Albert Einstein's Report Card: Grades, Struggles, and Success at ETH Zurich

Einstein's academic record reveals high grades, but also struggles with professors and a lack of diligence in some courses.

### Einstein's Academic Journey: Grades, Struggles, and Success
* 🔍  The video analyzes Albert Einstein's school and university report cards, debunking the myth of him being a poor student.
* 👨‍🎓 Einstein initially failed the ETH Zurich entrance exam at 16.5 due to low linguistics scores but later gained direct entry after attending Aargau school.
* 🇩🇪  His Aargau final grades showed excellence in math and physics (grades of 6/6, the highest), with a lower grade in French (3/6).
* 📚  At ETH Zurich (1896-1900), Einstein's grades were good but not perfect, revealing a complex relationship with some professors like Weber, whom he felt taught outdated physics.
* 🧑‍🏫 He often skipped lectures, preferring self-study, notably learning Maxwell's laws independently.  He even received a failing grade (1/6) in a practical physics course due to poor attendance.
* 🧮  A significant portion of his learning came from his classmate Grossman, whose notes Einstein used, and whose help Einstein gratefully acknowledged.
* 👩‍🎓 Einstein's first wife, Mileva Marić, also studied at ETH, achieving good grades but ultimately failing her final exams and not graduating.
* 👨‍🔬  The video concludes that while Einstein excelled academically, his unconventional approach and strained relationships with professors initially hindered his career prospects, highlighting the importance of building positive relationships in academia.

Hi, I'm Toby, and welcome back. Today I'd like to show you through the report card

of none other than the famous Albert Einstein. I have his grades here from the end of high school, as well as during his time at university, and I'd like to take

a bit of a look through with you to see what Einstein was really like as a student. There's a bit of a myth that goes around that Einstein was really bad

at math and failed at school, but from having a look at his grades we will see that Einstein was actually a pretty good student, although his grades aren't

perfect, and his time as a student wasn't without struggle. Looking at Einstein's grades reveals interesting information about his life, his teachers, and what was

going on in physics at the time. As well as Einstein's school and university grades, I also have how his grades compared to his classmates at the time

and also the grades of his first wife, who he met while studying at university. So with that, let's have a look. Just so we know the timeline here, when Einstein

was 16 and a half, in 1895, he actually tried to get into the ETH University in Zurich,

Switzerland, but he failed the entrance exam. The normal age that you have to be to even take the entrance exam is 18, so he was trying to get in early.

The entrance exam had a scientific section which Einstein apparently did quite well on, as well as a general section which was his downfall. Apparently, he got quite

low grades in the linguistics questions. After that disappointment, Einstein enrolled in the Aargau school, which is a secondary school near Zurich in

Switzerland, where he would continue his education, and graduating from this school would allow him to be directly admitted to ETH without having to do the

entrance exam again. So this first document I have here is Einstein's final grades from his year at the Aargau school. Herr Albert Einstein from Ulm,

which is the town in Germany that he was from, born on the 14th of March

1879—that's Pi Day, the 14th of March—attended the Canton school in Aargau.

You might have noticed this is all in
German, so I'm giving you a bit of a translation, although I don't speak
German myself. These are the subjects

that he took and his grade. Now, a grade
of 6 is the highest one obtainable; it

would mean very good, and a grade of 1
would be very poor. So we can see he's

taken German language and literature,
French, English, Italian, history, geography, algebra—he's got a 6 there—geometry
including trigonometry and analytic

geometry, a 6 as well, the highest score,
descriptive geometry, physics, again a 6.

So he looks like a pretty good student
here in those subjects. Chemistry, a little bit lower, a 5. Natural History, art
drawing, and technical drawing. So his

lowest grade here from when he was
leaving school would have been French, at only a 3 out of 6, but he clearly was a very
good student in the scientific

math and physics subjects. And there we
go—he graduates from the school in October 1896, allowing him to go straight
to ETH. And this here is his grade record

from his whole time there at University.
Albert Einstein. On the front of the grade record here, this is referring to
the entrance exam, and ordinarily they

would write your entrance scores here,
but since he was able to have direct entry from school, that is empty, and we
just have his admission date, October

1896, and his exit date of August 1900.
This would be the grades from his first

semester, 1896 to 1897. We have the
subject, the teacher, the grade that

Einstein received, and again, one is the
lowest grade and six is the highest grade. Then we have a column for notes or
remarks. Their translations are

differential and integral calculus by
Hurwitz, analytical geometry, descriptive geometry, mechanics with exercises,
determinants, and projective geometry.

And it looks like he's done fairly well
in his subjects, although no 6's here.

So the grades aren't perfect. Over to the next semester we have differential calculus and then physics by Weber, or maybe "Vee-ber" if it's German.

