Can exams measure your intelligence?

The educational system is designed to measure students’ intelligence by grading them and their ability to memorize and reproduce the same materials they were taught in an exam hall. If you do well, you are tagged as a ‘genius or an intelligent student’. In reality, they memorised the materials in order to pass the exams, that is all. This system of measuring someone’s intelligence has created limitations in the minds of students because students are limited to what the tutor or teacher gave them.

I want you to cast your mind back when you were still in the high school or college, you had to study hard to pass all your subjects with good grades in order to impress your teachers, parents, and friends, and make a name for yourself. There has been a lot of developments in the 21st Century especially in the area of technology, education, economics etc. But still, there is no improvement or new way of measuring students’ intelligence in our educational system apart from the ‘grading system’. As a result of this immeasurability of student’s intelligence, it has caused some students to doubt themselves, especially if they failed one subject or they got low grades in an exam.

Corporal punishment is useless in school philosophy

February 27, 2021

Debt trap after graduation

February 27, 2021

The educational system of measuring intelligence has only helped in producing ‘in the box’ thinkers instead of ‘outside the box’ thinkers. This, however, limits the rooms for students to maximize their creative ability or mental powers. This is because their thinking is limited in a ‘box’, that is the materials (notes) given to them by their teachers or lecturers, so all their thinking is within the context of the resources provided to them.

Let’s look at the examples of a few individuals who were measured wrongly in the educational system. Ben Carson (a world-renowned Neurologist) and Bill Gates—who was not doing well in school and later dropped out to pursue his dreams where he maximized his intelligence beyond the educational grading system. The school must have measured his intelligence as ‘low IQ’ compares to his other colleagues’ who were seen or measured as having a ‘high IQ’. This is where the educational system of grading or measuring intelligence is faulty or inaccurate. Look at Bill Gate’s life now. He is the founder of Microsoft and one of the wealthiest men on earth.

The educational system of measuring intelligence encourages students to develop what I call a ‘garbage in, garbage out mentality’. This means most students read to pass exams, and the educational system measures them as intelligent students. This, however, does not change the fact that, in an academic setting, currently the only way you can know your students’ level of intelligence is through an exam. Furthermore, this system of measurement has been overrated through the years, and students have failed to unleash their true mental powers beyond the educational system.

In conclusion, does this system of measuring the student’s intelligence through grading depict a true picture of a student’ s intelligence? Is the system overrated? And why?

Written by Hosea Gijebeth

Email address: [email protected]