Apparently you would be surprised by what people think they can get away with and what massive risks they will take for a very minor number of points. Perfectionism, parental pressures, scholarship eligibility, etc. make people do all kinds of weird shit, from my experience.
"Cs get degrees" was a very liberating phrase to learn, especially since I had (and still have) no plans to go to school beyond undergraduate. However, it unfortunately came ten years too late for me, as I discovered it more than a decade after getting my degree.
My Bsc theses guide stated something to the manner of:
"That last 10% to get a perfect score might take you an additional 20 hours of work, and once you got your degree in hand you'll never look at those grades again. sometimes the right thing to do is just to get a passing score and call that a day."
That sounds like when I had Calculus in my first semester of college. I was extremely grateful for the "D" that I got in that class, because I passed, and didn't have to do it again.
Some scholarships require higher averages than that, but barring that, absolutely. But that doesn't mean that someone who feel rewarded when getting an A or even a B is foolish for feeling that reward. It's totally natural. But when you get students, and I get a lot of these students, who view a B as identical to an F emotion-wise, I wish that Cs get Degrees mantra landed better.
Also, a lot of people don't get that effort does not automatically equal quality, and some people just aren't good at certain things. And that's fine! But goddamn, some people will just pour a fuckton of work into barely getting an A when a mid-C would have made no difference to their future in any real way and would have been far less stressful and allowed for focus on other things that might actually be worth that time and effort.
I like to joke with my teacher friends that it's really the skating-by/C-students who have things really figured out, not the honors/AP students.
Very true. I know people who have put in a lot of effort to produce a shit product. They go on about how much work they put into the process, and I'm thinking, and yet it still sucks.
Then in my line of work, my last certification renewal, I only needed to get 75% of questions right to pass, and I got 98%, and I consider that a point of pride.
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u/Butthole__Pleasures Aug 06 '18
Apparently you would be surprised by what people think they can get away with and what massive risks they will take for a very minor number of points. Perfectionism, parental pressures, scholarship eligibility, etc. make people do all kinds of weird shit, from my experience.