Ironic that if you say this almost anywhere (academia, Reddit, your local bar) people immediately assume you're talking about Eugenics, accuse you of racism and try to get you fired.
Yes, she takes the view that individually some people are smarter than others due to purely random factors, a combinations of variants, she also takes the view that the important variants for intelligence are basically equally distributed among races. Thus the inter racial group differences must be due to racism. The book is an attempt to split the difference and in doing so spells out the explicit biases that must be taken on faith. Which is what makes it interesting. The book as gotten quite a bit of push back on the "some people are smarter than others" aspect which demonstrates that there exist people that believe that some people are not inherently smarter than others. I should have been more explicit on my second message but your response was trite and I assumed in bad faith.
I mean, that's pretty clearly racism.
I would never say to colleagues at my university that I hold the belief that some people have more intellectual talent than others. Amongst certain vocal subgroups of academia an unassailable core belief they hold is that all people are equal in intellectual abilities and that only external factors contribute to any divergence in perceived intellectual talent or in knowledge.
Einstein's report cards https://www.openculture.com/2020/04/albert-einsteins-grades-...
In that light, this particular achievement of Einstein’s doesn’t seem very impressive.
Edit: to clarify, mine was in the mid-2000s, don't know if there have been changes with things like Common Core, but from what I've seen/heard that seems focused on much earlier years so I don't think it would have affected this part of math education.
If not, it sounds like resume padding by someone who wanted to make Einstein seem even more impressive than he is.
But it may have changed since then.
He is a prime example of how traditional schooling methods are typically stacked against extremely intelligent students who don't conform to those learning methods.
https://theeconomyofmeaning.com/2013/07/27/science-myths-did...
It's a sign of the times that a person with two decades of experience as an educator needs to heavily qualify an obvious fact.
And the problem of grade inflation is more about universities competing for prestige (and keeping wealthy donor/legacy families happy) than about creating outcome equity.
I'd say that one degree program being less difficult than another doesn't make it fake or unserious though. It's just natural that some topics are harder than others. There's a qualitative difference between "unserious" and "easier" I would say.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/12/1005833496/critics-concerned-...
Latin may not be a requirement for whatever Grievance Studies, but it certainly is necessary if you want to study Virgil.
I could see loosening the requirement, but if the loosening isn't simply to permit French and German (also hugely important in academics, some fields more than others, very influential on English, and also often untranslated in otherwise English texts, so, justifiable for similar reasons) as substitutes, yeah, I'd regard it as likely a step backwards.
In Classics, where Ancient Greek and Latin are principal topics of study
I understand why we might relent on not teaching them as a part of general studies, but in Classics, Theology and Ancient History at the graduate level there's no way to escape the need to read the original, and anyone who must rely on translation will remain crippled in the field as long as they do so.
> JOHN MCWHORTER: Thanks for having me.
> SIMON: Josh Billings - I don't have to tell you, a classics professor who's the department's head of undergraduate studies - says, quote, "having new perspectives in the field will make the field better." What would be wrong with that?
> MCWHORTER: Nothing at all, but I don't want to hear it until I know that it's not a way of saying through the back door that we want to have more Black students, and it's racist to expect them to learn Latin and Greek.
My surprise is that NPR—which thinks that minorities can’t be expected to adhere to white people’s rules like not burning down cities—would have on a heretic like McWhorter.
Is that true? It sounds more like classical Greek literature was just removed from the core curriculum.
Heck all students in american education ( K-12 ) should be taught latin at the very least. Why we stopped...
> One course must deal substantially with classical reception or comparative approaches to the ancient world; this requirement may also be fulfilled by study of another language relevant to the student’s interests (Akkadian, Modern Greek, etc., at any course level).
You make such sweeping claims based on a sample size of one. You neglect to account for survivorship bias -- you cannot see all the bullshit papers that were rejected from journals. This all feels obvious to me as issues with your analysis. Where is your intellectual rigor?
