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| Quantum Thought Experiment |
Here is a thought experiment. Read the following advice from an article in The Harvard Business Review:
A New Game Plan for C players
1. Embrace a talent mid-set, and make talent
management a critical part of every manager’s job.
2. Create a winning “employee value proposition”
that provides a compelling reason for a highly talented person to join and stay
with your company.
3 3. Rebuild your recruiting strategies to inject
talent at all levels, from many sources, and to respond to the ebbs and flows
in the talent market.
4 4. Weave development into the organization by
deliberately using stretch jobs, candid feedback, coaching, and mentoring to
grow every manager’s talents.
5 5. Differentiate the performance of your people,
and affirm their unique contributions to the organization.
The fifth imperative incudes and goes beyond dealing
explicitly with the low performers. It addresses the broader need to
differentiate the strong players from the weak players in a company’s entire
talent pool, and it implies the need to invest in and grow A and B performers.
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| Thought experiments since the scientific revolution |
The article has to do with designing strategies to improve
the performance of lower level managers in companies. The C in the article refers to those who earn
C’s in job performance reviews. The
advice is simple, direct and encourages honest assessment, coaching, and
mentorship not only for the C players but also for all the members of the
company.
Now substitute the word “applicant” or enrolled student” for
“managers” and “employees”.
The point I am trying to make is that honest assessment on
the part of people in charge extends to more than places like McKinsey (the authors
of the article work for this firm) an stretch across any large business, and
make no mistake, billion dollar schools are certainly in business.
The question I have is whether the strategy outlined here
would be useful in terms of student assessment and admission decisions. I would
say the answer to this is an easy yes. Unfortunately, I also know that such
direct assessment o students and applicants is not taking place at most
selective colleges and universities across the country
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| Yue Minjun |
Few students are ever even given a C grade as enrollment
management has replaced admission offices in many places. The difference is
important. Schools now prize keeping every student admitted enrolled and
eventually graduated. While this is a noble goal, it also means that the way to
make people learn effectively has, at times, been compromised. Many teachers
receive high ratings because they are easy graders. The toughest teachers, the
ones who often are cited for teaching people life skills, are often shunned by
students for fear of a low grade. Confronting a student for a weak effort is
often seen as antithetical to the educational mission. Gone at least in most
cases are teachers like the one highlighted in the film The Paper Chase. That
particular professor would not last long in an undergraduate program. Maybe so.
But things like keeping the students and the applicants happy
at any cost does indeed cost a lot in terms of the education students receive.
If you think I am being old-fashioned maybe this is true too. At the same time,
just today a member of the quora.com community posted an answer to a question
about choosing one Ivy league school over another with a replay that I think deserves
a hearing by parents, educators, prospective students and others. Not because
it rates one school as potentially better than another (I am after all quoting
the experts writing for Harvard), but rather for the larger point the writer
makes about the ways students are educated at the most selective schools in the
US. While I disagree with a number of things the author says, I think the
points about telling teachers to take it easy on students may not be in keeping
with the assessment put forward in the real world by Harvard Business Review:
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The Harvard Undergrad
Problem
Your typical Harvard
undergraduate falls into two camps. They are at Harvard to be cool and make
tons of money, whatever that means; or, they are there to be cool and be the
smartest person on the planet, whatever that means.
Basically, what that means
when you are trying to teach Harvard undergraduates real skills is that:
[ A ] They exhibit deep
levels of anxiety and self-doubt over the fact that they are not cool, are not
rich and are not the smartest person on the planet.
Because, honestly, no
one at Harvard is cool, now or ever.
[ B ] They try to hide
their deep levels of anxiety and self doubt by never admitting or trying
anything, ever.
They cannot fail
because they are the kids that were told they are smart:
And dealing with Harvard
undergrads is a lot like dealing with toddlers - and sometimes the professors,
too. That is fine in politics and history courses, but in an actual skill
disciplines, especially in the scientific laboratories, it makes for a risk adverse
culture where nothing gets done by these folks. They cannot take any
responsibility for their own work. They do nothing.
The worst part about the
phenomena of the Harvard undergraduate problem was when the foreign graduate
students come in for training as teaching fellows. They literally are given
training and a booklet on teaching American kids [Harvard undergrads] that
instructs them never to tell an undergraduate that they are wrong.
Think about it. The
Harvard undergrads are dearly paying customers. Why would we tell them that
they are wrong and hurt their feelings?
Foreign graduate students
are generally baffled by that. Why don't they want to learn? They ask.
Because they are too
scared to learn. Huh?
In science, you must
fail. In engineering, you must fail. In life, you must fail.
At Harvard, as an undergraduate, you cannot fail.
The exception to this rule
of thumb is that sometimes you get truly brilliant undergraduates at Harvard.
