Good Gpa Quotes

What makes the SAT bad is that it has nothing to do with what kids learn in high school. As a result, it creates a sort of shadow curriculum that furthers the goals of neither educators nor students.… The SAT has been sold as snake oil; it measured intelligence, verified high school GPA, and predicted college grades. In fact, it’s never done the first two at all, nor a particularly good job at the third.” Yet students who don’t test well or who aren’t particularly strong at the kind of reasoning the SAT assesses can find themselves making compromises on their collegiate futures—all because we’ve come to accept that intelligence comes with a number. This notion is pervasive, and it extends well beyond academia. Remember the bell‐shaped curve we discussed earlier? It presents itself every time I ask people how intelligent they think they are because we’ve come to define intelligence far too narrowly. We think we know the answer to the question, “How intelligent are you?” The real answer, though, is that the question itself is the wrong one to ask.

Flynn conducted a study in which he compared the grade point averages of seniors at one of America’s top state universities, from neuroscience to English majors, to their performance on a test of critical thinking. The test gauged students’ ability to apply fundamental abstract concepts from economics, social and physical sciences, and logic to common, real-world scenarios. Flynn was bemused to find that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”*

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives. But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero. Commenting

You only needed one yes to be happy—medical school was like love in that regard. Some days her chances seemed promising, and other days she hated herself for clinging to this ridiculous dream. Hadn't she muddled her way through chemistry? Struggled in biology? You needed more than a good GPA to get into medical school. You had to compete against students who'd grown up in rich families, attended private schools, hired personal tutors. People who had been dreaming since kindergarten of becoming doctors. Who had family photos of themselves in tiny white coats, holding plastic stethoscopes to teddy bear bellies. Not people who grew up in nowhere towns, where there was one doctor you only saw when you were puking sick. Not people who'd stumbled into the whole idea of medical school after dissecting a sheep's heart in an anatomy class.

At its most intense, the admissions process didn’t force kids to be Lisa Simpson; it turned them into Eddie Haskell. (“You look lovely in that new dress, Ms. Admissions Counselor.”) It guaranteed that teenagers would pursue life with a single ulterior motive, while pretending they weren’t. It coated their every undertaking in a thin lacquer of insincerity. Befriending people in hopes of a good rec letter; serving the community to advertise your big heart; studying hard just to puff up the GPA and climb the greasy poll of class rank—nothing was done for its own sake. Do good; do well; but make sure you can prove it on a college app. So

Still, Iyengar and Westwood’s research is a fundamental challenge to the way we like to believe American politics works. A world where we won’t give an out-party high schooler with a better GPA a nonpolitical scholarship is not a world in which we’re going to listen to politicians on the other side of emotional, controversial issues—even if they’re making good arguments that are backed by the facts.

the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”*

With her strong GPA and merely quite good scores, busy athletic schedule, and character-building volunteer efforts, Portia Nathan’s application would have left this room with a fatal designation of Academic 3/Non-Academic 4, meaning that in the real world her scholastic skills were solid, but in Princeton’s supercharged applicant pool they were unremarkable, and that although she had been busy within her school community, she had not been a leader within that community (NonAc 3) or distinguished herself at the state level (NonAc 2), let alone accomplished something on a national or international scale (NonAc 1). NonAc 1’s, of course, were rather thin on the ground, even in Princeton’s applicant pool. They were Olympic athletes, authors of legitimately published books, Siemens prizewinners, working film or Broadway actors, International Tchaikovsky Competition violinists, and, yes, national judo champions, and they tended to be easy admits, provided they were strong students, which they usually were.

Flynn was bemused to find that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.