The U.S news law school rankings hold a lot of weight. They include statistics for how many of their students place at top law firms. If they grade inflate and lose credibility with these top law firms as to the grades being indicative of the quality of their students, top law firms will stop hiring from those schools, and their rankings will collapse. Of course, if you got a C in law school, that's a bad grade. In fact, you can flunk out if your grades go below a B-. Also, classes are graded on a strict curve. The teacher can only give out a certain number of A+s.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2021/12/06/gifted...
I have now attempted a few times to finish my higher education, always bounced HARD as I lack the mental facilities needed to deal with the frustration/commitment of actually having to learn.
Most of the ivy league schools are now doing this simply because they are dropping the most, and hoping that other universities will follow them in dropping out (they typically do).
Can a paraplegic play college football? I don't get your insistence on catechising the obvious.
Case in point: I struggled in my algebra class and developed no useful intuition for groups until years later, but by most conventional standards I am a moderately intelligent person.
Can a mentally disabled person learn college algebra?
The answer is yes or no, or some can but others can't. Within the context of college algebra and considering no other areas is it safe to say that some people are smarter than others? I think clearly the answer is yes. Of course a person not smart in college algebra might have genius level talent in programming, writing, art, or some other area.
I'm smarter than the vast majority of people in the world when it comes to mathematics but am completely useless when it comes to engineering, art, writing, physics, and other areas. Saying one is bad at college algebra is not a denigration, it is an assertion of fact and not in any way a determinant on one's worthiness.
I teach mathematics at a university. A large majority of my colleagues think that everyone is equally capable of learning college algebra. I think they are wrong. I think it is obvious they are wrong. They think any assertion that some people college algebra must be rooted in racism or other terrible biases that one has.
Academicians ought not dogmatically cling to notions that are easily disprovable. Namely, it is clear that some people - mentally disabled for instance - can't learn college algebra. We should not shy away from confronting uncomfortable truths.
I agree, natural aptitude absolutely is a thing. I'm somewhat smart, but maths does not come readily to me no matter what I try. And don't even get me started on music - which I have brute-forced myself into being barely able to play.
They have to hold that view, though, else their reason for existence disappears. How can students justify the high cost of hiring a professor, accepted on the premise of being able to make it up with higher future earnings, if they realize that the reason there is a spectrum of incomes is because some people can't rise into higher paying work?
You and I know that the mentally disabled person will never rise into a $500,000 per year job, no matter how hard they try, because of their disability. But your colleagues have to suggest that the mentally disabled person won't only because that person hasn't attended their classes. Their entire marketing strategy of getting students into their seats rests on it. Failure to communicate that to students means they soon find themselves out of job.
It's like everyone here is taking some extreme edge case as the baseline for mental disability where it is immediately obvious that they can throw them into the "too dumb" bucket.
The problem is that the answer isn't yes or no. Performance isn't discrete. Someone who fails college algebra and repeats a semester might do better than their peers next time around. Your oversimplification would mean that no improvement is possible which is at odds with the paper this HN submission is about which is about the fact that the learning rate is the same.
That implies that it isn't a yes or no question. The question is how long will it take. You might bucketize a person that needs 10 semesters to finish his bachelor's (assuming European 6 Semesters) as incapable of learning college algebra.
The problem with this reasoning is that finishing the bachelors could still result in a quite significant improvement in quality of life even for a handicapped person, so acting as an authority telling them they can't do anything is counterproductive.
>. Saying one is bad at college algebra is not a denigration, it is an assertion of fact and not in any way a determinant on one's worthiness.
Now you are moving the topic. Being bad at something is different from being unable to learn something.
People who are capable of learning something can still be bad at it. College freshmen are bad at the things they are about to learn, that is the point of college, to learn new things and get better at them.
What's clear to me is that people have different learning rates and different need for personalized attention. I also would never argue with the assertion that some people have greater natural aptitude for specific things, meaning their ability to pick up the material at a standard pace without a lot of extra personalized help.
