Suppose Anita has a 3.8 GPA and Dave has a 2.6 GPA. What sort of assumptions can we make about these two students?
Anita probably goes to class more often than Dave, and she likely understands the material better than he does. Dave probably isn’t as organized as Anita. He might be more easily distracted or might not have the same resources to which Anita has access.
Maybe Dave’s studies are more difficult than Anita’s. It could also be that Dave has things going on aside from school — perhaps he works full time or is raising a child.
It is easy to make a variety of assumptions about people based on their GPA because grades measure a variety of things: how much time one dedicates to school, how good of a relationship one has with his or her professors, patience, tenacity and intelligence among many others.
Grades are a useful tool for approximating someone’s ability to accomplish complicated things, but they are imperfect and becoming more so.
Fordham University mathematician Robert Lewis distinguishes between training and education. For Lewis, training is specific and limited: “Training is what you do when you learn how to operate a lathe or fill out a tax form. It means you learn how to use or operate some kind of machine or system that was produced by people in order to accomplish specific tasks.”
Danny Bugingo | Argonaut
Education, on the other hand, is a “deep, complex and organic representation of reality.” It is not about any particular skill or tool, says Lewis, but rather about building a dynamic understanding of how concepts “relate to each other, reinforce each other, and illuminate each other.”
Lewis notes one reaches an educated guess by synthesizing and extrapolating from their knowledge base, but points out there is no such thing as a “trained guess.”
Grades don’t do a perfect job of distinguishing between training and education. One can leave the university with a strong GPA that reflects training in the specific and limited task of earning good grades instead of the broader achievement of an education. One can have learned how to memorize material the evening before an exam, how to crowdsource homework and how to lobby professors for extra credit rather than the principles of whatever he or she is studying.
Anita probably really knows what she’s studying — but maybe she has access to a rich test bank and classmates willing to share their homework.
While it is difficult to train into an A, especially as one goes deeper into his or her college career, the attitude of cramming the bare minimum is alive and well, even among high-achieving students. Getting As and winning at school often trumps exposing oneself to a variety of experiences and becoming educated.
As university becomes the standard path to a middle class, it will likely reflect training more than education. But there’s an alternative: we could value community colleges and technical schools as respectable paths to respectable careers. There’s nothing wrong with wanting training instead of a broad education.
If we instead continue to push university as the only reputable post-secondary option, the undergraduate degree will become another box to check off, and a strong GPA will show nothing more than an ability to jump through hoops.
Danny Bugingo can be reached at [email protected]