My Own Pirate Radio

At a dinner party last night I met a McGill med school grad who has worked for several years as a radiologist. He sits on a medical school admissions board, and we talked about how hard it is to calibrate applications from different universities. At University of Toronto’s med school, for instance, the top 30%* of the class gets an Honours rating. At McGill, only the top 10% earn Honours. How do you calibrate objectively? You can’t, really. That raises a debate: what do grades really mean, and how much should they matter within and outside of the school walls?

A similar problem occurs in evaluating university credentials once they’ve been granted. Some governments refuse outright to recognize medical school credentials from certain foreign countries. Others classify foreign doctors as second class citizens with restrictions on the work they can do. Some of this is warranted — medicine is certainly an area in which you ought to be conservative about credentials — but there’s also a healthy dose of protectionism at play.

International work aside, once you get out of med school marks don’t matter so much. You either graduated or you didn’t, and you are certified to practice medicine, or you’re not. When it comes to getting a job, according to my radiologist friend, hands-on experience (e.g. through locums) far outweigh the importance of marks. And that’s as it should be.

MBA students have it harder. Many MBA schools issue grades to their students, and some industry recruiters have become accustomed to using those as part of their screening process. That seems broken to me. It’s a Master’s degree, after all. The bar to get in is high. These are smart, experienced people. So why disclose grades? A simple pass/fail or honours/pass/fail should suffice. What matters more (to me, anyway) is on-the-job performance, and that’s where interviews, internships and apprenticeship periods should come in. If you’re leaning too heavily on marks as a pre-screening device you are missing potential future star hires.

There are tradeoffs within the learning environment too. If you don’t measure grades, you get more student collaboration, but also more free-riders. If you do measure, especially in a fine-grained manner, you flush out the free-riders at the risk of the environment becoming over-competitive. Students may grandstand and try to upstage each other in class, for instance, in an effort to earn participation marks. What’s worse, over time profs inflate grades and everyone loses faith in the system. The same exact effects play out in workplaces with respect to compensation measurement and employee behavior. Neither extreme is healthy.

Grades do matter and to a reasonable extent they should. A simple Pass/Fail/Honours system can add value when used with care, be it in a university or a workplace. But we must be prudent about what we measure and how much weight we place on it. Measurements are very much a double-edged sword.

* Update April 24, 4:05 PM: at U of T about 30% to 40% of the class is awarded Honours. This is anecdotal.