The Standards of ‘Smart’ Are Causing a Sense of Failure

I’ve come to notice that things are a lot clearer when you look back on them rather than when things are happening. In the moment, people tend to do what the norm is, and only a select few ever question what is expected of them.

Often times, those that are skeptical are seen as “outside the box,” until later, when more and more people come to the same conclusion and realize that those outside thinkers were actually onto something.

I notice this phenomenon a lot when I think about what I learned in high school, and how it has either helped, or hindered, me in college. Each day when I meet more of my classmates, I realize that we all come from very different educational backgrounds.

I’m sometimes bothered when I realize that I had to work much harder than my other friends throughout high school, only to have the same grade-point average, receive the same honors cord, and start at the same place in college. What was I achieving, really, if I am the same place as ten thousand other students?

I don’t mean to say that I’m not grateful for my education, because I know how lucky I am. Despite being in the same place as my classmates, I tend to find class workloads easier to handle, and I meet academic success much quicker and easily than others.

But when I was in high school, there was so much emphasis on receiving a high enough number. It was all about the statistics. The smart kids were in the top twenty percent, and you could only achieve that with perfection. In my last two years of high school, there was the constant questions of: “What did you get on the SATs?” and “What is your class rank?”

In some ways, we ceased to be looked at as a person, but as a number. We were judged by our GPA, our SAT and ACT scores, our class rank, the number of advanced placement (AP) classes we took, the number of AP tests we passed, the number of colleges we were accepted to, and ultimately the college we would be attending.

I will agree that these numbers are important. To a college admissions office, you really are nothing more than a number (and maybe an essay). Universities need some criteria to select their incoming freshmen class, and that’s fine.

It’s good to strive for good grades and academic success, but the standards for what is considered successful are getting way too high. Smart and accomplished students began to think they are failures. The top-ranked and most praised students look down on “the regular kids.”

Then they all graduate, go to college, and began with the same blank slates. Professors don’t care about your high school GPA or if you were the “smartest.” They care about what you think.

And numbers can’t think. Students that put all of their focus into choosing the right bubble on a Scantron, because that’s what will ultimately determine their intelligence, don’t always have opinions. Because opinions are not right or wrong. Therefore they aren’t put on tests in high school.

But when your grade in a college class depends on your ability to write an essay on your opinion, your SAT scores mean nothing anymore. Now you have to rely on your critical thinking skills and your ability to make connections between abstract ideas.

That’s not taught enough in class. It’s not to say that it isn’t taught, but not nearly at the level it should be. When you take AP classes, you have to be able to pass a test, and while you still have an essay writing section, your answer better be correct. Your opinion is invalid, because in the end, the graders are looking for a single word or definition, not your beliefs or interpretation of a subject.

I really struggled with this in my first semester of college. I kept thinking that there had to be a right or wrong answer, and the realization that there wasn’t caught me off guard.

I’m not calling for the abolishment of standardized testing, grade-point averages, or class ranking. That will not happen, because high schools have to prepare students to meet requirements and receive certain scores to get into college, and colleges need some criteria to decide which students to accept.

I just want there to be a change in what we consider “smart” to be. Are the students that pass tests really smarter than students who can think abstractly about the subject? And why are students who excel in math and science always considered better than students who do well in history or English?

And the worse is that students that are extremely bright in one area, but might struggle in another, will never achieve the praise or accolades of others because they aren’t the best in every single subject.

The standards of what makes students “smart” cause those that do not meet the criteria to become stressed and anxious. It causes perfectly able and intelligent people to think they are failures.

And this isn’t just happening in the last year of high school. It’s occurring among the freshmen. If fourteen-year-olds are ranking their friends on test scores now, what is going to happen when they are eighteen?

Changing this starts at home and in the classroom. It starts with parents who support their children’s interests, rather than funneling them into a different path. It starts with teachers who don’t reward the top twenty percent that got into high ranking UC universities and ignore the others.

And it starts with the students who need to realize that there will be a time when things like leadership, teamwork, critical thinking, confidence and integrity get you further then your high school rank and test scores.