There's plenty of research showing that IQ exists and can be consistently measured, but I would hesitate to ascribe the learning outcomes in a higher-level math class directly to IQ. If assessing general intelligence were easy, we wouldn't need decades of psychology research on the topic. So I personally don't think we should be in the business of trying to assess how smart people are in general. Assessing attitude at specific tasks can of course be practical and useful.
That said, have you asked your colleagues for clarification on what they mean by "everyone can learn"? Are they talking about learning it on a hand-wavy pop science level (eg Numberphile), or learning it well enough to derive results and apply it in new problems? Do they have a timeline in mind for learning, or a specific context? Are you sure your colleagues are being dogmatic for fear of confronting uncomfortable truths, or are they just optimistic? Or have they forgotten that algebra is pretty esoteric and far away from what people normally deal with in their day-to-day lives, and might actually be a specialized topic that does require a bit of specialized natural aptitude?
We don't have enough information to say. But what's almost certainly true is that one of you is smarter than the other.
I think a useful analogy is smart = compute, wisdom/knowledge=data.
Your example is not great because "woodworking" is primarily a knowledge game. Nothing is complex to the point you can't understand it.
University-level mathematics is less obvious--there's certainly a knowledge aspect--but I would stay largely a compute game.
Almost all people can become top-tier at knowledge games, not nearly as many at compute games.
I think his example is very good if he requires much more effort to understand straightforward woodworking concepts. It might not be that he can't be an average woodworker but that it takes him 5x more effort - and after just 3x more effort he's kind of done.
Source: I learned college algebra, and I have my woodshop 20 yards from me.
If he was 50 years younger he probably would just be a very mediocre programmer and not have "wasted" his time with this other intellectual activity.
Einstein would be a data entry clerk trying to get a job writing javascript.
I suspect with so many more educated people we have so many more true genius level minds than a 100 years ago but we have narrowed economically useful intellectual life to such a degree that 99% of them are doing well paid sub-optimal bullshit with their genius unexpressed.
We are then left we needing to modify the statement. What is true is the following: Some people, but not everyone, can learn college algebra.
This is an uncomfortable statement for a lot of people because the inevitable follow up is: Who can and who can’t learn college algebra?. Relatedly, one must confront the idea that not everyone is college material. Maybe too many people are going to college and this is why so many in college are struggling in basic courses. I could go on.
Your post appears naive in that you don’t seem to have thought through the implications of the idea that not everyone can learn college algebra.
I think that's a stretch, unless you expand the meaning of "intellectual disability". I would agree that considerably more people can succeed than currently do because effort can make up for a lot, but that's a different claim.
People have different working memory capacity, different abilities to reason deductively and considerably more differences on various other metrics of cognitive performance. There are as many dimensions to cognitive performance as there are ways to measure athletic performance, and people fall on very different parts of this spectrum.
With significant effort over time, I can make up for athletic deficiencies and become a pretty good basketball player, but being 5'9" I almost certainly would never be able to make a college basketball team let alone the NBA. I'm not sure why this same logic applied to cognitive abilities is so controversial.
Not at all. In my experience, many people of mediocre intelligence but a background that has sufficient education think they're geniuses. The variability in intelligence achievable by tutoring vastly exceeds the difference in their intelligence vs. that of the average inner-city high school dropout without a disability.
> People have different working memory capacity
Multiple studies have shown how this is easy to train.
> different abilities to reason deductively
This is also very easy to train by example.
> I almost certainly would never be able to make a college basketball team let alone the NBA
Being able to do college algebra isn't equivalent to making the NBA, which means being in the top fraction of a percent in basketball ability. Being able to do college algebra is equivalent to being able to dribble.
Running ability is also easy to train, that doesn't mean everyone can run a marathon. Some people have flat feet or poorly proportioned limbs unsuited to long-term running. These aren't disabilities preventing them partaking in such activities, but nevertheless limits their potential.
> Being able to do college algebra is equivalent to being able to dribble.
No, it's being able to at least dunk. Again, a common skill but not one everyone can achieve.
