Do Grades Define Your Potential?

"With colleges becoming increasingly academic-oriented and recruiters looking for holistic candidates, what matters?"

Let us begin by addressing the elephant in the room; no, your grades do not define your potential. The pressing question in every student's mind is the importance and weightage of grades. College students want to know it for placements, whereas school students want to know the answer to get into good universities. Working professionals also eagerly weigh this metric to move ahead in their respective careers. 

There is no simple answer to what exactly makes you successful in the eyes of your recruiter or society. Let us analyze a few scenarios and understand the root cause of this perplexing query.

Students with unparalleled GMAT scores of 780 have gotten rejected from Harvard. On the other side of the spectrum, students with scores as low as 650 manage to score an admit. The problem is that people do not understand that both these cases are niche. The probability of you fitting in these extreme ends is narrow. The human tendency is to always look for the easiest way out. If you think you will work extremely hard on your test scores only, or maybe work extremely hard on your profile only, then you will always remain unsuccessful.

Students want to discover a tried and tested path to their goals. Understand the analogy, every student's portfolio is different hence making their selection criteria different. One thing common, however, is that nobody has had it easy. So, if you're thinking that the 650 candidates have worked less than the 780, you're mistaken. Although the scores are on the same test; you're still comparing apples to oranges. 

Nowadays, parents are also aware of the things happening around, like grades vs potential of a student. A student with good grades may not have potential or vice versa. Because grades cannot define the potentiality of a student. And that’s the reason why teachers of boarding school in Dehradun give more emphasis on the learning capability of a student.

By no means will I convince you that grades are not important. Of course, they are; grades highlight your cognitive capacity, academic capability and educational rigour. Grades also form a measurable metric to distribute candidates by calibre. Hence grades are traditionally important most of the time. there are top 20 school in dehradun which defines your child potential.

When are grades not important?

The answer is quite simple if you think about it. Do you see your parents or any other working professional sitting with books and solving numerical problems? Do you see a doctor referring to a 900-page manual while prescribing medicine? The simple difference between studying and working is that the approach becomes much more practical rather than theoretical. Thus, if a student can successfully showcase optimum practical skill sets, it is inherently applied that he is strong in the fundamentals of the theoretical aspects of the subjects. In these conditions, poor grades do not hinder a candidate from opportunities. On the contrary, having shining grades does not necessarily imply that the candidate may be able to practically apply that knowledge. It does prove their learning, and growing capacity and hence makes up for the lack of practical accolades.

Thus we can conclude that grades are not important when you have worked extremely hard in industrial projects, case studies or any other Realtime hands-on experience which gives you theoretical knowledge while implementing practical skills. 

What defines your potential?

Everyone has their answer to this question, and coincidentally, everyone is right. There is no one universal quality that defines every human's potential. Despite this, educational institutes use grades as a metric because if they sat down to evaluate every student by their metrics, the procedure would be cumbersome and will not yield any comparative. Hence, the educational institutes have their hands tied due to the prevailing system.

So, should I work toward scoring good grades?

Now that you understand why the standardized grade system needs to exist, there are two options one has. People can choose to either have excellent grades or have other excellent skills. The only thing important is excellence. Irrespective of what you do, always be the best possible version of yourself and develop that skill inside out.

As a student, you need to understand the tradeoff. The only justification for having poor grades is if you've accomplished cream level excellence in a project, community service or any other extra-curricular which you focused and dedicated your time on. This is extremely hard to accomplish. There is no justification for having top grades but poor interpersonal communication skills and poor work ethic.

Hence always target grades according to your requirements in your career, but leave room open to develop other skills in life which help you develop holistically and contribute to building the community around yourself. Above-average grades do come with above-average creativity, learning capacity and dedication ethic. Grades do reflect various skillsets which can be useful in non-academic fields also.

Let me end this on the same note we began; no, grades do not define your potential, but having them does open doors to higher credibility.