April 27, 2006 - kenshinjeff

examinations and results do not prove how smart you are

Most people should realise this fact by now. Results do not prove how smart you are, they prove that you can learn something academically, in a fixed syllabus, understand something better than others, given the same material.

So why aren’t exams and results abolished? It’s the same question as “why do Government related jobs prefer a university graduate”. It is so obviously not true that all university graduates are smart, and everyone else is not smart because they do not have a certificate. It would make more sense to say “a smart person would know that since everyone thinks a graduate is smarter, and earns a higher paycheck, therefore a smart person should study hard to be a graduate”. So by hiring someone who studies smart, it is likely that the person is smart.

That is of course, true, if you want to be the one receiving the paycheck, instead of the one writing the paycheck. At least it is statistically true.

So to achieve this market need, there needs to be a system that can generally differenciate the “hardworking”, the “lazy” and the “normal” people.
There is no simpler systematic way of achieving this except to teach which is likely to be useful in the future. Plus, it is more cost efficive to create a system which tests for a general way of measuring your ability to study.

Therefore there exists meaningless examinations and results for uninformed. The problem comes in, where there is a influx of really smart people in the academic system. These people will raise statistics and results of education in a skewed manner, and, therefore, will cause chaos in the system. In a sense, they are the troublemakers.
The short-lived solution is to weed out this bunch smartasses, and put them into a different playing field. By the process of induction, it would seem that the way to make the “special” system work, would be to model it after the “normal” system. Meaning to say, get smarter people to teach the smart people, lathe, rinse, and the rest of the stuff you need to do normally, on a higher level.

I have no idea what the long-term solution would be like, simply because I do not know. But I would assume that the smartasses would be hired off by coporations, or they simply just act normal to blend into the society, after all, there are no higher institutes of learning for them.

logic & ideology

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