Everybody without a disability can run a 5k. High schools used to require students to do a mile run to pass physical education.
> Some people have flat feet or poorly proportioned limbs unsuited to long-term running.
And some people have microencephaly. We're not talking about outliers. We're talking about the vast majority of people.
> No, it's being able to at least dunk.
Look, you're not special for being able to learn college algebra. Get over it. 95% of Koreans and Singaporeans can do it today, but this wasn't the case 60 years ago. It just requires a basic level of education.
No, you specifically said "people without a disability". Unless you're going to expand the meaning of "disability", various permutations within the range of "normal" physical characteristics will impose different limits on athletic abilities, and analogously, the range of cognitive qualities (memory, focus, spatial reasoning, etc.) will do the same for cognitive tasks.
The fact that these qualities can be improved via training doesn't change the basic fact that those limits will be quite different for different people, even within the normal range. We can quibble all day about whether college algebra falls under that category, but this basic fact won't change.
And that range is smaller than the difference between your ability to perform cognitive tasks and the average high school dropout's ability to perform those tasks. Education makes a much larger difference.
Your study is about the effect of an extra year of badly done education on people who drop out of school, which is worth 1 IQ point. That same study shows that the effect of mediocre education on people who don't drop out of school is an increase of 5 IQ points.
What is funny and ironic is that you falsely accuse me of making a baseless assumption and then in the next sentence explicitly say you are assuming I’m learning English. I think it’s clear that I’m not learning English.
His argument seemed like a pretty straightforward logical deduction to me. If his argument doesn't refute the claim that everyone can learn college algebra, then you must have some unusual definition for one or more of "everyone", "learn" and "college algebra".
It is naive in the sense in that it actively tries to discourage people from trying and learning including the ones who can because they will have this brain virus implanted into their minds that they can't do something because of some unchangeable factor and then turn the mind virus into reality where they are unable to perform which then further tells them that they can't perform because they aren't smart enough. It is basically the equivalent of pulling up the ladder under the pretense of avoiding injury in case someone falls. You can tell anyone that they aren't smart enough and tell them to not do something but only people who try and succeed can disprove them.
So you have this constant cheap troll attack about people talking how you can't do things and then you must put in the expensive effort to disprove them which they can only do in a few disciplines.
No one's discouraging anything. Differences in cognitive abilities should be no more surprising than differences in ability to jump and run, thus resulting in differences in one's ability to be a professional basketball player.
It is simply a fact that most people cannot play in the college level basketball, let alone the NBA. This should not be surprising, nor does this fact discourage people from playing basketball causally for fun or fitness. I'm not sure why this exact same argument would suddenly be discouraging when applied to cognitive activities.
My non-professional experience is that most people are capable of learning most things with enough time and dedication, up to a certain level of sophistication. There's a huge range of variation in how quickly different people can learn different topics, how capable they are from learning by reading versus listening, how much they struggle with various emotion management problems that might inhibit their otherwise-highly-capable cognitive abilities, et multa alia.
Moreover, very very very few students are ever taught how to study and how to learn. Even fewer still are taught how to understand their own minds, and how to find the balance between training their minds to learn in certain ways and finding learning styles and subject areas that work well with their minds. Some students instinctively realize that writing, drills, and practice form the seeds of intuition, which is the basis for understanding, while others never really figure this out on their own. Some students understand how to take notes that work for them, while others have bad handwriting and find it difficult to take notes at all.
I think that what we tend to perceive as "intelligence" is some combination of "ability to learn a limited set of desirable subjects relatively quickly from conventional instruction techniques and resources" and "well-spoken".
If that is true, then if we want more equitable learning outcomes, we should be focusing on helping students to explore how their own minds work, to learn self-awareness and emotion management skills, to improve communication skills, and to learn their own innate mental strengths and weaknesses, so they can more easily self-select into and self-direct within their own learning environments. And society in general should offer and hold high esteem for a greater variety of learning environments and types of intelligence.
