= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MathiasZaman comments on Don't rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (64)
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.