Now Weber is a teacher of Einstein's worth mentioning because he made quite an impact on Einstein during his time there. After Einstein initially failed the

entrance exam when he was only 16, it was Weber who invited Einstein to sit in on his lectures while he was attending the school nearby.

But during Einstein's time as a student with him, Weber seems to have turned on Einstein, and they ended with a very poor relationship. Einstein thought that

Weber's physics lectures were actually a bit old-fashioned and out-of-date. Around this time, I believe that physicists were starting to accept

Maxwell's laws and incorporate that into their teaching, except for Weber, who didn't include Maxwell's laws at all. So Einstein didn't really have much respect

for Weber and did a lot of his own self-learning to learn some of these things, like Maxwell's laws and other current work at the time. There was another

professor that Einstein also didn't get along with, who we will encounter on the next page, but for now let's look at the rest of these subjects. We've got

mechanics, projective geometry again, and then another familiar name, Minkowski down here. This is geometry of numbers, and it's interesting that Minkowski was

a former teacher of Einstein. You may have encountered Minkowski's name when reading about some of Einstein's work, maybe about general relativity, because

Minkowski spacetime and a few other things under this name are quite important mathematical ideas there. So Minkowski actually, later on in life,

ended up helping with the mathematics of Einstein's theory, but at this time Minkowski was his teacher, although—and this is a bit of a trend—Einstein actually

skipped a lot of Minkowski's lectures, like he did with Weber and others. Einstein didn't think that he would derive much value from attending the

lectures and would rather just study on his own. We have some more classes from Minkowski down here; we've got function theory

and potential theory. We'll go to the next semester, and this is where things get a little bit spicy 🌶️. If we zoom in down here, we will see the lowest grade

that we're going to see in this record, and that is "Introduction to the Practice of Physics." It would appear that this is a lab course and it was taught by

Professor John Pernet. Einstein very seldom showed up to this practical course, and so Pernet gave him the lowest possible grade of a 1, and he wrote this

note up here which says "March 1899: reprimand from the director on account of lack of diligence in the physics practicum."

So really, Einstein was penalized for not showing up enough to this class. His other grades this semester include a 6 from Weber in electrotechnical

laboratorium, a 5 from Weber in scientific work in the physics lab, and a 4 1/2 down here for something that translates as "geographic location,"

but maybe it's got something to do with geometry; I'm not sure. I should mention that this Weber I've been talking about is not the same Weber that

electromagnetic flux is named after. That is Wilhelm Weber, and this professor here is Heinrich Weber. In our last semester here, we have partial

differential equations, AC systems and AC motors, systems of absolute electrical measurements, scientific work in the physics lab, where he's got a 6 and a 5,

so fairly high grades; introduction to alternating current and applications of analytical mechanics. It's not clear to me if the dashes indicate that he didn't

take the course or if the course just didn't have an exam, because there are many sources that say Minkowski was a former teacher of Einstein, but all I'm

seeing is a lot of dashes next to his name. This last page is his certificate of departure and seems to be a summary of all of his courses and grades,

indicating that he graduated with his diploma as a specialist teacher in the mathematics direction, granted by the Swiss school council on July 28, 1900.

The presence of this 1 and the fact that Einstein didn't show up to a lot of his classes may be a bit of a

surprise to you. It is said that Einstein could not easily bring himself to study what did not interest him, and most of his time he spent on his own in

joyful exploration of the wonders of science. Einstein said in his autobiography that "one had to cram all this stuff into"

one's mind for the examinations, whether
one liked it or not." This coercion had such a deterring effect upon him that he
says, "after I had passed the examination,

I found the consideration of any
scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year." Now that is a sadly
relatable quote, I find. That the process

of being tested on subjects drains your
interest in that subject so much that you don't even want to look at it and it
no longer brings you joy. I guess we're

lucky that Einstein didn't just quit
physics there and did seem to re-find his joy and his desire to work on
difficult problems. The next paper I want

to show is a document from halfway
through the degree, and it shows the classmates that Einstein had; it's a pretty
small class, there's just five of them.

