What mistakes did the excellent students make?

About 10 years ago, at the end of my first semester at Wharton, a student came into my office during office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. In my head, I tried to make a list of reasons why a college freshman might cry: Dumped by his girlfriend, accused of plagiarism…

“I just got my first A minus in my life.” – he said, his voice trembling.

Over the years, I have seen many students become so obsessed with getting an A that they burn out, and others even try to sue their schools when they don't get the results they want.

Everyone worships the perfection of perfect scores and believes that it will be the ticket to enter elite schools and promise an attractive job.

I was one of them. I started my college years with the goal of graduating with a 4.0 GPA.(the highest score in the US education assessment system). That it would be a reflection of my intelligence and will. It would show that I had the right stuff to achieve success. But I was wrong.

The evidence is clear: Academic achievement is not a predictor of career success. Across all occupations, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is small in the early years of employment, and minuscule in later years.

For example, at Google, when employees are in their second or third year of college, their grades don't affect their work performance. (Of course, it must be said that if you get a D, you probably won't 'land' at Google.

Grades rarely measure qualities like creativity, leadership, teamwork, emotional, social, political intelligence. Yes! A students are great at cramming information and writing it down on tests. But a successful career is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem, it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.

In a 1962 study, a group of psychologists tracked America’s most creative architects and compared them to their less creative but technically skilled peers. One of the factors that distinguished them was their grades.

“In college, creative architects typically average B grades.” – Donald MacKinnon writes. “In courses that interest them, they can get A's, but in subjects that don't require imagination, they are willing to do nothing.”. They pay attention to their curiosity and prioritize activities that they find intrinsic motivation in – a factor that contributes to their success at work.

Getting straight A’s requires conformity. A successful career requires originality. In a study of top graduates, education researcher Karen Arnold found that even those who had successful careers rarely moved on to higher positions.

“Top students are not necessarily visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explains. “They tend to rely on the system, rather than change it.”

This may explain why Steve Jobs graduated from high school with a 2.65 GPA, while Harry Potter author JK Rowling barely got Cs at Exeter University, and Martin Luther King Jr. got just one A in his four years at Morehouse.

If your goal is to graduate with no bad grades on your transcript, then you’ll take easy classes and stay within your comfort zone. If you’re willing to settle for Bs, you might learn Python programming and try to decipher “Finnegans Wake” (which is notoriously difficult). You’ll gain experience with failure, which will help you build resilience.

A students also miss out on social activities. More time in the library means less time for lasting friendships, clubs, or volunteering. I know this from experience.

I didn't hit my 4.0 GPA goal. I graduated with a 3.78. (This is the first time I've shared my GPA since applying to PhD 16 years ago. Seriously, no one cares.)

Looking back, I don’t wish my grades had been higher. If I could do it again, I would have studied less. The hours I wasted memorizing the inner workings of the eye would have been spent watching sitcoms and having late-night conversations about the meaning of life.

So, colleges: Make it easier for your students to take intellectual risks. Graduate schools could make it clear that no one cares about the difference between a 3.7 and a 3.9. Colleges could assign letter grades without minuses or pluses, so that any GPA above a 3.7 shows up on your transcript as an A.

That could help stop the madness of the race for grades, which encourages too many students to strive for meaningless perfection.

For employers: Make it clear that you value skills more than A grades. In a 2003 study of 500 job postings, nearly 15% of employers did not consider high GPAs, while more than 40% did not consider grades in the initial screening.

For straight-A students: Realize that doing poorly in school can prepare you for bigger challenges in life. So it might be time to set a new goal: get at least one B before graduating.