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James_Miller comments on Don't rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction - Less Wrong
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I doubt this. Because of the general nature of IQ and the massive number of tests students take I bet that the smartest kid in every high school knows that he/she is at least one of the smartest 3 kids in his/her school.
Not really.
In history/political education my grades depended a lot on the teacher. In Germany you can get better 0 and 15 points. A bunch of my teachers just didn't understand me. Nobody told me that good writing is clear writing so, I did the German intellectual thing of writing long and deep sentences.
One teacher didn't understand the difference between tactics and strategy and therefore just didn't get what I wrote. I often got something like 11 or 10 points which happens to be above average but not the top of the class.
Than I had one teacher who had the reputation of being really tough by other students. He gave me the full 15 points for every exam I wrote with him. If he would have followed the rules to the letter he would even have to deduct a point because of spelling mistakes that I made, so he effectively gave the quality of my writing something like 16 points on a 15 point scale.
As far as I understand it also happens frequently that high IQ people perform poorly when they are in an environment that doesn't challenge them the right. It's even one of the prime ways IQ tests are used. They are useful tool for identifying smart kids that are failed by their schools.
Sometimes it's not even about the challenge, but about an environment actually punishing you for doing a smart thing. (Or for doing a thing that seems smart on your level, such as publicly correcting your teacher's mistake. Yeah, it's obvious to us why this is probably a bad idea, but not to a 10-years old child. The child does it, receives some kind of punishment, and most likely learns the wrong lesson that it is wrong to analyze too much what higher-status people are telling you.)
If the lack of challenge were the only problem, we could fix it rather easily by adding more difficult alternatives within the system. For example if a child is bored during the math lessons, you could just give them an option to take the final exam at the beginning or in the middle of the year, and if they pass, they don't have to attend the lessons (they might have to stay at school, but be able to read something, debate with other similar students, or do some private project on the computer).
I just got a new appreciation for my country's school system from the fact that this probably being a bad idea wouldn't even have occurred to me without you mentioning it. When I was 10 - or for that matter any age - and disagreed with my teachers, they'd just look up the right answer in some authoritative reference and admit to being wrong if necessary. I thought this was the norm everywhere.
Right, it's both.
When I was in high school, I got a lot of Bs and Cs -- not because I didn't understand the material, but because the homework was so uninteresting that I didn't bother to do it. I slept through most of my classes -- they were slow enough that I didn't need to be awake, and the more sleep I got at school, the less sleep I needed at home, and the more free time I got -- so I got bad participation grades.
And then there was an AP Computer Science class I took, taught by a business teacher drafted into it by the administration. She didn't know the first thing about the material, so I got points docked for doing things she didn't understand, points docked for correcting her errors on the tests, points docked for going on IRC instead of listening to her lecture incoherently on things I already knew... and I had friends in the class who were in the exact same situation. She eventually cooked up some ridiculous scheme to try to get us all expelled: she falsely accused us of running a credit card fraud ring. And it worked.
Yes. Understanding exactly how to play the system is about more than IQ.
Especially those smart kids that would do much better when they would drop out of school might not reach the highest scores in standardized tests.
This might be different because I have a European experience/perspective, but I don't think tests are a very good indicator for general intelligence.
Due to how the system is set up, there's little incentive to score a perfect score (10 out of 10 points is often used here in Belgium). In terms of consequences, there's absolutely no difference between 10/10 or 6-7/10. You still pass the class, you still get to the next grade, you still end up going to university.
So what ends up happening is that a lot of smart kids end up with grades around 7/10, because that's what they get when they put in no effort.
That surprises me a bit. Where I'm from in Europe, you basically get to (the equivalent of) 10/10 without effort if you're smart and don't make the teacher hate you completely. Now I wonder which is better.
Same here. It probably depends on country. Yeah, it's kinda disappointing when winning a math olympiad gives you the same score as merely repeating the teacher's password. (But it's probably even more demotivating if your skills are somewhere in between: if you can do much better than the school requires from you to give you the best rating, but not enough to have your skill recognized somewhere else.)
For me it depended somewhat on the subject, for some I'd get the equivalent of 10/10 with very little effort, for others it would have required somewhat more work.
Even if I'd literally gotten perfect grades in every subject, though, it still wouldn't have told me that I was the smartest kid in the school. Since I never bothered asking others for their grades for the sake of comparing them, for all I knew there could've been twenty other kids with equally good grades.
Also, getting good grades only told me that I was good at school / playing the system, and I had serious doubts of how well that translated into "real-world" intelligence.
It's pretty much the same in Italy (or at least it was when I was in high school), and besides that getting more than 8/10 is often not only useless but also extremely hard.
That's probably close to true in the US, at least by college admissions season -- there are only a few merit-based scholarship packages that are open to anyone going to any university, and if you've landed one of them, or even gotten close, you can be pretty confident that you're if not the smartest kid in your school then at least in the 98th percentile or so. (There is some noise.)
I think it becomes a lot less true at percentiles below the 95th or thereabouts, though. You'll have gotten standardized test results, yes, but if I'm remembering my own high school years right, they'll likely have been perceived (not entirely without justification) as utter bullshit. Grades are better correlated with conscientiousness than IQ, and you'll probably have gravitated towards students close to your own intellectual caliber, so social proof won't be helping you much. All told, I think I'd expect high school students that aren't obviously more than two or three sigmas out to perceive themselves as much closer to average than they are.