Was It Something I Said?
Smart is Cheap
By Vijay Mehrotra
The student is infuriated with me. He has come to my office hours to argue with me about the points that I have assigned to him on a homework problem, and he's not getting anywhere at all with this negotiation. With each passing minute, his face gets redder, there is more and more moisture visible on his forehead, and (is it my imagination? perhaps...) there is now an angry fire in his eyes.
The gist of the disagreement is this: On a recent homework assignment, I have asked my students to respond to an open-ended question ("provide a recommendation to the executive about this issue. In your response, you may want to consider the following points (a) — (f)..."), and he has answered it as if he was solving a mathematics problem with multiple parts ("Answer to point (a), Answer to point (b)...").
I try to explain that the reason that he received a lower score than he expected was not because of his modeling or his computations, but rather because he had made absolutely no attempt to organize his response as if he were communicating to senior management — or to anyone else, for that matter. He has simply made a mistake by overlooking an important part of the assignment.
Alas, he is either unwilling or unable to see this core point, so instead we argue. He points out that his technical answers were absolutely correct, that he simply deserves a better score, that he's talked about this with "lots of other people in the class" and that they all feel the same way. I respond to each point, growing more than a little exasperated along the way.
Finally, we review — in painstaking detail — the text of the question and the content of his answer. I once again explain the reasoning behind the assignment, the importance of summarizing results and presenting in a way that the audience can relate to. And all of this only enrages him further.
In his frustration, he tells me that he is an outstanding student (this confirms what I have seen in class), that he takes great pride in his schoolwork, that he spent a lot of time on this assignment, that he has an overall GPA of 3.9...
"I have an overall GPA of 3.92," I tell the professor, "and I have never gotten a C on a test before!" I've just found out that I've bombed my Finance midterm.
I am 20 years old, Big Man on Campus, taking an overload of classes, serving as an RA in the dorms, doing a consulting project for a hotel chain, and trying to have a social life all at the same time. Everything had been going just fine until now, halfway through the semester. I am panicked.
I had studied really hard for this exam, and I don't understand exactly what happened. Maybe I misunderstood the questions, maybe I didn't really "get" all the material, maybe I had panicked while taking the test. In any case, I'm convinced that this result is an aberration, and thus a tragedy.
The professor just sort of smiles, which makes me madder (doesn't she know who I am?). She is a first-year faculty member in her late 30s, having returned to academic life after several years in industry, and she simply can't understand what I'm so upset about. After all, it was just a midterm where I made some errors, not a test of my character in which I was found wanting. And the mistakes I made were real ones, which she tries to point out to me in a constructive way. I'm not interested — all I can think about is the exam, the lost points, the poor score. Eventually, she begins to tire of my whining.
In the end she promises (probably just to get me out her office!) that if I do well on the final she'll give careful consideration to my overall course grade. With that, she sends me on my way, though. I'm still angry and upset...
"Look," I say, snapping out of my recollection, finally losing patience with him, "you'll have plenty of chances to demonstrate your skills on the midterm and the final. But I'm not going to change your grade on this assignment. I want you to spend some time thinking about what I've said and why I've asked the questions the way that I have. It's important for you to understand this." He grumbles and goes on his way...
I want to run after him, grab him by the shirt, and sit him back down in that chair. I want to scream at him, to shake some sense into him. "No one out there really cares about your fancy GPA, kid. I know you think you're really smart, and I know you expect me to be impressed. But smart is cheap, my friend, and there are an awful lot of people out there just as smart as you. Look, you've got a lot of solid strengths: work ethic, commitment, intelligence. You just need to add 'humility' and 'adaptability' and 'good listener' to that list. Listen to me, 'cause I know what I'm talking about. You see, I thought I was really smart, too..."
Somehow, the most difficult lessons to teach are the ones that you had a hard time learning yourself.
Vijay Mehrotra (vjm@sfsu.edu) is a faculty member in the Decisions Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, and an operations management consultant.
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