[Flipside Week] School exams grades are not useless for measuring the capabilities of employees

Many people often say that doing well in schools does not always mean doing well at real work.

Well that makes sense, because the school teaches unrelated things and measures unrelated things. It teaches you how to study for exams, and measures how well you take the exams.

But, it is the most controlled way of measuring how good the employee is.

Because I can ask the same with other things - is the performance review of an employee a good indicator of how he will perform in the future, or even how he is performing now? Does the review show how good he is or how good he appears to be?

Consider two people on two projects. Project one fails while project two is a success. How to know if project one failed despite guy 1's great work because it is too hard, and project 2 is a piece of cake and guy 2 is slacking?

Trying to compare things with too many different variables at the same time yields no useful information.

This is why schools and exams are good. You have a whole bunch of students doing the same exam. The marks reflect how well they demonstrate their intellect, not how well they con people. And since everyone is doing the same exam, results are comparable against each other.

If you say that school exams are simple compared to the complex real world, then all the more reason for the good people to ace it, and it says something about those that fail.

And if you say that school exams and university degrees are about things unrelated to real work, I agree. But then the world is always hiring people whose knowledge is unrelated to the companies they are working for. We call them MBAs and consultants.