So the story goes....
Primary school to secondary school, you strive for straight As, you get them (or almost get them)
Pre-U, you strive for straight As, you struggle, you get them (or almost get them)
University, you strive, you realise As are incredibly hard, failing is a very scary reality.. You struggle, you pass. Happy? Hmm....
Sigh, how do people get first classes? GPAs of 4.0. Or whatever it is. Or am I just in a course where that's impossibly hard.
haha. i havent reached that level yet.
But according to the Malaysian Education System, the only thing you NEED to strive for is Straight A's. Anything less than that, you can't get to do anything that you want.
Sorry for the late reply - the weekend's the only time I have to catch up on my other modules, and I've been trying to make the most of it.
I think this is a rather good question, Wen Qi. I don't come from a history of ZOMG AWESOME exam results (4As in UPSR, 7 in PMR, 8 in SPM, none for STPM) and to be honest for the last couple of years in high school I've been questioning the validity of grades.
What are grades for? We've had a lot of people tell us, over the years, that grades are everything. Our parents tell us that if we get good grades, they'll buy us fancy new toys. Our society measures our self-worth (as kids) with how well we do in school. Asian societies, in particular, believe that the primary function of a good son/daughter is to go to school, be kuai, and come back with good grades (co-curricular activities be damned).
But really - you know, when we think about it - grades are merely the tools with which future employers use to measure your value (or perceived value, or future value) to the company you're going to work for. Grades are an indicator of performance, though not a very good one at that. And the thing is that employers have no choice but to use grades as indicators because they can't really measure the true value of an employee - that is your actual performance, while you're on the job, a couple of years down the road.
(This is probably why you hear people say that grades matter for only your first job, and then after that other things like leadership and people skills count for more. I've a cousin, by the way, who went to Cambridge for E&E Engineering, and to this day his boss doesn't even know where he gets his degree from).
I must note here that this argument doesn't apply to certain specialized fields, where grades do have a strong correlation to performance - med school for one, and nursing, and perhaps even law.
For the rest of the other vocations however, we pretty much know that whatever we learn in university would probably be useless by the time we go out to the working world. Or that - when we finally get our jobs, 90% of the things we learnt in uni won't be used by us in the day-to-day grinds of our jobs.
I know I'm ranting, but I want to throw this out to you: are grades an accurate indicator of performance? The modern world - which is now primarily capitalist - measures performance by economic productivity, and so is there a strong corellation between economically productive people and grades? If there isn't, what does this mean?
I guess my point is that: don't worry too much about scoring perfect 4.0s la, Wen Qi. It won't be too long before everyone is out in the working world, and in there, at least, people would be measured not by an indicator or performance, but by actual performance itself.
And performance, as a metric, is a lot harder to game.
I kinda get where you're coming from. But you see, I'm no overachiever who has a past of straight As who comes to uni stumped to find that 4.0s are quite impossible sometimes. I'm the kind of average student that somehow got into the hardest pharmacy course in UK, and now realises that a second upper class is just going to have to cut it. First class is quite beyond me, I've done the maths....
I just hope that I can even have the opportunity to perform, to even step into that world. As it is this summer, by the looks of it, I wouldn't be able to get a summer placement in a pharmacy at UK, unlike some of my classmates.
Perhaps I'm just comparing myself too much... It's a matter of perspective eh
And I do agree with that part of how a lot of what we learn wouldn't be useful in our work! My course is really preparing us to be anything pharmacy related: industrial, community, hospital, so the kind of things we have to learn can really seem quite inane sometimes.
Just, you know, a thought. Happy new year all!
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