Our obsession with exam results does not always tally with reality

“Someone I hadn’t seen in 40  years recognised me the other afternoon.  He had been one of my closest friends. We looked at each other with a mix of tenderness and befuddlement, moist-eyed. 

It was clear to both of us, after the five or 10 minutes of our hasty conversation, that this chance meeting was the last time we ever were going to see each other. 

But that was okay. When you are young, you think there will be plenty of time for everything in your life; counting all the grains of sand in the Sahara Desert, seeing all the people in the world.  

Life is a process of gradually coming to terms with the meaning and the very concept of never-ness.  ‘Well, so—how was it, in all?’ I asked him… He understood me. ‘Life, you mean?’” Mikhail Iossel writes in a recent heartrending article in The New Yorker; on a poignant moment when he met a former high school friend after four decades.

Chance encounter
This story reminds me of the day I met a former schoolmate in Mombasa after many years. He invited me to his “place”, which turned out to be a run-down mud-walled, grass-thatched house very far from town. It was clear that things were not working well for him (economically speaking).

 In school, he had good grades and a promising life. Maybe I should not have expected so much from education, but we were made to believe as children that good grades were the only magic wand to the life of our dreams. 

The restless Mombasa wind must have whizzed outside in dangerous undertows, then suddenly suppressed as if in orderly retreat probably snuffed out swiftly by the trees outside. It would have been a perfect evening, but I felt something deep, like the unbearable sadness one feels just before tears well up. Sentimental man that I am, I could not rule out weeping throughout the encounter. As a writer described such times; it is “Loss: but loss of what? Youth?” 

Was I mourning the end of promise? The dwindling of the days and the diminishing of all the daydreams we earlier had as children? I felt many things, I felt bad for my friend; I felt guilty about my relative ‘prosperity’ and ‘luck’; I felt bad for our generation. 

I cannot now remember the sound of his laughter, but it must have been bitterness disguised as mirth as I tried to cheer him; we talked wistfully about things we had hoped for as children; and how life breaks one’s heart. Had I known then, I would have quoted Sigmund Freud who famously said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”.

Personal experience
This is a good time to think about the place of examinations as we reflect on the usual hullaballoo after KCPE results were announced on April 15, 2021. How do examination results determine the outcome of our lives? There is no easy answer as life is complex and subject to all manner of permutations; and could turn out this or that way. 

Having been a student with good grades, there are a few things I have learnt. It is good for students to exert themselves within their ability to get good grades. I am encouraging my children to do that. However, in life, one needs more than just good grades or high IQ. To good grades or high IQ, one must add both hard and soft skills. 

Required skills
Hard skills have been defined by career expert Tom Gerencer as the “teachable abilities or skill sets that are easily measurable…the technical abilities that fit the job”.  

Hard skills are like writing, editing, coding, budgeting and others. Hard skills, good grades and high IQ can enable one to get an entry-level job in a company. They are what gets one into the door of a company. However, they are not enough to ensure success. 

One must add soft skills, which are defined by Gerencer as “the traits that prove you would be a great fit anywhere such as etiquette, communication and listening, getting along with other people”. 
As a country, we need to de-emphasise the importance of examinations. That is the whole point of the competence-based curriculum (CBC) education. 

We may debate whether we have the resources to implement CBC (that’s fine) but the benefits are clear. CBC emphasises that learners have what Howard Gardner called “multiple intelligences”. One may be good in languages but may struggle with mathematics; that does not make them a failure. 

A good analogy I first heard at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) was, “What if all animals were given a test to climb a tree?” Monkeys would pass the test with flying colours but fish would not even attempt it. That is what happens when we only test and prioritise certain (mostly cognitive) abilities and ignore other competencies. 

It is hoped that CBC, if implemented well, will cure that. 
Kudos to all pupils who did well in the recent KCPE examinations. However, for those who did not do as well, there will be many other types of wins ahead. And for the rest of us, the question still is: life, how is it?

The writer is Regional Director, Oxford University

Do good school grades lead to career success?
In his article about the correlation of good grades and career success, CEO and co-founder of online learning platform, Jack Tai says earning a good grade is not only a measure of subject matter knowledge or intelligence. Instead, it is a composite of knowledge, skills and personality traits. 

For example, a student with a good work ethic and discipline could help their grades because they turn in homework assignments on time and have good class attendance. Similarly, a student who is driven would be willing to do additional research for assignments or to seek out learning resources if they were struggling.  

Predictor of success
Because grades are a composite measurement of student performance, they can be a better predictor of success than other narrow measures, such as IQ. 

A research paper co-authored by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman found that personality is one of the most important predictors of success. Grades capture personality traits such as perseverance, diligence and self-discipline, three helpful traits that can lead to success. On the other hand, IQ alone only accounts for one to two per cent of income differences. 

Even while there are links between academic and career success, there are still notable gaps. For example, grades do not measure leadership or comfort with risk, two traits that are essential to the highest echelon of business success. Additionally, a grade point average (GPA) is not an indicator of emotional intelligence or interpersonal skills like networking. It would be hard to go far in a career without these critical skills. 

Despite the limitations of how academic success can predict career success, college grades remain a key factor for a student’s trajectory after college.  College grades are evaluated by the gatekeepers for many opportunities, including graduate school, internships, fellowships and job applications. GPA is also an easy way to sort candidates and identify likely prospects. 

For US college graduates in the class of 2019, 73 per cent of potential employers have screened job candidates by GPA, according to the Job Outlook 2019 survey. Moreover, most industries had a GPA cutoff, and students needed at least a B average before their résumé was considered. 

Recent graduates with a good GPA could be more likely to land a job interview or have a chance to prove their qualifications. Conversely, those with a lower GPA could be forced to shift their job search to smaller markets or smaller companies and to accept lower salaries.

Adapted from Forbes.com