How many times have we been at a party and someone asks what we do for a living and finding out we’re in science they say: “Wow! Science! That’s hard, even Einstein flunked high school science (or math)!” As we fight to stifle a scream we look at our shoes and mumble: “Well…gee…uh...” Because we really don’t know the story of how he didn’t flunk we’re sort of stuck agreeing from ignorance. Well, the real story is one of the best April Fools-type jokes ever!
It turns out Einstein left his German high school early without his diploma, but with a letter of recommendation from his teachers to the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, saying that he was an outstanding mathematician and should be allowed to take their entrance exam a year early. Although he was still two years younger than the minimum entrance age he passed the science and math parts with such high grades the head of the physics department, Professor Weber, requested Einstein be allowed entrance immediately! However, due to some rather more mundane grades in history and foreign languages, and lack of a high school diploma, it was decided he should take a senior year of Swiss high school just to even out his total intellectual ‘package’ and pick up the diploma required for entrance by the ETH.
His first semester at the Aargau Kantonsschule high school was accomplished with a GPA of 2. Not too good right? Wrong! They were using a grading system of “1” as superior through “6,” a total failure. So he was doing B-level work (although his math and physics grades were “A”s his foreign language and liberal arts were still “C” level).
Now it gets interesting. After the first semester the Swiss educational bureaucracy issued a fiat that for the next semester the grading system was going to be turned on its head: 6 for superior and 1 for the less advantaged. I’m sure you can see where this is going!
Of course! The second semester he failed everything miserably by the grading standards of the previous semester! Although his second semester GPA was 5.4 out of 6, a B+ level. So he actually got smarter the second semester.
And at the end of the year he was welcomed into the ETH with open arms and as they say: “The rest is history.”
However, as time passed and the hoary mists of history enveloped the finer details of a foreign secondary school system, all that was remembered was that, somehow, inexplicably, because even the great Einstein failed his high school science, science must be really, really hard, so why study it?
Well, now you know how he didn’t fail. I wonder if Einstein ever thought about the irony of his senior year high school grades? And the nameless Swiss bureaucrats who made the switch would have pulled it off without notice if they hadn’t had one certain brilliant young man in their school system that year: 105 years later Time magazine’s “Man of the Century.”
All the above information can be easily had by reading “The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein,” volume 1, page 17.
The lesson learned is that if you are going to use a system (e.g. alphabet letters, numbers, emoticons, etc.) to indicate goodness it should be set-up to leverage seemingly pre-conceived human expectations of a top score (first letters, biggest numbers, smiley face). In this respect the American tradition of assigning “A”s coupled with 4 GPs is a stroke of genius combining the best of both of the Swiss grading systems that bedeviled Einstein!
It can be reasonably inferred after reviewing the standard Einsteinian biographies that Einstein himself never gave his high school grades a second thought; that’s what publishing articles in Annalen der Physik will do!
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