talk to them.

That's why I'm doing a Master's degree. You get no grades, just the degree.<p>[Edit] A friend tells me it's pass or distinction. Oh well.

It's time for the author to brush up on his argumentation and rhetoric. It makes no sense. But it is provocative.

This is great fodder for thinking about how I'm going to explain my average-ish GPA on law school apps.

I read the thing and didn't understand the word of what the author is trying to say. Maybe I am fumbled up in vocabulary or something. Anyways, if any random person were to ask this to me I would definitely go for "good grades if you want to lead a happy peaceful life and smarts if you want to live like hell but have a shot at being happy as heaven".