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by hrktb 4394 days ago
> No one is telling them that the game is about to end

I'm not sure about that. During college, there was a few doors that were only open to students with some level of grades. I applied for an exchange program requiring recommandations from the college teachers, one them had the honesty to tell me straight "why should I recommand you with the very average grades you have now?"

I did better at the next evaluations, and entered the program I wanted, leading almost directly to my first full time job after graduation.

Even after entering professional life, there are so many companies with extremely naive perfomance grading, where at evaluation time you get comments like "we understand you put a lot of effort in <hard to quantify but long term positive stuff>, but following the letter of the rules, we have to cap your reward to this level because you didn't do <easy to quantify but almost irrelevant stuff >". Playing the game goes a long way in these organizations.

To make it clear, I think people who care about learning and only so much about grades would have different privileges at school (better relations with the teachers, less stress, etc.) Same goes for college, where a student growing on a personal level and being curious about extra cursus stuffs will get attention and be more prepared for some aspects of their future professional life.

I think these students go a different route, but not essentially better or worse than those playing the game.

1 comments

Meh, the easy to quantify stuff is applied on an ad-hoc basis. It's just a way to lie to employees who didn't win the popularity/politics contest.
Isn't it somewhat the same thing ? Most of the time the people that care about popularity/politics will also take care of ripping the low hanging fruits to make it look good on paper. It's a good way to deflect criticism when anyone starts to ask questions.