Assertion: academic success does not equal intelligence.

In My Humble Opinion
21

I use to do a lot of thinking about this in school.

One part of me agrees with the OP. Excelling in school doesn’t necessarily mean one is smart. If anyone works hard enough, they can do well in school. Hard work =! intelligence.

However, it can be reasonably argued that failure to appreciate the importance of doing well in school may be a sign of some type of intellectual (or perhaps emotional) deficiency. Growing up, I saw smart kids who had mediocre grades and were slackers when they had no real reason to be that way except for laziness or apathy. It wasn’t like they had no role-models or had to work two jobs to support the family or whatever. They just couldn’t be bothered to do stuff like turn in their homework on time or do the required readings.

Now is it “smart” to slack off like this? I guess it goes back to defining what intelligence is.

22

What better metric would you want for a business school? Business is about making money. In the business world, your nebulous “quality of education” or “skills imparted” is reflected by your ability to make money. Besides, like everything else, business isn’t necessarily about being the “smartest”. There are other skills required like interpersonal skills, professionalism, innovativeness, leadership and so on.

The way the system has evolved, it has become a self-fullfilling cycle. Businesses recognize that students from Wharton demonstrate success when they are hired. Those businesses seek out Wharton grads. The best business students want to go to Whaton because it has a reputation of being the best. Wharton can choose to select the best students. If you’re such a great prospect, why didn’t you go to Wharton?

Academic success requires more than intelligence. It is a combination of hard work, discipline and raw intellectual horsepower. It also requires a little luck as well as the financial means to go to the best school you can go to. A lack of intelligence can be mitigated by other factors, but it is this combination that defines your ultimate success.

As for those people who think they’re so smart in spite of poor academic achievement, how do you KNOW you’re smart? Because YOU think so? Because you have a casual interest in what you perceive to be intellectual topics or can articulate a sentence? Maybe you’re just average.

23

Intelligence just like memory must have a context in which we define it.

For example, different neural pathways for literacy and mathematical comprehension exist in the brain. While there is some overlap with different tasks (such as reading comprehension and mathematical expertise), the differences must be emphasized in order to be concise and clear. **A mechanic may not be good at reading, but there will a come a time you need his assistance, and in that time he is intelligence. **Intelligence can only be defined within context. This is a more constrict-specific definition that makes sense.

What must be understood is we all have a propensity for certain tasks, but we can condition ourselves to become more intelligent in them with discipline and the right circumstances. The school systems are inadequate for doing this because they are more concerned with arbitrary letter grades rather than real results that are shown in efficiently accomplishing tasks. Granted, you could say one is intelligent in earning good grades, but who cares? How is such a thing practical outside of societal expectations?

Similarly, there are different memory systems in the brain as experiments on HM determined. Procedural and declarative memory are different and significant empirical evidence verifies this. Temporal lobotomies can cause anterograde amnesia (i.e., the inability to form new declarative memories), but you can still learn new procedural tasks.

Is syntax the same as semantics? No linguist would argue this. Likewise, the skills of a mechanic, scientist, gardener, and etc. all differ. They are all intelligent in their own ways. In a sense, everyone alive is intelligent in survival, to some degree, otherwise they could not survive. So yes, intelligence can also be applied to survival, living or etc., but it MUST ALWAYS be relational, hence why constantly labeling others as intelligent or not is inconclusive.

Finally, there is no “you” that is intelligent. Intelligence is defined by action and is relational to specific activities (as explained). What I mean is, we should stop adding a fictitious cloud of associations to the “I” and cease saying, “I am intelligent” or “You are intelligent”. It is in one’s behavior that someone can discern another as intelligent or not, which he is not really separate from. Since one is always in a flux, intelligence {i.e., the ability to efficiently accomplish a goal-specific task} too is in a flux, so it makes sense to refer to it only provisionally, relationally, and singularly. There is no all-encompassing intelligence.

This definition was inspired by the Buddhist notion of “emptiness”.

24

Of course this is true. I teach graduate students. The variance of innate intellectual ability is pretty significant. I have folks who are terrifyingly brilliant in courses, and those where I wonder how they got through undergraduate school.

The thing about Ph.D.s being largely perspiration… that’s true. I have some truly gifted students that I doubt will ever finish their dissertations. On the other hand, there are those “bulldogs” who will not set the world alight with their intellectual contributions, but they will successfully write and defend a dissertation and be called Doctor for the remainder of their lives.