They are amazing people to work with, possessing breathe-taking talent, yet
make the problem for the other students that much worse. And often the
brilliant ones have the hardest time.
The final problem with
Harvard is that the professors, as a general rule of thumb, do not care about
teaching. And if you try to do research, they do not care about your ideas. I
once overheard a famous scientist complain to another less famous scientist that:
"I forgot you
actually had to prepare for this teaching stuff. It's, like, hard."
I once saw an
undergraduate propose a brilliant idea for research to a professor, who only
met him with a blank stare. Do not be deterred by that. It's normal and in the
back of the professor’s head, he is simply thinking, my grant applications do
not cover that, even though it's a great idea. Sorry, kiddo.
Literally, no professor is
at Harvard because they wanted to teach undergrads.
No matter how many mission
statements or committees say undergrad teaching is important to the Harvard
Corporation, literally every professor is there because they excel in their
field of research and, if given the choice to do one or the other, every single
one would pick research.
Go to Yale. I don't know
anything about Yale, except their research. Probably everything said here is
applicable to Yale and so on. But, if you do go to Harvard, build stuff from
day one and do not be afraid to fail or to be wrong or to be seen as the
weakest link in the chain. You are not.
Work hard. Have fun. Be passionate about what you do, even if
people around you try to take that passion away from you due to arrogance or
insecurity or misery or whatever. Be happy.
Learn real stuff and criticize
your environment. Probably the only rational reason to go to Harvard is the
quality of the laboratories; all other knowledge is attainable on the Internet.
So, if you do go, join a lab early and work on real scientific research. That's
the only way to learn. The classes do not matter.
Even there, severe
limitations exist, but that is actually a different story that has much more to
do with how science funding is, based on the evidence, broken in this country
and less to do with undergrads until they grow up.
May God help you if you go
to Harvard to study liberal arts. See Good Will Hunting and go to your
local library and save your parents a small fortune.
Better yet, learn
everything on the Internet and follow Michael Arrington's advice, get into
Harvard and head straight to Silicon Valley:
Even if you are not Mark Zuckerberg:
The risks you'll have to
take in life to be successful at whatever you do will not go away just because
you went to Harvard. Better to face them early.
The best option is to find
your passion, and follow it where that takes you. An Ivy League education is
probably not worth the investment anymore, even for the credential, even if you
want to become a scientist.
Life is beautiful.
Don't miss it wasting your time at Harvard or Yale. All the knowledge you need
is on the Internet. All the creativity you need, virtual or real, is at your
fingertips.
What follows is my quora.com
comment. I will have much more to say about these issues but I would be
grateful for some comments about the statements made by the writer who took a
lot of time and effort to identify an important issue in education that rarely
gets mentioned.
This quora.com answer
should be a part of every student's introduction to the way in which the US
education system has now produced a generation or two of bright people who are
afraid of taking risks. A book, too much overlooked, Adapt: why success always
starts with failure, makes a great case for learning by trial and error.
Instead, in order for students to get accepted at top schools, not just Harvard
and Yale, but a fairly long list, students are taught: never take a course in
which they might get anything but an A.
In other words, it is not that the
students at Harvard decide, once they are there, not to take risks; instead, it
is the way they have been taught how to get into Harvard etc. which has made
the people who attend the most selective schools, the ones who come with
emotional and intellectual baggage which precludes risk taking and the willing
desire to crash and burn in order to learn. That is not the path to success as
it has been outlined. A C on any transcript for any class is almost certain
doom for students. This means hard grades or hard course are to be by-passed.
And then there is the whining. I have had students say that a B+ will ruin
their chances at getting into law school, med school etc. regardless of what
they might actually have learned. It is the land of credentials that are
unblemished which can be looked at quickly by overworked admission offices. A C
stands out as a lost cause. B's are almost there now too at most schools. It is
the number of As, the number of high scores, the number of activities, and the
number of awards that can be read quickly and given points. The delving into
the person underneath is a relic of a by gone era. And I am afraid it is going
to get worse. The decision by Common Ap to get rid of the open-ended essay
question means that the innovative thinkers and off center creators have no
chance to ply their wares. It means that generic questions with sought after
responses will become the order of the day. This will then lead to more
emphasis on numbers, as the words will all sound the same. And it will permit
schools to pick people more generically more demographically.
Teacher's hands are often
tied in high schools. I just talked with a long time teacher who was summoned
to the Principal's office for telling a student who had just thrown another
student's book across the room that he (the student) likely was headed for an F
and summer school. The school immediately sided with the student despite 9
students who wrote in support of the teacher. The fear of saying anything
negative to a student is true at Harvard and public high schools, and likely
just about anywhere else that has the potential to bring in lawyers or lose a
valued dollar.
I will post this response
of my blog this evening. It is detailed, provides support and sources, and in
fact has earned my A grade.
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