Suicide in Korea - Page 5

I'm a premed student at Williams College, guessing most people haven't heard of it, but from wikipedia: "56 percent of the students were expected to be valedictorian or ranked in the top one percent of their class." We're fairly selective. There is a fine line between nerdiness and insanity, and most students here are so far beyond that line into the realm of insanity that their origins are unrecognizable. What makes me so mad about this whole culture of academic perfection is that for all the hours that a lot of these students put in to get perfect grades, it doesn't really translate into any usefulness. It's all for nothing. It's a correlative effect, rather than a causal effect. The measurements that school use for efficiency's sake are only proxies for the real qualities that they are looking for. For instance, a high GPA in biology is meant to mean you care a whole awful lot about the subject, and as a researcher you would have a passion for it. 99% of what you need to know to perform at a job in say the biotech sciences, you are taught when you are hired. What school is meant to do, is give you a passion, and having a passion for something makes it so you don't have to work hard, because work is easy. There has been tons of research done on how sleep deprivation, chronic stress, and other factors that are brought about by a stressful learning environment can inflict very significant damage neurologically (look up hippocampal neurodegeneration), yet this old anxiety based system of fostering inter-student competition is still used because administrators, professors, and many others are deluded into thing that "no pain, no gain" applies well to academics. Many professors hate this new wave of students with a firey passion because they are like robots who memorize rather than learn to apply concepts, yet at the same time, teach and test in a way that fosters this phenomenon. You know when someone is discussion a particular strategy in starcraft, and you are really into the information, and you can't stop thinking about it? You could spend hours doing unit testing to figure how well something works? That characteristic is what makes a good researcher. Making flash cards of all of the unit stats, and boasting that you know how much a corrupted roach with +2 armor takes from a +1 attack roach doesn't make you a good researcher (edit: I say researcher, because I can only speak from my own experience, but from everything I have ever seen, this is the same for pretty much any profession. Warren Buffet is a pretty good example of this). When you know why you are learning something, you'll remember it for a very long time when you do learn it. If you are learning something so that you can score higher than someone else, you use learning strategies that have a short term advantage. You would think that people so focused on academic improvement would pay attention to the science of learning itself, but it's completely ignored. I think much of it comes down to bigotry and narcissism in the academic community (high schools are measured in SAT scores, premed programs measured in MCAT scores).

FYI, My sister went here as well, and took her life her junior year due to major hypomanic episode set off by academic pressure, much longer story but I'm not going to write my life story out on the innernettes. Also: I think people saying that governments should have protective measures for students under academic pressure think too idealistically about this kind of thing. No matter how you word it, any kind of support system, not would, but does bear a mark of intense shame at the upper levels. The problem here is the manner by which students are taught and tested, and the absurd fact that schools don't care very much about false negatives in test scores. When we hear about Asian countries, and to a lesser extent some western countries, that have systems where 1 exam dictates your placement, we shouldn't be thinking "wow they are harsh, that is terrible" we should be thinking "wow that is an incredibly uneducated and wasteful way of going about doing their job." They are essentially trading a large portion of the career life potential of someone who did badly on 1 exam for the ability to test people in a fast, and more cost effective way. Not a very good trade for society IMO