Of course, some people will indeed struggle with emotion management, or communication, just like some people will struggle with learning mathematical proofs or understanding complicated historical events. But I think that's better than our current status quo of just hoping that students figure all this stuff out for themselves. I would even hypothesize that parental involvement in these areas specifically might be causal for some % of differences in student education outcomes.
Edit: All of the above is of course possibly contradicted by the article under discussion here. I'll have to read it in more detail, and maybe I'll update my beliefs as a result.
As a less offensive example, there are people who literally cannot comprehend a=b, b=c, a=c. They just can't do it.
There are people who can't do abstraction.
There are people who can't do accounting, because they get stuck on debit/credit.
There are people who can't hold huge multidimensional models in their heads.
There may be various measures of intelligence, but no matter what the measure there will always be someone at the bottom of it.
The point of my post was not to deny this, but to assert that what we perceive as intelligence in our day-to-day lives might not be something as deep as that.
- Some people are taller than others, Basketball Coach
- Some people can run faster than others, Track Coach
- Some people have more musical talent than others, Piano Instructor
- Some people are sicker than others, Emergency Room Nurse
Tends to be a lot of "convert at the point of a sword" from the authoritarians, as usual for them.
“Some people are taller than others” is dogma?
Sure. That doesn’t make the underlying variation non-empirical, i.e. dogmatic.
But your straw man does not stand up under his own power. The concern is and always will be what differentiates peoples' abilities, and which abilities in which people are incentivized / selected for in our society. These are of course still matters of intense debate. We are reasonably sure by now that it is both nurture and nature -- indeed, a synthesis of the two perspectives -- that is vital to understand all the forces at play.
On the "nature" side, genetic damage resulting from multi-generational trauma has been identified as a reasonable explanation over that of some notion of "inherent" genetic differences by race. So, while the contributing aspects of "nurture" happened in the past, it is the "nature" of the specific individual, born already with those disadvantages, that largely determines the outcomes of their lives. There is of course still the "nurture" of that individual, whose environment can influence the balance of advantage or disadvantage for that person after they are born as regards positive outcomes. This is not limited to family life but extends to all forces incident on that individual.
Then it seems inevitable that, as a result of any focused campaign of coercion or discrimination, persistent statistical patterns will arise within oppressed sub-populations which impact outcomes for future generations. In other words, we are all still living among the echoes of the past.
Proponents of everyone can go to college and be successful ought to be precise in their statements. What they really mean is that more people are capable of succeeding in college than our currently attending college. If they would argue thusly and say it as such then a real discussion can be had. Instead we have people saying everyone can go to college. This shuts down any notion that perhaps too many people are going to college. No reasonable discussion can be had when one starts with the clearly false statement that anyone can go to college.
Why some people aren’t capable of succeeding in college and the causes of such is a different discussion.
Can you cite some examples that reflect this exists on a meaningful scale?
I never ran into this at college nor have I known anyone to say they witnessed it. It seems like we should have, if this is a routine thing.
A majority of incoming college students place into pre-college level courses. A recent trend is to ban pre-college level courses and instead do supplemental instruction in college algebra. Too many students are underprepared so we ban the courses to get them prepared. It is now a trend to no longer require college algebra level knowledge to get a college degree. The only reason for this trend is because a lot of people fail college algebra.
The only discussion I’ve seen regarding limits to learning algebra is at this link:
https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/11396/what...
If you acknowledge you have such a limited viewpoint, why make such strong assertions of facts? You cannot possibly know the things you are pretending to be an authority on.
It is common for people to make conclusions on topics based on their experience and what they’ve read. We all do this since none of us can possibly fully research all topics. In my first post I specifically declared that I have no expertise on these matters. I think this topic is an emotional one for you and this is clouding your interpretation of what I have written.
I’ve encountered people like you at the various colleges I’ve taught at. You make it hard to have discussions regarding uncomfortable ideas. Such is not befitting of a person with your apparent intellectual capabilities.
