Hey, everyone! After we saw Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk during class, the book I wanted to read was Outliers. However, as books were being picked, I ended up being stuck with The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk. I have since come to terms with my previous bad luck because The Genius in All of Us was a great book and an eye-opener with how I look at individual talent and potential.
One passage that stuck a chord with me the most was in Chapter Two: Intelligence Is a Process, Not a Thing. It discusses how during the late 1800s and early 1900s, arguments that successful people, usually privileged whites, were gifted with superior biology lacked any solid proof, so in an attempt to solve this problem (and make up proof), Charles Spearman, a British psychologist and statistician, devised mathematical formula based on "a correlation between school marks, teachers' subjective assessments, and peers' assessments of 'common sense,'" to measure intellectual skills of an individual. After reading about his formula to measure intellect, I was reminded of the mathematical formula used for rating poetry in the 1989 film, Dead Poets Society. Just as creativity cannot be accurately measured through a mathematical formula, neither can an individual's intellectual capacity.
Spearman's work is a precursor to the revision of the IQ test and the National Intelligence Test, itself a precursor to the SAT of today. The revisers of the IQ test recommended that "anyone scoring less than 100 be automatically disqualified from any prestigious position. To automatically dismiss the worth of anyone scoring below 100 was to mistake relative value for absolute value. It was like saying that, out of any one hundred oranges, fifty are never going to taste very good."
I thought about how ridiculous it was that there was a formula to determine how smart someone is based on how well an individual performed on tests and how their teachers saw them, and then it hit me, that's the simplified version of how we get into college.
This post was a real eye-opener. It's interesting how society has turned intelligence into how well we do on tests. It frightens me how basically our whole lives are based off of how well we do in high school and college. I understand that it is an efficient way for our society to work, but sometimes people can't apply themselves to a situation like that as well as others can. Like Shenk said, intelligence is a process, not a thing. Some people learn differently than others, and testing us all the same way to determine how smart we are just seems unfair sometimes. I can kind of see a connection to one part in my book, The Happiness Advantage. Shawn Achor talks about how some students fall into this spiral of failure because of their negative perspective on school, and some excel greatly because of their positive outlook on school like it's a privilege. We are all different and we all learn differently, but if we all take a positive outlook on school and actually try learning for learning and not for grades, maybe we would all just do that much better.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe that the most accurate way to determine an individuals intelligence based on how well they take tests. The testing atmosphere is very stressful, which can cause one to panic, and that panic leads to blocking the mind from accessing all it's information. Therefore I agree with you that it is wrong to base overall intelligence on test taking skills. Also a teachers judgment is important, but colleges shouldn't determine who they will and wot accept because of that. You never know what type of person that teacher could have been, and if they are telling the absolute truth.
ReplyDeleteThere are some things you can't measure. You just can't trust humans to express parts of themselves accurately because we don't know *anything* about ourselves. We sort of just make assumptions about ourselves compared to what we observe in other people. I think a man on a TED talk Fletcher played in class noted this, how charts showing trends in our world were inaccurate because they must first have an "average" to base themselves off of. That's the problem with IQ and SAT tests. There's no way to measure intelligence. But there are many ways to guess.
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