Over-Researching
A common theme that comes up, at least in Singapore and in the IT industry, is that plenty of people with mediocre academic grades turn out to be excellent at the actual work once they are on the job. Today I want to make one point about why that happens.
The university business model
We all know a university’s main income is student intake. Its main challenge is attracting those students, and that usually pushes it down one of three routes:
- Offer courses more cheaply than other schools.
- Give its graduates a better shot at landing a job than graduates elsewhere.
- Offer unusual but popular courses that other universities don’t.
I want to focus on the second one and how it actually gets pulled off. For it to work, employers need to recognize the school and believe its graduates are more skilled than the rest. Recognition on its own is the easy half: high intake, word of mouth, advertising. The hard part is getting employers to believe your university produces quality graduates.
That is tricky to prove. You can’t just point at a pile of “top scorer” graduates, because an employer can assume you set the bar too low. And hoping graduates go out, do great work, and leave employers with a good impression is an unpredictable plan, since it leans entirely on those employers to spread the word for you. So the route more universities are taking now is the “researcher” route.
The researcher route
Student projects as research
Give students project work. Every so often one of them produces something genuinely interesting, maybe even ground-breaking. Then staff step in to guide the student further (or take the project over if the student isn’t interested), publish research off the back of it, and circulate it among employers as “a student from our school did this”.
It costs the university nothing, the student is still paying fees to do it, and it is hard to find a downside. If a student does poor work, you just grade them low and move on as if it never happened. You don’t need every student to produce something ground-breaking, you just need one or two per batch.
Researchers for hire
Have students do a project for a real business as part of their coursework. The business doesn’t pay the students, the students still pay the university, and the business walks away happy with free research help. Another win for the university.
The only real risk is the students doing poorly, and assigning an academic supervisor to watch the project closely keeps that risk down.
Over-researching for grades
With that in mind, here is where university grading clashes with the reality of most workplaces. Universities grade heavily on the research. For a given project, they will usually look at:
- Is it ground-breaking?
- What background research did the student do, and was it enough?
- Did the student really verify that their implementation was the “best” one?
- Did they compare it against other solutions?
- Did they come up with alternative approaches?
- Did they check the results of their implementation?
- What effects did it have?
- How much of an improvement was it over other projects?
That all sounds reasonable, until you notice the implementation itself is barely the point. Implementing something gets you a passing grade, but for a good grade it is almost an afterthought. There is too much weight on research. And it quietly assumes students have unlimited resources to do it, when they don’t: they aren’t paid, they are short on time, and any research funding comes out of their own pocket, on top of the fees they already pay.
The point is that universities aim for a “perfect” project. That creates a gap between how a university grades and how a workplace actually runs.
The workplace reality
In an actual workplace (assuming a non-research department or company, which is the big majority), you are given a task because it makes money. The longer you take, the more the company loses. So companies tend to push people to get things done quickly.
Research at work is hugely simplified compared to a university or a research-focused business. Does a business really want an employee spending a month finding the “best” database, comparing the options, justifying the choice, then running tests to confirm it? Or does it want that employee to spend a day looking up the popular databases that similar projects already use, and follow the trend?
In reality, you research “just enough” to be confident the product will satisfy the customer without draining your profit. You don’t want to sink so much time and budget into research that you miss the market window or go months without earning anything. You are not aiming for perfection, you are aiming for something good and improvable. Businesses tend to ship first and refine later.
That is a big part of why so many people with average or poor grades still do well at work. The reality is there is a 95% chance your workplace never wanted that much research in the first place. They know that past a certain point, more research is just lost time, and they would rather you start building with what you have already found. It is simply a different model from the one universities and research-focused organizations run on.