Except to them it isn't. Their entire life they have been playing the grade game and have learned how to optimize it. Like any group of people given a metric they will try to game it. Not to mention it isn't like everyone is telling them that to get a good job they need good grades in college too. Not one is telling them that the game is about to end.

Above a Field's medal winning mathematician having a conversation with a 17 year old A level student.

Actually, my perception is that the grade gaming started fairly recently in the UK, around 10 to 15 years ago. The rhetoric of 'raising standards' came to mean 'more passing and higher grades'.

As regards the parent post's last sentence ('Not one is telling them that the game is about to end.') some of my brighter Further Education students (vocational training) seem to have guessed. They are not going to University directly or at all but via placements in company training programmes or services training.

I'll bet you were not taking nationally defined exams which do not stress derivation from first principles however...

But the subsequent college course followed the same pattern, and I don't think it was atypical for the time. It took a couple tries to drive it into my skull, but I did end up majoring in math.

Turning math into a series of multiple choice questions that are answered by cranking through memorized algorithms... don't get me started.

Your experience is a really good illustration of the first phase of what I think is a common 'pattern' or 'process' in education reform.

Phase 1: An exceptional teacher decides to do something and a group of highly motivated students (also self-selected students) responds well. Results are good.

Phase 2: This activity is highlighted as 'good practice' and showcased in conferences by head teacher/managers

Phase 3: Managers in other institutions say 'we must do this' and impose the outer form of the activity on staff who are not perhaps thinking of that and students who are not self-selecting.

Phase 4: Results not so good in copying institutions. Staff blamed. Much mumbling.

Knowledge is situated and good teachers will modify things to suit their students in their particular institution.

I recall reading about Feynmann, he was very eager to help students as long as they were prepared. If they presented a question to him, partially or totally unprepared he was extremely pissed. But then again, he is a Nobel prize why should he waste his time with someone who didn't do his homework?!

Gowers' point is to do with 'teaching to the test' which is happening far too much at the moment in the UK if you ask me (but no-one is asking us).

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.

>>> Like any group of people given a metric they will try to game it.

Reminds me of Paul Graham's interview question: Have you ever hacked something that wasn't a computer?

With most students being forced to study 3 Sciences, Maths, English Language, English Literature, a Foreign Language and a Humanities subject, there is little wonder that they want at least one subject, from their optional choices, that they deem easy, if not particularly worth while.

Are you arguing that higher grades might be causing femaleness? Interesting theory.

In context, since we know that femaleness is (barring certain rare disorders) caused by the sex chromosome of the sperm that reaches the egg, which is essentially random, we can be fairly sure that it's not caused by school grades or anything that would affect school grades, which does allow us to conclude with a reasonable degree of confidence that femaleness (indirectly, of course) causes higher grades.

How can you ever tell that the correlation isn't a coincidence? (see: pirates are correlated with global warming http://sparrowism.soc.srcf.net/home/pirates.html) that seems a bit hand-wavey.

"Oh, that's not a REAL correlation..." sounds a bit like "Oh, that's not a TRUE Scotsman..."

It's true that you can never be completely sure that any correlation isn't a coincidence, just like you can't be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow. You can, however, be sure beyond a reasonable doubt with enough of a sample size and a strong enough correlation.

Out of curiosity, do you personally believe it's likely (say, >5% chance) that it's a coincidence that girls have better grades than boys?

Schools also game the system and put a lot of effort in getting D students to get a C at GCSE level (exams taken at 16) as this is what they are scored on.