Those of course are the poles. Most people have areas of intelligence in which they excel, and those that they are merely adequate (if not deficient). If you happen to be engaged in an endeavor that exploits your intellectual gifts, you’re going to look like Einstein. If not, you will certainly struggle.

We have a program that develops educational leaders, folks that will end up being superintendents and presidents of colleges. And to excel in that world, having emotional intelligence is the coin of the realm. Regardless of the intellectual ability of my students, they all are highly emotionally intelligent. That’s one of the perks of my teaching life.

At this level, so much of what constitutes academic success is subjective. Can you construct cogent arguments for your perspectives? If so, it’s likely that you can find someone that will support your work.

I also believe that academic work favors a narrow band of what is actually intelligence. If you’re familiar with Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, there are potentially twelve variants… and I know the academy is resistant to expressions outside of the traditional canon.

25

There’s a strong correlation between academic success and intelligence and vice versa. That’s kind of obvious.

That said, there are other elements to academic success besides raw intelligence–such as study habits, work ethic, memory skills, etc. But then–you could argue that those skills are just another component of intelligence.

26

After 12 years of teaching in college I feel certain that the assertion that academic success does not equal intelligence is wrong.

Poor academic performance may not equal a lack of intelligence but even in an undergraduate major as easy as psychology, the students with the A’s and who exhibit a commitment to volunteering, research, and graduate school are smarter than all the others. They work harder, they plan better, and they do not get hung up on new or complex concepts. They are smarter than students with B’s on down, on average.

As an example, really take a look at Dragwyr’s anecdote as the second reply to the OP. His wife used his skill, studied for the tests properly and figured out what the class required of her. Guess what…she’s smarter. All the excuses he mentioned are actually clear demonstrations that she’s smarter than him.

We can come up with as many multiple intelligences as we want and theorize about the actual abilities required to succeed in any field, but in the end, the people who perform the best in any field, including academics, are smarter than all the rest of you.

27

Spoken like a true academic. Perfectly condescending, and lacking in substance. You can define intelligence in many ways, but all the attention to detail in the world will never create anything new. Intelligence is problem solving, the kind of problems with solutions that can’t be looked up in books. Academics is a skill, intelligence is a talent.

28

IMO, grades are a better indicator of potential in the business world than they are of anything else. They ostensibly reflect a student’s mastery of the course material, but grades necessarily reflect both the student’s mastery and the student’s ability to communicate that mastery. A student who earns an A gets an assignment and can answer the question, but (s)he does more than that: figure out what information/analysis the assignment is specifically asking for, figure out the appropriate level of detail for the response, answer the question providing that level of detail but without straying too far into extraneous tangents, and present that information in a clear way. Those skills transfer directly to the professional world.

Bill Gates is a classic example of a poor academic who turned out to be a brilliant success in the business world. Everybody wants to be Bill Gates… but nobody wants to employ him. Gates would have made a piss-poor entry level employee for the same reasons he was a lousy student; if some poor middle manager gets the next Gates on his team, it’s probably not going to work out well for either of them.

29

If you ever want to cure yourself of the delusion that academic success is proof of intelligence, you want to go get a job in a popular pub, in a university town. Whoo Boy!

You’ll be working with kids who are going to be a lawyer in just two years, but can’t remember to put the glasses in the dishwasher correct side down! Some, whom the management cannot promote to waiter, so they remain busboy, will be dentists in under 18 mths!

It’s an eye opener!

30

What is discipline? Is it a skill or a talent, to be able to sit at a desk and work for 12 hours straight, with no distraction and no immediate reward?

They are plenty of intelligent people who are destined to lives of mediocrity because they simply can’t buckle down and work. Maybe academics is just a mere skill, but it’s a great way to learn how to dedicate one’s energy to purposeful activity.

31

I didn’t say there was anything wrong with skill and discipline. That’s what grades are made of, and often great success in life. But only ordinary intelligence is required for those goals. We’re not talking about the total lack of intelligence here, but the claim that extraordinary intelligence is indicated by academic success.

32

Academic excellence requires some level of intelligence combined with effort, persistence, good time management, and/or prioritization. To succeed academically you have to be intelligent, but you can be intelligent without being successful due to a lack of motivation and/or effort.

