Comments on: Smarter Than the Rest

By: Observer

Observer — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:01:26 +0000

***Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”***

I think this is a good approach. Certainly at my boarding school people often avoided the appearance of putting much effort in. It was more respectable to do a minimum of work and get an ok grade than to work really hard & get a top grade (which would just suggest you were a geek or a ‘try hard’).

By: R. L. Mair

R. L. Mair — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:34:08 +0000

My experience with IQ testing hasn’t been all bad. Like many who have posted, I tested in the 99th percentile and was several years ahead in my reading and language skills and managed to sail through the academics of elementary and high school, for the most part. I had the notion that I didn’t have to work hard at things I didn’t like, and my marks in some subjects suffered, but not enough to keep me from getting into university easily.

So in some ways, I was a little overconfident. But in other ways, it kept me going. In grade 9, I had a school counsellor tell me that I wasn’t cut out for university despite my high marks because my dad was a tradesman and my mother hadn’t finished high school. Classism is something we Canadians don’t like to admit to, and that was the day I found out that not admitting to it wasn’t the same as not having it. Anyway, knowing how well I’d scored gave me a little something to fight back with, a reason not to listen to the authority figure, be a good little girl and take “general math”. I was the first in my family to go to university.

After the first shock of finding that they actually expected me to bust my ass at university, I totally embraced being there. I think it was good for me to get my butt kicked that first semester. I did have a terrible personality conflict with a faculty member midway through my degree that could have gotten me tossed from my chosen program, but again, believing I had the ability to do the work and do it well kept me from just giving it up.

Sometimes it’s a good thing to know you’re good at puzzles. It’s not the only thing, though. Balance is the key!

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:14:55 +0000

A corollary: (or, actually, an extension) and playing off what Becca said in her comment .. Teaching undergraduates at Harvard was an interesting experience in this regard. Contrary to rumors you may have heard (and which were once true, most likely) Harvard actually admits top students (not students who sprang from the loins of former students). So I would run tutorials with six or eight sophomores each of which was the valedictorian of her high school, and it was often a higher-end private prep school (though usually just a public school). These students were for the first time sitting in a room where it was actually impossible (for the most part) to say who was smartest. They all excelled in some area or another, and while the occasional student would seem to shine, others were probably just dampening the lantern in some way, and since in many cases I knew these students for a three year period, I can say that is true.

But the pressures of going from Valedictorian (or whatever) of the largest public high school in North Dakota (meaning you were the smartest 18 year old in the entire state, most likely .. not because North Dakotans are stupid … there just are not many of them) to being average was enormous.

Thus, it is said, the very high suicide rate at that school. One of my students actually killed her roommate, her roommate’s lover, and herself. The academic pressure is thought to have been a factor.

By: Barn Owl

Barn Owl — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:16:03 +0000

Thanks for your well-written and honest post, Mike – I find it especially interesting because my experiences are quite different. As I mentioned in the comments section for one of Greg’s posts, I have no idea what my IQ is; I might have been tested in school, but I was never informed of the score. I was also raised by parents who think that childhood environment and experience have the greatest impact on intelligence and academic performance. Consequently, I read avidly and worked diligently to achieve good grades, with the initial goals of medical school and a career as a surgeon, upon entering university. At the same time, I worked in a pediatrician’s office and in hospitals, because I’d learned in childhood that competence, whether physical or intellectual, at various skills and tasks is an important part of any career, and of life in general.

I’ve never thought that I could sail through anything because of a superior IQ, because I’ve never known my IQ score, and because I was not raised to think that I could just rest on the laurels of a superior intellect, even if I had one (which I don’t). Through persistence and hard work, I graduated magna cum laude with degrees in biology and anthropology; by that time, I had enough practical experience working in hospitals and in research labs to know that I preferred the latter. All throughout college, I heard from other students and from my professors, how brilliant they themselves were, or what a genius so-and-so was, or how Wondergirl was the most scintillating mathematics prodigy EVAH. “Wow, that’s great, now excuse me while I go tend to my tadpoles and embryos, or try to find a graduate student who can help me identify those pottery fragments from our dig, or write a paper on why I think a character in Wuthering Heights suffered from something like Marfan Syndrome.”