The only strong assertion that I’ve made is that some people can’t learn college algebra. If you can find a severely mentally disabled person who has learned college algebra then please present your evidence. I suggest you are part of the problem in education. If we can’t acknowledge even the obvious (namely that not everyone can learn every topic) then we will continue the trend of dumbing down standards and curriculum and just passing people through the system in a misguided approach to educational equity.
Normative, not substantive. "Other people speak without knowing the limits of their knowledge" is not a good reason to emulate them.
Research is not about filling your bucket of known knowns: that's merely literature review. It is about converting unknown unknowns to known unknowns related to some question or goal, and then chipping away about the unknown-ness of whatever enables you to reach your conclusion. With this exploration of the limits of knowledge I hope comes some humility about what people are willing to state in such strong and unwavering terms.
> If you can find a severely mentally disabled person who has learned college algebra then please present your evidence.
Straw man. Who has claimed this? The question of who is given advantage in the educational system is not related to this strange fixation of yours. I can acknowledge that someone defined as "disabled" is "dis-abled" from performing certain acts. This is uncontroversial.
I suspect you are hiding behind this innocuous claim to avoid having the more uncomfortable conversation about what you think actually holds people back in the educational system. So far you have said "some people are smarter than others". I proposed a way this could be explained. You seem to have rejected it, but have not replaced it with another theory of your own.
> I think this topic is an emotional one for you and this is clouding your interpretation of what I have written.
Yeesh. Good luck out there.
I scanned the paper, but I don't recall if this was just K-12, or also higher ed, but I wonder if this result would fall apart in more complex subjects.
Also, no matter what the learning rate really is, if a student isn't interested in the subject, good luck getting them to learn much at all!
It's like saying evolution or fractions are controversial.
1. How it relates to g-factor and whether it tests it accurately
2. How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices
3. How it relates to academic and professional success
4. How much apparent academic and professional success is influenced by parental cheating and influence - including bequests, donations, "special" deals behind the scenes, in-group networking, and so on
It's not controversial that some people are smarter than others in specific ways, just as some people are better athletes than others.
But there are a lot of unanswered questions about what "smarter" really means, how broad the definition should be, how much it's defined by covert and contingent expectations, whether "smart" behaviours are innate or acculturated, who defines them, and how/why.
According to adoption studies, there's barely any influence at all. We can measure a little when the kids are young (the better the measurements, the less we can measure). It gradually disappears as they get older.
But yes, I recognize the "like a scratch-off lottery ticket which might reveal that you should be a Big Winner In Life" psychological appeal of IQ tests. Especially for people who are not actually experiencing any of that Big Winner in Life stuff, or have other issues. Especially those needing humanity to be a Well-Ordered Set ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-order ) with a convenient and easily-rationalized "who get to look down upon whom" metric.
As for comparing humans with each other I agree it's totally stupid. Personally I blame religions and their simplistic concept of good and evil for this eagerness of comparing humans and putting them on a spectrum.
Read up a bit on the hierarchy systems found in various non-human primate societies. Religious status is just another convenient and easily-rationalized ordering metric.
It's problematic because sometimes IQ tests will require a mix/match of: - Literacy - English language understanding - Extensive Vocabulary - Sight / Hearing
Of course literacy worked around with filling in pictures, but that just shifts us to the requirement of certain sensory input. Requiring English can be worked around by translating to any language, but doesn't address literacy requirements. One big issue I have is seeing vocabulary involved in these tests, which is outright not testing intelligence, but rather experience with a language.
For example, try testing ChatGPT for it's IQ. You'll see very clearly that an IQ test is not made for a system which doesn't have visual capabilities. Perhaps it would be able to from the domain of given the chance - but we don't know because the test is flawed. That is precisely the thing an IQ test should be able to measure - capacity to learn, regardless of the sensory input fed to the system.
(This is literally textbook science and not something "all sorts of idiots are [...] delusional about".)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brainstorm/201806/ho...
1 point per year of education is the lower estimate.