You can be brilliant, but if you don’t apply yourself, you likely will not succeed.

33

Dear Dragwyr,
It doesn’t even matter that what grade did you got because the girl you’ve date with, you loved her so much and if she’s copied you for having A then you need to feel proud that your wife know how to get succeed.

34

You all realize that Dragwyr wrote that post six years ago, right?

35

I’ll tell you one thing: intelligent kids who don’t do anything academic after a while can’t do anything academic because they’ve never gained the foundational skills they need and there isn’t any easy way to get the remedial help they now require. So they grow increasingly unwilling to even try, because, hey, they were too lazy/apathetic to try when it was fairly easy, they aren’t more willing now that it’s really difficult. So they continue to mutter “yeah, but I’m smart” when they are lost in class, as if that means they are somehow better than the people around them.

On the other hand, a weak student who buckles down and works actually gets smarter. I think that’s something “smart” kids don’t understand: you actually can learn in school. If you usually knew everything the teacher said before she said it in the early grades, you stop thinking of school as an actual learning environment and just as a bunch of bullshit hoops and quit listening. But in the long run, it really doesn’t matter if you knew everything in kindergarten and they had to slog through 8 years of gradeschool to get it all: in the end, you all know the same stuff.

Then one day “new” information starts entering in, and you don’t get it because you’ve written off the whole institution. When you eventually do start to try, it seems impossible, like you just aren’t good at school so you quit. You comfort yourself with your earlier idea that it’s a bullshit institution anyway. It seems like those other people must be better at playing the game or something, because you know you are smarter than them. But what it really is is that they know more.

36

I have a Ph.D. and did a postdoc afterward. Then I got an industry job. I can confidently say that academics are significantly less smart than the people I worked with in industry in terms of social skills, street-savvy, ability to realistically evaluate paths of action and goals, and the ability to actually get shit done.

So yeah, I think academics tend to be less smart in many areas that matter.

37

FWIW, in my life, the only people who have said face-to-face that good grades and degrees don’t mean nothin’ are people who either dropped out of college or didn’t go in the first place.

In fact, a couple of months ago I got into a nasty argument because I was introduced by someone who made note of my degrees and that I had been a professor, and one person went out of his way to pronounce that having an “alphabet soup” of letters after your name was nothing more than bragging (yeah…I went through all those years of killing myself in grad school so I could “brag” :rolleyes: ) and that the more degrees someone has the more stupid they are. The person making the statement had been given a full ride to any school they wanted by rich parents, dropped out of 3 colleges and never finished their degree in musical…something, don’t remember - and now sells used mobile phones out of their parents house.

But here’s the capper - they got an online “divinity degree” by filling out forms and studying for 1 week, and now insist that everyone call them “Dr.” :dubious: :rolleyes: :smack:

Among the young Engineers I hire, the ones who are the most successful in all possible aspects are not the ones with the 3.8+ GPAs. The most successful ones are the ones who have a 3.0-3.3 GPA and who worked at least 40 hours a week while attending school.* They are the ones who learned time management, they are the ones who don’t shirk from the occasional 80-hour week when there’s an emergency, and they are the ones who have some inner fire which drove them to fight against despair and fatigue to succeed. Those who I have hired who fit that category not only become respected in their field, but they get promoted fast and rise high.

  • And no, drunken car washes with your sorority every other weekend don’t count as “work.” I mean standing over a fucking deep fryer, sitting alone in a computer lab doing data entry, or laying asphalt for the highway department.
38

This is what inspired by own take of intelligence. Isaac Asimov talks about it here:

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/WIIA.html

The truth is, people like to glorify their ego, hence why they get caught up whether or not they’ll be labeled as intelligent. Intelligence is meaningless without context (a task that’s relational to the subject); thus it only makes sense to talk about intelligence in relation to doing tasks well, making intelligence a provisional designator.

What Asimov says is kind of obvious.

Getting good grades means you are intelligent in how to succeed in the school environment and do well on tests. It does not necessarily mean more or less than that. The school environment works for a lot of people but not everyone; it is not an absolute and is by no means a final judge in determining someone’s potential in acquiring knowledge.

39

People can also be intelligent but not good test takers for whatever reason (anxiety, for instance). I sometimes do poorly on tests.

40

I figured this out in High School.