I don’t really think most people give a damn about whether you had an A average. Grades in my school seemed to have nothing to do with popularity at all, unless of course you actually flunked out of school, in which case you were forgotten. Indeed, most of the really popular kids were good students. I strongly suspect this is equally true in the USA and fully agree with MeanOldLady; this is a complaint from people who want to think they were picked on for being smart.
It’s almost absurdly easy to find examples of high school overachievers who are exceptionally popular and get into the best fraternities/sororities when they go to college. I find it baffling people do not notice this.
Didn’t vote in the poll since I’m American. As an American, I would agree with those who say that American smart kids are not generally picked on just because they’re smart.
If a smart kid is reasonably good looking, has social skills, and can at least feign an interest in the things that “normal” kids are interested in (like sports and stupid pop culture stuff), I think that kid will probably be fairly well-liked and possibly even be able to get into “the popular crowd”.
A smart kid who looks funny (acne, overweight, dorky glasses, etc.), is socially inept (or arrogant about being smarter than everyone else), or is interested ONLY in “weird” things (things like sci-fi, dungeons and dragons, anime) will be scorned. It’s not about the person’s intelligence - it’s that they’re seen as weird or uncool.
I was a “smart kid” when I was young. I never had many friends back then - but I was also very shy, overweight, and didn’t like popular music or TV shows, and I think that had more to do with my being unpopular back then than my intelligence. My fiance is about the same level of IQ that I am, and he even has a very geeky interest (star trek), but he also is more naturally chatty/outgoing than I am and has plenty of interest in “normal” things like the sports teams where he grew up, so he always had friends.
The good news is that as an adult you can still work on trying to develop the qualities that people value and get people to like you. I have more friends now than I used to.
Depends what you mean by “student” - at university they didn’t (then again I went to the best university in the UK so we were all technically “gifted”) but at school, especially around the ages of oooh 10-15 (say) then yes they did but it wasn’t a huge thing and you could definitely be a popular genius and an unpopular thicky. I went to quite a range of schools in the UK but all of them (private and state) were pretty “high end” so I may have had an unrealistic experience.