Some students think that I am a bit naive when I talk about science and dreams. Reality is cruel. Statistics shows that students with higher grades can get offers from better graduate schools, and students with poor ranking like me rarely have opportunities to get an offer. The safest approach is to be practical. By saying “practical”, they mean to focus on exam only when they study. Of course, if they are well trained in exam tactics from primary schools to high schools, this approach may be the best for them. However, there are many drawbacks of being an exam addict, just to list a few main reasons here.

In my previous post How to Score High in GPA, I stated that familiarity of an area helps students to get higher scores in related courses. Some students tend to take courses which they are familiar with and avoid those they are not good at. Indeed, this makes life easier, but we do not learn in an easy life. In Tsinghua University, many students have taken part in High School Olympics of Physics / Math / Biology, and they completed most of the college syllabus in their high school. (Wow, I have never imagined that before I came to Beijing.) What they have to do in college is to review what they have learnt again, and recite the information in greater details in order to score much higher. They get high grades comfortably, but I feel pity on them. I did not take part in the crazy Olympics in high school. And I had to study very hard in college and still got lower grades than those students. Still, my 4 years in college are more meaningful than theirs. I am making progress.

Diversity of knowledge is crucial to creativity in scientific research. If we just study something we are familiar of, and feel reluctant to leave our comfort zone, we won’t do research well. As Martin Schwartz wrote in his essay, we do science not because we know a lot about it. Research is exploration of unknown.

I have also said that it is easier to score high if we take courses with simple exams. Everyone knows that. But what many students have ignored is that, over 80% of courses with easy exam questions, the professors do NOT teach well. How come the professors are so generous to give us grades? Perhaps they do not devote in teaching and so they just ask their post-doc to make up the easy questions. Perhaps they intentionally make the scripts easier to attract more students to choose their courses. Perhaps they are really poor of the subject and cannot write good questions. According to my knowledge, most of the professors within this 80% meet all the 3 “perhaps”. It is totally wasting our time to take these courses, because after taking them, we will find that we are just the same as the students who have not taken them. Good professors should know that the purpose of exams is to let students know about their weakness, but not let them think that they are perfect. We lose our great chances of communicating with good professors, who may give us valuable advice or even change our life, with the compensation of score.

Is it really a nice choice to devote 3 years of time on exam score? Not a fair trade. The transcript will be used once only, and once we finish our application to graduate school, it becomes garbage. By spending more time on reading extra-curricular books and taking part in academic activities, I am proud to say that I obtain broad knowledge which is not only important for PhD interviews, but also useful in my research for many years. More importantly, I feel happy during the process of study. Do you think it is more practical?

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