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.
In college I had a friend who nearly aced the SAT's. As freshmen, we had Calculus & General Chem together. He was pulling C's or worse. The Chem teacher was a 26 year old fresh from finishing his Phd at Oxford, and had never taught or made tests before, and his tests were both hard, and very variable. The Calculus teacher was known as the hardest math prof, but he was good. His tests usually had at least one problem that determined what your IQ was, as opposed to just whether you knew the material. My friend dropped out of Calc, (and picked up an easier teacher next qtr) but hung in the Chem class. The Chemistry department required that at the end of the year the General Chem class had to take the American Chemical Societies standardized test, as a means of judging how the department was doing. The new prof was worried (he had had lots of premed students bitching to the department chair all year long) so to encourage us all, he said the grade for the last qtr of the class would be the better of the grade in the class, or the score on the ACS test. My friend who had two C's from the previous qtrs pulled a high 90's percentile on the standardized test. The prof tried to flunk him for cheating. I and several others went and had a chat with him (it helped that I got the freshmen Chem award) and he finally relented. The test styles were totally different, but the prof could not believe that his metric, and the ACS metric could yield such different results.
My 2'nd year, I took what was called Principles of Physics (a year long Calc based physics for Physics and Engineering majors). The school also offered a year long non-Calc based physics which biology & chem majors (premed usually) took. Everyone in Principles looked down their superior noses at the others of course. My prof was hard, but very good, the other prof was considered easier. Our tests were heavily into the math and problem solving. Their tests were True/False or multiple choice, very little problem solving. In the 3rd quarter, for midterms, our prof gave us their midterm. The results were a bit shocking. He had thought our class would easily outscore their class. Not the case. It turned out that we were focused on problem solving and math manipulation, not conceptual thinking. They lacked the math to handle our problem solving, so instead focused on conceptual understanding of physics. Of course, they would have all flunked our normal test, so there was some conciliation in that, but it was a valuable lesson to learn. Our prof was kind of pissed too. Oh well. |