I should have realized that I was in for listening to, and enduring, more of the same in graduate school: the boasts of “genius” and “superstar”, the intellectual lek displays and chest-thumping in journal clubs, and the not-so-subtle remarks like “You’re not so smart”, and “Your undergrad university isn’t that great”. Stubbornly, I kept working, and persisted such that I managed to get a PhD in a reasonable amount of time (5 years), earned postdoctoral fellowships, and published consistently throughout two postdoctoral stints. I’m certainly not well-known in my general field, but I’ve developed a few reagents that colleagues and collaborators use, and maybe someday one of them will do something brilliant and therapeutic with them. Currently, I’m happy with tenure, course directorships, writing and editing for other labs, and the prospect of developing and running a core research facility in the next year.

At this point, I’m glad I’ve never known my IQ score – if it was high, then I might have been a slacker about learning and gaining competence, and if it was low, I might have given up my goals in despair. I think that not knowing my IQ might also make me more sensitive to the needs of my students … usually I tell them that if I could master this anatomy-embryology-neuroscience, so can they, and then proceed to show them some of the ways in which I set about learning the information, which can be intimidating in its sheer volume and detail. Almost all of them have had their brains probed by every standardized test known to humankind, so I figure that they’re probably pretty sick of being judged by such scores. I prefer to make no such judgments.

By: Mike Haubrich

Mike Haubrich — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:04:58 +0000

Well, here I have enjoyed the positive feedback, because it was something I accomplished and not something that I am.

By: becca

becca — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:01:56 +0000

I’ve got some nebulous thoughts floating around my brain on how this relates to the infamous impostor syndrome, but they will have to await a time I am not casting gels. But this is a great post.
Someone should be there to tell all 99th percentile kids that there are ~30-40,000 other ones out there. Of course, I don’t know how many are 99th percentile across the board, but then, I never was. Damn math computation.
It’s also important to have someone to remind you that when you start doing poorly compared to your peers at a new academic level, at each point it will in significant part because the bulk of the bottom part of that distribution dropped out below you. Having smarter peers is a good thing- if they are also willing to play nice you learn more and have more fun that way.

Also Hakan- I wouldn’t be so sure about Obama. Judging from his autobiographical writings, he certainly “wasted” a lot of time pondering who he Really Was, and I’d be surprised if wondering about intelligence wasn’t part of that.

By: Scotlyn

Scotlyn — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:04:00 +0000

This is so spot on … it’s unbelievable. Same story, effortless A’s, 99th percentile test results, drop out – not in college, but at anthropology PhD level – it was realising that I didn’t have what it took to do actual field work of my own – the whole having-to-work-hard business of it, together with the stick-to-one-subjectness of it! I’d never had to do hard mental work before, nor stop myself from flitting from one flower of knowledge to another. Dweck’s analysis is spot on too.

Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure

I remember feeling imprisoned within the family’s definitions – I was the “smart one”, my sister was “the pretty one.” My sister, accordingly, felt like the stupid one, although she’s not – but she learned a lot about how to study and how to learn that I never did. Thanks for putting this into words!

By: Hakan

Hakan — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:55:06 +0000

Well I can say I’m no different than what happened to the writer. I don’t think intelligence is malleable. But intelligence as a concept makes you somehow think about your actions, behavior or what you are in a deterministic and mechanistic way. You don’t think you can do better, or push harder. Because you don’t have to be something any more. You have a high IQ and that’s all. You don’t have to prove this. Your intelligence will do all the magical things for you. I think this is some kind of obsession.I am so obsessed with my IQ that It paralyzes my free will. I fear being intelligent no more when I do something different than the routine. That’s not a healthy view and I think people who happens to have high IQ but feels failure, just can’t infer on things healthily, can’t think like a normal, healthy person. I don’t mean if you are highly intelligent and feel disappointed about yourself, you definitely need proffesional help. But if you think you should be sucessful by just doing nothing you need.

In the end what makes our intelligence so useless is, our never ending ruminations about it. That’s why Obama is the president, he did care other things much more than his intelligence for success. He mustn’t have wasted time by ruminations about if he’s intelligent enough or not.

By: Peter Lund

Peter Lund — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:48:58 +0000

“At University the first time, I recall being one of a group of students who went to see one of our lecturers to ask how we could write better essays – and his answer was to say that was for us to find out.”

Robert Boice might be your friend, then.

By: Mike Haubrich

Mike Haubrich — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:18:14 +0000

That’s where I have been the last few years, trying to pay for just the few remaining classes that I need in order to finish. With a degree in Organizational Management and Communications, not my field of great interest but it will do in order to get the paper.