Giant Panda Attack

The nice thing about having hardly any readers is I don't have to worry about alienating tons of people when I post something really inflammatory. For example, in a few sentences I'm going to say "the current system of assigning grade point averages and the value we place in them is stupid," and when I do, I won't have to worry about driving off tons of people who love and swear by GPA. It's convenient!

So. GPA is dumb. Now, this is not merely the bitter ranting of somebody who got crappy grades. (Should I have said shitty instead of crappy? I'm kind of contradicting what I wrote in my blank post.) I was comfortably in the high 3's. I had to be, or I'd have lost my scholarship, and in turn not been able to afford DePaul, and would have had to drop out and go somewhere else. Not the end of the world maybe but would have been somewhat unpleasant.

A lot of people like GPA. As I already mentioned, my big fancy scholarship was contingent upon keeping my college GPA high. When applying to colleges, every single one of them wanted my high school GPA. When filling out job applications online, the majority of them want my college GPA. When I talk to recruiters on the phone, the second question they ask (the first being my degree) is about my GPA. It's a big deal.

The problem with GPA is that it's an attempt to quickly summarize everything about someone's academic abilities. When a college is looking at high school applicants, or an employer looking at people finishing up or done with college, they often have mountains of applications, and hardly have the time to review in great detail an applicant's course history, how they did in their classes or what their teachers thought of them. So, the solution is a single number which quickly measures someone's academic performance.

It's sound in theory, I guess, but in practice it falls apart, as it would only be an unbiased measure of academic performance if everyone took exactly the same classes under the same conditions with the same teachers. The problem is, given two equally intelligent students, the one who takes easier classes will end up with a higher GPA, but will probably end up learning less due to not challenging him or herself. For example, at my university, I pursued a degree in computer game development. Though my emphasis was on programming, for my elective slots I took a few classes in related fields, such as 3D art. My hope was that by learning about the other fields of game development, I'd become a better developer overall. Learning how programs like Maya and Motion Builder worked would make it easier to work with artists and understand what they were doing.

I might have been wrong, but I think I made the right choice. In my senior capstone project, I was able to incorporate what I knew of Motion Builder from my Advanced Motion Capture class into the development of our content pipeline. I was also able to teach my team's animator how to use Motion Builder to place multiple takes into an fbx file, allowing us to use a single file per character rather than having a different file for every single animation, which would have made me a sad panda. Also, knowing my way around Maya allows me to quickly make place holder art when I need to put something on screen to help me test my work, rather than having to pester an artist to make me a cube or something silly, wait for him or her to make it (as they might be busy with something else, and I'll have to wait), then put it on version control where I can get it, when I can instead just do it myself.

So, what then, is the problem? The problem is these classes were hard, and I sucked at them. I consider myself an artist sometimes, but my art is words, stories and games. I cannot do visual art. I can visualize what I want in my head, and I know how the tools in 2D or 3D art programs technically work, I guess I just have difficulty knowing what tools to use to get what I want, which some people seem to be able to figure out intuitively. Maybe I'd have gotten better with practice? Who knows. Either way, though I learned a good bit, and feel like it made me a better developer, my projects were somewhat pale in comparison to those of more experienced modelers and animators, and my grades reflected that, so I'd usually earn a B in such a class (or a C+ in one case, but damn was that class hard) rather than an A.

I'm not complaining about that, the grades were fair. What I'm complaining about is that instead, I could have taken some "Easy A" 100 level liberal arts class, learned nothing I didn't already know (or nothing of practical use in my chosen field), and ended up with a higher GPA, but, in my opinion, I'd have been a worse game developer. I'm not trying to brag, or spin some "woe is me" tail to earn sympathy. I just want my example to illustrate the primary flaw in GPA: It actually discourages students from challenging themselves. The way for them to look best is to take only the hard classes they absolutely must, and fill the rest of their schedule with the easiest classes possible, whether or not they are relevant. Sure, there will be students who ignore GPA and take only classes they are interested in or will benefit from, but the sad truth is their transcripts will look worse for it unless they manage to get straight A's in those classes as well. A system meant as an innocent measure of academic achievement instead makes people want to play the game of college on easy mode.

tl;dr GPA sucks because you can pad it with easy classes and it gets worse if you take hard classes