My partner has a long, successful career as a university professor. After working with many students in over four decades, he made an insightful observation. Students can be broadly classified into three categories: A, B, and C. After completing an examination, standing right outside of the examination hall, an A student knows exactly which questions that she got wrong, and what mistakes that she made. B students know that something is wrong with their answers, but they don’t know what exactly the mistakes are. C students, on the other hand, know that they have done everything correctly, and if there is any disappointment when the exam results are announced, it must be the lecturer/weather/dying grandma’s fault.
It makes perfect sense. A students are not only knowledgable and intelligent enough to know what they don’t know, but also take ownership of their mistakes. They are willing and able to learn from their mistakes, and take things to the next level. C students blame their failure on others, refuse to taking ownership of their learning, and hence lack both the incentives and ability to improve. So C students stay C students, and A students just keep propelling.
I have an “C Student” just recently. A taught Master student who insists to do a dissertation that is theoretical by nature, and not even in his field. In one of his emails, he told me that 1) he doesn’t understand the maths in a paper on which his research is based; and 2) He has replicated the experiments in that paper by asking his classmates to complete an online survey and the results are promising. I replied that if he cannot understand the paper completely, he should not proceed to conduct further experiments. He disagreed – “the maths and ideas in that paper are simple. I just don’t understand one particular part and got stuck. If you tell me how to do the maths, I can write a high-quality paper on this topic.”
He does not even know what he does not know. This is the unknown unknowns. B students know the knows only. C students do not know there are unknowns. A students know their unknowns, and are able to learn and improve. That’s what makes them the winners.
