I am grading the exam on pumps and pumping stations of my last course for water engineers. The first exam was administered together with hydraulics and they spent all the time on solving hydraulics problems and most had no time to answer the pumping part. So we gave them a second opportunity, with plenty of time and plenty of solved exercises and background material. Most succeeded, and one Russian even wrote a computer program to optimize the size of wet chambers in sewage pumping stations. But one paper was really pityful, the writer had not the minimal understanding of the subject. It was Pavel, a green-eyed friendly Caucasian Jew, always sitting in the first raw and copying laboriously my equations on the board. He checked my numbers and corrected my errors. He was one of the stars of the class. How is that his work was so bad? It is clear case of the brilliantness phenomenon. Some student are brilliant in class, participating actively and being very positive and helpful to the teacher. But when the time of reality comes, they are zero.
It is explained by low IQ. But how is that I cannot recognize low IQ in class and in cafeteria chats? Cochrane has the opinion that IQ is very visible in daily life. He might be right, by my personal experience, repeated Pavel after Pavel, is that I cannot.
It is explained by low IQ. But how is that I cannot recognize low IQ in class and in cafeteria chats? Cochrane has the opinion that IQ is very visible in daily life. He might be right, by my personal experience, repeated Pavel after Pavel, is that I cannot.
10 comments:
Maybe it is not low IQ. These students could have gotten through school with grades just high enough to pass by having intelligence, but not a work ethic. By the time they get to college they need to remember everything that they should have learned, but have forgotten it.
In short these kids may have skated through by getting A's on test, but doing no homework, and then promptly forgetting it all when they finished the course.
Intelligence without effort can be wasted. Or I could be wrong and they could be morons.
Loved the Pythagorean cartoon. I hope she got full marks. Perhaps the student was Marilyn.
Why do you think blonde women (as opposed to blonde men) are exclusively the butt, of "dumb" jokes? Is there any data to support this strereotype? Do you think that being more attractive, the mutation was permissive for some level of stupidity? Or could it be that the enzymic pathway for melanin is co-implicated in neurotransmission? Or is it purely based on envy; OR, what I think, the kind of woman who dyes her hair blonde might be from a lower IQ band, and so give the natural blondes an undeserved reputation.
Anon.
Are blonde girls stupider? Nowadays you cannot know who is who. Every second woman is blond.
There is such a thing as social intelligence. Perhaps Pavel relies on that, and not on raw intelligence.
However, it is interesting that had the 2 legs of the right angled triangle been equal,eg 3cm each instead of 3cm and 4 cm, not even a brunette could have told you the exact length of the hypoteneuse.
And maybe Pavel just had a bad day.
If not, he might benefit from training his working memory, which, it is claimed, can reliably increase IQ. There is some good research to support this and courses available from Sweden, I think. (The Karolinska?).
rashkov,
Social intelligence? Is it relevant to water engineering? Would you drink water treated by Pavel?
My feeling with Pavel and his socially brilliant but intelectually challengend fellows is disappointment. Almost like I was cheated by them. It makes me sad and uneasy.
The reason I thought he might have skated through all those years is that he did make it into an engineering course, indicating that he does have some intelligence. Is there some kind of entrance exam to get into your class or the school or does the school assume that they know what they are doing since they are engineers? Are the students that are unusually friendly to you the ones who also flunk out?
Israel is a country of immigrants, and lots of people from Central Asia arrives with academic diplomas. In engineering, they accept the titles, in medicine and law they have pass very difficult exams. The idea is that the employers will easily discover the usefulness of a worker, and in fact, they do. The point of my note is that I was misled by his friendliness and helpfulness in class, I did not suspect that in front of an exam paper he would fail miserably. It is not the first time that this happens to me. Greg Cochran thinks that this should not happen, but to me, it does. Conclusion: Believe only in written objective exams, not in personal impressions.
Cochran has studied intelligence proffessionally, so he may have developed an eye for seeing it. Here in AZ *some* engineers have to pass a written exam confirming their competence with the Board of Technical Registration (link).
Written examination should be required of immigrant engineers to transfer their diplomas to Israel, or America. Can you imagine a large building falling over because it was designed by an ignoramus?
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