I am one of those persons who get good grades and work hard and challenges myself in difficult fields,
but fail when it comes to selling myself or cramming years worth
of experience into 30 minutes for a job interview. ( I do well on tests). The motivating problem
is that employers cannot seem to find good candidates for the job
they are offering, of after they had offered the job, the candidate
didn't turn out so good, same thing.
If the interview process was so great, there
wouldn't be so much complaining. The problem is, if we eliminate grades
as a measure, we will be eliminating another competency.
It is a problem of false positives vs false negatives.
Sure there are many people who pass college who are incompetent. They
are the false positives. The false negatives are the ones who do
not pass college who are not incompetent. So it is a balance. Do you
want to make sure that nobody who isn't skilled doesn't get a job.
(This works against society). Or do you want to take your chances with
a system that generates some false positives and false negatives.
For myself, I would certainly say that education has been great, because
had I been hired into a position of worthiness, I probably would
have been able to achieve much more. But consider the true positives,
some of those would have been lost because their greatness would
have never been realized if we didn't have a system where "building stuff"
was more important than "How I answer a question of how I think my life
would be if I got a chance to build stuff." .
Now do you want to argue with me when I say "had I been hired" and say that
because I didn't I am not an achiever? Suppose I had been a "faker" who
really didn't have any marketable skills to show. Or that
people had wasted time on me since I didn't move on as well. Well, I guess
I was one of the false positives then, but how would we ever know? Surely
not putting the best use of everybody in society. The other alternative presented is to have
all the best students who show creativity and motivation, but have the chance of generating false
positives that have not learned the skills that enable them to "build stuff" and deal
with the mechanical and non-human world if such a thing can exist. Sure we will all
get along great on our little planet, but how about going beyond that?
My solution is a medieval one, have apprentices just like in the
middle ages. Co-op's and industrial internships are a step, but how about
taking it a step further and developing a system whereby people learn on
the job while they are being educated? I believe Germany has this model.
One side effect is that people have less choice later in life to decide which
career path to follow, but do we
have a better way now? As another side effect though,
such an alternate system might might not do as well in generating people who
sell themselves ... or people might switch to another employer who pays more
but doesn't participate. One other side effect, is that those who are creative and talented might
get relegated to a role that doesn't use their capabilities, or that the system might be inflexible once we
have it set up. We could have a stream for such bright and talented individuals like they have in the movies, but now we can't even debate the merits of such a system because we haven't done so.