We've got Einstein here, and we can see
that halfway through his degree, if this is the average column, that he was the
highest average student, so he was top of

his class. There is one notable classmate
of Einstein's down here, Grossman, and he

is notable because he was a good friend
of Einstein's, and actually he is who allowed Einstein to be able to skip so
many classes because Einstein would

study from Grossman's notes before the
exams. Einstein was very grateful to Grossman and he said that he was a very
diligent student who took very good

notes. It's kind of tragic for him that
Einstein, the guy who was stealing his

notes, is the only one in the class who
scored higher than him. After graduation, the other four students in the class, except for Einstein, went on to get

assistant positions in the university
doing physics. Einstein, however, was not able to get such a position, but he did
try because he wanted to continue his

career in physics. His tactic of copying
Grossman's notes came back to bite him because he had such a poor relationship
with many of his teachers that none of

them wanted to take Einstein on as
their assistant. Einstein considered it to be Weber who was conspiring against everyone

and Einstein even wrote letters out to
many physicists across Europe to try and get them to take him on, but he had no
success. His one salvation turned out to

be Grossman in the end, as Grossman's dad
was able to get Einstein his job at the

Patent Office after a while. I even read
that because of Einstein's mastery of Maxwell's laws, the patent office was
happy to hire him, but I guess he really

had Grossman to thank for a lot of that.
Now there's one more document that I'd

like to take a look at, and that is the
grade history of Mileva Marić, who was

Einstein's first wife. She actually
met Einstein while studying at ETH. She was in the same class at the start; she
also was admitted in October 1896 and

was studying the same subjects, although
she spent a year in the middle studying at the University of Heidelberg. This is
the summary of her grades. You can see

they're actually pretty good: we've got a
five in something to do with geometry. She'd done differential and
integral calculus; she has survived

Pernet's practical physics course—and
this is the one where Einstein got a 1, but she managed to get a 5. Sadly,
however, she did not graduate because she

failed her final exam and then shortly
after became pregnant with Einstein's child. She did make one more attempt to
pass the final exam, but wasn't

successful and then moved away with
Einstein to support him in his work. I thought it would be worth making a note
about her because she also was quite

important to Einstein's time
at ETH, and she is the one who he did a lot of that self-study with. She was the
one who he shared reading about

Maxwell's laws with and just exploring
their joy of physics together. So that's all I wanted to show you today. If
there's any takeaway message, it's that

Einstein did score pretty high grades as
a student, but that time was not without struggle. Einstein knows what it's like
to not get along with your professors

and to feel like the school system is
beating your interest out of you. I would say it's not a good idea to employ Einstein's strategy of not going to

lectures and just copying someone else's
notes, because although he passed, it did really come to hurt him when he tried to
get a job later on. And I think that

still applies to university now. You want to be on good terms with people that are in your field, whether it's for reference letters or to just have good

relationships in academia. So thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. This video was made possible by you, my viewers, through your support on Patreon.

Thank you. Special mention to today's patron, Cat of the Day, Brandon 🐈

Einstein's grades 👀

Tibees

Introduction and early academic struggles

Introduction of the topic: Einstein's report cards.

Overview of the available grades: high school and university.

Debunking the myth of Einstein being a bad student.

Einstein was a good student, but not perfect and faced struggles.

Analysis of grades reveals insights into Einstein's life, teachers, and physics at the time.

Comparison of Einstein's grades with classmates and his first wife's grades.

Failed entrance exam to ETH Zurich at age 16.5.

Einstein's final grades from Aargau school; grading scale explained (6 being highest).

High grades in German, math, and physics; lower grade in French.

Graduation from Aargau school in October 1896, allowing direct entry to ETH.

ETH University grade record overview; admission and exit dates.

ETH University Grades and Professorial Relationships

First semester grades at ETH; generally good but no top scores.

Second semester grades; discussion of Professor Weber and their strained relationship.

Einstein's criticism of Weber's outdated teaching methods (lack of Maxwell's laws).

Mention of another professor Einstein didn't get along with.

Grades in mechanics, projective geometry, and Minkowski's classes; Einstein's skipping of lectures.

Minkowski's later contribution to Einstein's work.

Grades in function theory and potential theory.

Lowest grade received in "Introduction to the Practice of Physics" due to poor attendance.

Reprimand from the director for lack of diligence in physics practicum.

Grades in other subjects during this semester.

Clarification on the two Webers mentioned.

Last semester grades; uncertainty about missing entries.

Graduation with diploma as a specialist teacher in mathematics.

Einstein's Study Habits and Post-Graduation Challenges

Explanation for low attendance and low grade: lack of interest in uninteresting subjects.

Einstein's quote on cramming for exams and subsequent loss of interest in the subject.

Mid-degree class ranking: Einstein as the top student.

Mention of classmate Grossman and his assistance to Einstein.

Post-graduation job search difficulties due to poor relationships with professors.

Grossman's father helped Einstein secure a job at the Patent Office.

Introduction of Mileva Marić, Einstein's first wife, and her academic background.

Summary of Marić's good grades; successful completion of Pernet's practical physics course.

Marić's failure to graduate due to failing her final exam and pregnancy.

Marić's importance to Einstein's self-study and shared interest in physics.

Summary: Einstein's high grades but struggles during his student years.

Discouragement of Einstein's strategy of skipping lectures and copying notes.

Importance of maintaining good relationships with professors and peers.