OOOOOOOooooooooo la la. Yesterday, grades were distributed in the midst of beer, Funk’n’bleau rock music, and laughter.

A little recap, grades at INSEAD are all relative. Exams and assignments are graded in absolute terms. Your absolute grades are normalized, based on overall average and on standard deviation. With this process, 50% of the students will be below average. It is possible to have a negative relative mark.

No matter how well you did in absolute terms, what ultimately gets recorded is how well you did with respect to the other students. This is actually used in practice at companies that measure performance of various units only with respect to the other units in the firm. As no one knows how well the other units are doing (results are published after each period), everyone has a tendency to over perform.

I hope that some of these observations will alleviate some of the worries that I have overheard and restore pride in some egos.

- Finance, Business and Economics majors had it easy in P1.
- Consultants have a large scope of understanding, due to the very nature of their work. They also tend to do well.
- For some people, English constituted a hurdle: if reading a case takes you twice as long as everyone else, you will not benefit from the same analysis time
- Your grade does not reflect your actual knowledge of the subject. You can have a very decent absolute grade and a very average relative grade (a lot of my marks are in this case). You know your stuff but some of the other super bright students have better answered the question. Similarly, you might have gotten an ok absolute grade but everyone else did a lot worse than you did and you end up with a sky high relative mark. You might not feel confident making decisions in this subject without relying on a third party, yet your mark indicates that you are an expert.
- These marks reflect what INSEAD expects from you. Not what you want to get out of the program (remember, you are the customer), nor exactly how things are done in reality. Going over dozens of stats exam in the INSEAD format does not make you a Stats wizard. Working on sample Finance problems does not turn you into a monkey.
- MBA programs definitely offers a variety of learning means, and most of your growth will take place with your classmates. As far as educational programs go, it is probably one of the most personalized and varied example. However, exams have the most restricted format and mould people’s thinking into template questions. This might not accommodate for your own learning or execution preference.
- Some people have just brilliant minds and are good with numbers. So what?
- Remember the stats results: GPA and starting salaries are inversely proportional. Success is a personal measure and must be associated with your own objective obviously. However, in general, GPAs largely fail to measure your determination in life, your actual learning (this is not a differential system, people with different starting base are graded on the same scale), your ability to enthuse and inspire others, your people’s skills, your intuition, and many other factors that make successful leaders.
- Since these grades are all relative, any extra minute of work that someone puts in can offsets another student mark. So anyone involved in social activities, club leadership, presentations, conferences and all the other activities that INSEAD offers – all in reasonable amounts - can experience a difference between their actual and theoretical grades.
- Sleep, food, stress and general fatigue do play a large role in these results.
- Even if your objective in life is to be the best ever at what you are doing, remember that you are taking time off this path, at school, to remove imperfections, identifies areas where you will want support. You are taking time off to learn. If this is your key objective this year, the more you learn, the more new areas you cover and the less likely you are to secure top marks.

Finally, may I add that Einstein, in his early years was a very average student, who even had to take support lessons to improve his knowledge?