There’s a sense in irony that this post comes on a day when “study breaks” is more accurately defined as a break that I take in my ordinary day to squeeze in some studying, rather than its more common connotation.
I have a pair of finals next Tuesday, and three open days to study. I broke down the two classes into three manageable chunks, and put one chunk for each class into each day. Highly organized, highly efficient… highly pointless? Not pointless in the sense that studying doesn’t help and that time management is a useless skill. Not even pointless in that the grades I have in those classes are probably pretty solidified at this point and I don’t know how much I’ll be able to change them (though it is a concern I’m facing).
But maybe pointless in the long run of things?
Every once in a while (and especially around finals time) I try and refresh my perspective on grades and exams and what it all means. Sure, some of it is probably to justify not doing the best I can… but there are some more serious parts to it as well. Why do I need an A in Oceanography?
Are thermoclines, subtropical gyres and bony fish going to come up as a sizable road block later on in life? I need to name the most biologically productive section of the ocean and what direction the Ekman transport affects water to move on?
Or is it more likely that the grade I get just gets factored into the other 45 or so classes I’ll take while I’m at UCLA, into that three digit number? This is probably the case.
To my parents who will undoubtedly read this, my GPA will probably drop because of this quarter! Yikes!
Now, I’m not trying to desensitize myself to it. Your GPA is very important! Your employer will look at it! They’ll compare you in an Excel (or Numbers! Yay Macs!) spreadsheet next to plenty of other qualified applicants!
But the problem for me is two-fold. One, I’m an artist. It’s a decision I’ve made and will discuss in another post, but it’s how I want to lead my life and it means that GPA will ultimately not Make or Break my life path. Two, I still care a lot how I do in classes, and I don’t really know why.
The thing with film and tv and advertising is they are all industries based on experience or product. If you submit two spec scripts that are amazing, you’ll probably get hired onto a writing staff for Television. What grade you got in the writing class doesn’t really matter to them.
If you have a portfolio and a resume, you can probably get hired at an Advertising agency. These skills can be self-taught (with a patience most people don’t hav-Is that Sportscenter? NICEDUNK!) and achieved without grades.
So, grades. Supposedly we work hard, apply ourselves, and we get assessed on our achievement. But apparently there’s grade inflation at UCLA. It’s not as hard to get A’s as it used to be, so if you don’t get A’s, you’re in trouble. This is especially true for the film school. They expect you to get A’s in any prerequisite film class you take as a sign of your proficiency.
But they don’t want to know what kind of work you’ve done. What kind of projects you have under your belt. What creative output you’ve already showed. They just want potential guided by numbers and a select few essays.
Back to the point. Everyone’s getting A’s. Or at least, many more than deserve them. Doesn’t it become hard to separate yourself from the field, numerically? With those kinds of expectations, it seems the likely result is just separating yourself from the field in a negative way… and that only hurts. I mean, sure the point of a class is to try and make sure everyone learns everything, but if that’s the point, why are we comparing who learned the most? Or is it who worked the hardest? What are we grading exactly?
Then of course there’s the cyclical argument about just taking a class to learn… but obviously, if you learned as much as you were supposed to you would’ve gotten a good grade, right? (Right!)
Then we go back to my second point how I feel compelled to do work despite grades or interest.
Does anyone else have this compulsion? Eh. I just feel rewarded accomplishing things, and homework/reading/class are usually things on the to-do list that need crossing off. Probably something parents instilled. Blast…
On the other hand, I’ve skipped more classes this quarter than any other. Not entirely my fault when lecture is the same as a podcast, except I’ll listen to the podcast, when my Physics teacher has a fairly thick German accent and nothing that insightful to share about Albert “Einschtein” and my Spanish teacher talks about his boating trips and the house of prostitution that was outside his elementary school before spending 10 minutes on Adverbial Clauses and then letting us go.
Is one allowed to get sub-stellar grades and entertain the thoughts of not being challenged? Seems hypocritical to me, but I’ve been accused of that before.
