Part of Listed's 100 Day Writing Challenge.

One of the common theme brought up (at least in Singapore setting, and IT Industry) is that there is a lot of people out there with low academic grade, but excels at the practical work they are given in a workplace. Today, I wanted to share 1 point regarding that topic.

University Business Model

We all know the primary way for a university school to earn income is through intake of students. However, they do have the primary challenge of attracting students, which is why universities tend to go down one of this route:

1. Offer courses at lower prices compared to other schools.
2. Make graduates from the university have higher chance to find a job compared to other graduates.
3. Offer some unique, but popular courses that other universities don't offer.

I do want to talk about point 2. and how that is achieved. In order for that to happen, businesses need to recognize that school and acknowledge that graduates from that school are more skilled compared to other schools. The problem of recognition can be solved by just having a high intake, word of mouth and advertising. The problem is making business recognize that your university produces quality graduates.

That, is a tricky problem to solve. You can't just show that you have a lot of 'top scorer' graduates, because business can assume that you set the bar too low. Hoping that graduates find a job, do their work well and have businesses get good impression of the school is a unpredictable model to do, and it relies on the businesses to spread the information about the school. So, one way that universities are now going for is the 'Researcher' route.

The Researcher Route

Student Projects as Research

Basically, give project work for students to do. Once in a while you get a student who outputs some really interest project or research concept, maybe ground-breaking. Then, you have your staff members handhold the student to further continue the project (or take over if the student is not interested) and publish a new research on it and spread it around businesses, showing that a student from your school did this research.

Totally free from the student (and the students still pay you for doing it) and it's hard to find a drawback from this model. I mean, if a student does a really poor work on his project you can just grade him poorly and pretend it never existed. You don't need every student to produce a ground-breaking result, you just need at least 1 student or more to produce something interesting in each batch.

Researchers for Hire

Basically, have your students do a project for a business as part of their coursework. The business don't have to pay the students, the students still pays the university for course fees, business is happy with the university for free researchers/workers, a win for the university.

You only incur a risk where the students do poorly, but attaching an academic supervisor that closely monitor the project progress and all lowers the risk.

Over Researching for Academic Grades

With that point in mind, here comes the problem with university's grading scheme versus the reality of 95% of the workplace. University grades heavily on the research done. To break it down, for a given project, they will usually grade by:

• It is ground-breaking?
• What was the student's background research? Was it sufficient?
• Have the student's really verified that their implementation of the project was the 'best'?
  • Have they verified against other solutions?
  • Have they came up with other alternative solutions?
• Did they check the results of their implementation?
  • What effects does it have?
  • How much improvement compared to other projects?

Seems reasonable to a degree, until you realize the implementation is never really put in mind. Sure, implementing something gets you a passable grade, but its an afterthought for getting a good grade. The problem here is, there is too much focus on research. And a lot of times, there is an assumption that students have infinite resources to do those research. The reality is no, the students aren't getting paid and they have limited time to do the research. Any research funding comes from the student's pocket on top of the school fees they already have to pay.

Point is that, university aims for 'perfection' of a project. This creates a gap between the grading of the university versus the reality of a workplace.

Workplace Reality

In the actual workplace (assuming its a non-research based department or company, which is quite a big majority), you are tasked to do something because of profit. The longer you take to do something, the more loss the company is incurring. Hence, companies tend to pressure employees to do things fast and quick.

Research in actual workplace is really super simplified compared to universities or research-focused business. Do a business really want an employee to spend 1 month+ worth of time to find out the best Database to use, take their time to compare it, justify their selection and then do tests to check if they really should use it? Or do the business want the employee to spend 1 day of searching up the popular databases that other similar projects have used, and just follow the trend?

You see, in reality, you want to research 'just enough' to make sure that your product and it's implementation can satisfy the customer and reduce profit. You don't want to spend too much time and budget on researching such that you either just missed the market timing or never get a profit for a few months. Point is, you don't aim for 'perfection', you aim for something 'good and improvable'. Actual business tends to ship out the products fast first, then make enhancements on it later.

This, is why there is quite a good number of students out there who only got decent or poor grades, but they still do very well in a workplace setting. Reality is, there is a 95% chance your workplace doesn't want that much researching to begin with. They recognize that at some point, time spend researching is a loss and they just want you to start implementing with what you already discovered. Its just a totally different business model from universities and research-focused organizations.