Your study is about the effect of an extra year of badly done education on people who drop out of school, which is worth 1 IQ point. That same study shows that the value of mediocre education on people who don't drop out of school is 5 IQ points.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
It's not about IQ, also, was it ever replicated?
It certainly isn't genetics. You're not going to cause a population-wide one sigma increase within a single generation using any genetic mechanism.
> It's not about IQ, also, was it ever replicated?
Yes, this has been replicated repeatedly. As far as IQ, if you apply for a private school that uses IQ tests for admission, you will find that all of them explicitly forbid test coaching because it is well known that it works. Even a video will cause large gains. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
But the effect of education could be very large: e.g., give an illiterate person an IQ test, educate them and repeat. The change will be ~100 points.
To be correct you can improve IQ up to a point (depending on the individual) with education.
Raven matrices is the standard.
I notice knowledge of binary operations and computer frame by frame anination helps a bit with some but still a small fraction of questions.
What algorithms did you notice being useful for solving IQ tests?
As an autistic person I agree with this, but it comes at a huge cost of much worse understanding of facial expressions of people and much less adaptability to change.
Also one more big disadvantage is that most people can't distinguish between a smart person and an a$$hole (Dr House is a good example of a person focused on saving lifes, but still people think he's an a@@hole... Elon Musk is an even more controversial example)
Let's suppose that there are no such examples. What then? If a person is an asshole what does it matter why they are an asshole?
I don't believe that intellectual ability necessarily requires you to miss out on facial expressions or adaptability. It occurs in some people, but even, e.g., John von Neumann was famously gregarious and friendly. Furthermore, it is worth noting that autism (even high-functioning autism) does not consistently present with exceptional ability in formal reasoning — that is also a "sometimes".
>Dr House is a good example of a person focused on saving lifes, but still people think he's an a@@hole
Dr. House is a fictional character. I don't think there has ever been a real life doctor who diagnoses his patients consistently from intuition and then sends his residents on a scavenger hunt for kicks.
Neurotypical high-intelligence gets less media attention. I have an aunt that's an incredibly intelligent aerospace engineering professor who the military regularly brings in to teach fighter pilots the math behind flight. (This is a non-trivial achievement.) She's just a regular person.
This still does not explain why some performed less than others (the ones that should and ones who should not pass).
> I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others.
This is a fact indeed, but the real question is how much variability in performance/learning this explains, and if there are other factors that explain part (and how much) of this variability. For this we need data.
At one time, students were routinely "held back" if they didn't understand something well enough to pass. That gave them a chance to catch up, so that when they got back into the class, they would be more likely to succeed.
It always seemed to me that this was an act of kindness, for the alternative is for them to sit in classes of more and more demanding material, feeling less and less adequate.
Back in those days, it was not really considered a terrible thing to spend some extra time catching up. Folks would ask me around report time whether I had passed my exams. It was not meant as an insult, and was not taken to be one, either.
I see postsecondary students all the time who clearly have missed some steps at around grade 9 or so. Being smart and ambitious, these students would definitely have caught on, if someone had assessed them honestly. Instead, they live in an imposter-syndrome world, always waiting to be "found out".
Folded in with the false kindness of passing everyone is, as others have pointed out, the deeply corrosive influence of measuring teaching performance by passing rates.
It doesn't really take a lot more than honesty and sometimes a helping hand, to let students realize their potential, whatever it might be.
These findings pose a challenge for theories of learning to explain the odd combination of large variation in student initial performance and striking regularity in student learning rate.
My anecdotal experience from teaching math in higher ed for 20 years is that the variation in initial performance might be due to passing students who don’t deserve to pass. Especially in recent years our (teachers’) performance is measure by passing rate and I have very little incentive to fail a student even if they don’t know the material.
I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others. As an extreme example consider the difference in intellectual talent between Einstein and a mentally disabled person. I suggest the possibility that maybe some people start off school in kindergarten behind their peers and never catch up. If the rate of learning is largely the same for people then starting off in kindergarten in the upper half in terms of knowledge would likely lead to one ending up in the upper half of knowledge at the end of college.