I guess the point of these ramblings is to flesh some of my thoughts out but also to get you thinking. What’re your thoughts on grades/how they’ll affect your life/UCLA’s system/et cetera?
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
2 Comments
1) Can’t say I’ve experienced inflated grades… but alas, that’s South Campus
2) In my classes so far, grades have correlated with the understanding of the material. In the two classes I’ve ever gotten A’s in, I’ve truly understood it. In fact, even in the classes I get B’s in, I feel like I understand it. As for the majority that are C’s, I feel like I did enough to pass the class, and if it comes up again, I’ll be able to pick it up.
3) Too many professors grade absolutely, which is actually a problem. While the percentage you get on an exam should be a factor, it matters about what you learn and how you adjust to the class. The best professor I’ve ever had was my physics 1A/C prof. You could bomb the two midterms but nail the final and get an A. He looked at each person individually and looked at how much effort they put into the class (doing hw), and looked to see if your grades improved as the exams went by. His saying was, “A if you’ve truly mastered the material. B if you’re doing great. C if you stand a chance at passing the next class.”
3) I can honestly say that in the arts, grades don’t mean squat. They can’t teach you how to be creative. They can’t teach you to think for yourself and make something new and innovative that’s never been seen before. However, when it comes to engineering, I do believe grades are important (which is ironic considering I’m not studying 24/7 to get A’s). Knowing how to work out problems and use equations is important in engineering, and if one person can do it better than the other, then they’re the ones who are going to get the job.
4) But alas, there are the completely useless classes (a la Oceanography). I’m 90% sure of what fields I’d like to get into in Civil Engineering, but that doesn’t mean I can’t skip the courses related to the other fields :/
In relation to the non-major GEs, well, of course you’re not going to learn anything that’ll apply to your job, and you probably won’t use it later in life.. but they’re for your enjoyment really. I took a linguistics class, didn’t enjoy it, am never going to use it. But I also took a history of electronic music and loved the hell out of it. Will I ever need to know the history of it? No, but it’s good trivia when trying to impress other people in the genre who are in-the-know
5) Lastly, in response to how grades will affect my life…. They won’t. Or at least I’ll try not to let them. I guess they might affect whether I get a job or not.. but what’s important to me is just graduating (”C’s get degrees!”). 20 years from now will I or anyone else care if I got a B- in science of engineering materials??? Absolutely not.
Don’t let grades rule your life and time here in college. I’m enjoying the ride, even if it does mean me staying here a little longer than 4 years.
To ramble more, I think the same could be said about high school. I really felt I enjoyed it and had a great time. All the other honors kids and nerds were studying their butts off and doing way too many extra curricular activities and they had no free time and no time to do anything they wanted. Meanwhile I had a few jobs, made friends, hung out with kids in the neighborhood, and enjoyed my time there… And y’know what? At the end of it all we all still got into the same university!
It occurred to me that perchance the grade, point system is established not so much as a form of measurement, but as a way of giving students something to constantly work at. I think we would be hard pressed to find more than 5% of students [especially at a prestigious school like UCLA] who would honestly do all the homework, readings, and tests if they did not have something tangible to see on their URSA at the end of it all. You might be one of those people, because you enjoy learning it seems.
On the importance of grades to our lives, I think the only thing you left out is that college is not always about learning the material you’re going to use later in life. This is especially true in the “soft” fields–arts, English, etc. That is, college is about learning how to attack assigned work, how to manage [or not manage] time, how to assign priorities [i.e. physics is last], and how to deal with personalities that may be less than favorable [i.e. Gruner]. Getting an A in the arts certainly includes creating work [essays, films, what have you] that is capable of connecting with the grader/reader. It is also dependent on finding out what said arbiter of letters expects, and molding your talent to it [that's why I can bs most papers, but have to think hard about this one].
If one is to hold those two views valid, then studying and working hard [even if only for the grade], will inherently instill values that will benefit all–even in fields where the letter itself will not matter.
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