Class difficulty as a barrier to entry
I think it’s fair to say I’m an intelligent student capable of performing well in class. At least I like to think I am, and here is why: generally when a professor makes a class easier rather than harder, I’m more disappointed than relieved.
In one of my classes in the College of Business (which will remain un-named), the professor recently went over mid-semester evaluations and granted a popular request to announce quizzes beforehand instead of having unannounced pop quizzes throughout the semester. This disappointed me, and I think I understand why.
In “How to Make Wealth”, one of Paul Graham’s essays, he talks about solving not just valuable problems, but hard problems as important for startups:
This is not just a good way to run a startup. It’s what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he’ll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop? That is, how much difficult ground have you put between yourself and potential pursuers? And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they’ll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they’ll take away your market overnight.
Challenging course requirements serve the same function. They allow the more talented, ambitious, and hardworking students to become obvious in their talent. Employers look at your transcripts. They read your grades. The grade in the transcript should accurately reflect the student’s value to the employer, and the best way to do that is by making the class difficult enough that the more talented can get a high grade while the less talented get a lower grade. Trying to give everyone a good grade only puts less talented candidates in competition with more talented candidates while clouding the employer’s ability to tell the difference. It represents a fundamental failure of the university’s duty to provide educated, qualified professionals to the work force.
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