Neolib, re: "But first you must define intelligence. That is why I gave some results that seem to contradict each other. SAT scores vs. college GPA at Stanford. They both are reasonable measures of intelligence, or many people are wasting lots of money. How could there be a negative correlation? Heck, even a poor positive correlation is IMO an indictment against one or the other."
It's a sad fact of life in America that admission to our best schools and our best graduate schools are weighted heavily toward grades. If you consider what it takes to achieve grades in most classes, especially social science classes, it's the ability of the student to tell the professor what the professor already knows. If a student processes the professor's knowledge, changes it to suit his own thinking and returns it, he risks that the professor will find it unrecognizable. Pure learners don't make that mistake.
I'm an agnostic but I can bet that if Jesus and the 12 disciples were in a class together the 12 disciples would all get As, and Jesus wouldn't.
More directly on your Stanford grade comment, recent studies indicate that the accepted wisdom that we use only 10% of our brains is incorrect. It seems that our brains may be fully utilized. If memorizing occupies a certain number of brain cells then maybe there are too few left for creative, innovative thinking. Or maybe smarter people understand that getting a 3 pt. GPA at Stanford won't cost them much as opposed to working harder and getting a 4 pt. so they just bag it, party and learn about people?
Other studies reveal that the brain can get better at one or the other, depending upon what it's asked to do, but the cost of getting better at one may mean losing something somewhere else.
As Maurice points out, however, there may be some people who are great learners and great thinkers. They may also be strong right brained and strong left brained. They call people like that De Vinci, I suspect. Ed |
