High Marks Are Not A Sign Of Intelligence

I’m sure all of us imagine what the future holds. What it will be like 50 or 100 years later. Sometimes a thought strikes me. When people meet each other, maybe their conversations will go something like this:

“Hi, I’m 70.”
“Oh hello, I’m 60”
“Nice to meet you, I’m 80”

No, they won’t be talking about their ages. They’ll be referring to the marks they scored in their exams. After all with the kind of education systems and emphasis on numbers that our culture is breeding, it’s a matter of time before our marks come to define who we are.

Numbers seem to be so convenient, whether they are in the form of statistics or cricket match scores. But are they really so definitive and so absolute as to spell out within two symbols the essence of who we are and what we have worked for? I beg to differ. I refuse to allow myself or indeed, my friends and colleagues, to be reduced to a couple of typed ink marks on a piece of paper.

American educationist Dorothy de Zouche once said, “If I can't give a child a better reason for studying than a grade on a report card, I ought to lock my desk and go home and stay there.” Unfortunately, today, in our cynical, exhausted age where the rat race seems to have deluged everything that is good and pure about our thoughts and ideas, a report card is our ticket to the real world. A report card that may or may not even vaguely brush over the real people inside us. A report card that is a cardboard depiction of an institutionalised conspiracy to pigeonhole us into little numbered jars and force us into conforming to rigid, warped and frankly unnecessary notions of excellence and achievement. A report card that reports nothing but how much we can be manipulated by an obsolete system of learning into investing hours and hours at a study table, learning little but memorising the whole world, only to forget it all the moment the bell rings at the end of the exam.

Mark Twain’s famous quote, “I was born intelligent, education ruined me” comes to mind whenever this oft-discussed issue of marks and intelligence begins. However it isn’t education which is the problem. It’s the lack of it. The intellectual, moral and social development that it is ostensibly meant to provide is mainly absent from our current adaptations of formal schooling. The definition of education today has very much become about handing out a sort of homogenised, mass market form of instruction. It’s more like a McEducation really. And for this reason, the stress laid on marks has increased manifold. That’s the easiest gratuity the students can give to the institution. It’s like saying “One Math course and 25 history chapters…that’ll be 85% please.” There’s very little genuine effort to imbue the truest version of schooling in students. And it isn’t teachers or students who are at fault. It’s society as a whole, who’s urging this consumerist frenzy to just finish school, get a job and make money. Marks are the most readily available currency in this process, that’s all.

One must also bear in mind the debilitating effects of a mark-centric approach to intelligence. Intelligence is of various types and cannot be confined to academic achievement alone. Yale psychologist Robert J. Sternberg has proposed a Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences breaks intelligence down into at least eight different components: logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, intra-personal and inter-personal intelligences. Daniel Goleman and several other researchers have developed the concept of emotional intelligence and claim it is at least as important as more traditional sorts of intelligence. There are parameters other than grades that determine the intellect of a person. Music, for instance, is a widely accepted confirmer of great mental prowess in a person. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart were all great composers who let’s face it, might not have made the cut at say, M.I.T. And can we really call Picasso or Van Gogh anything less than genii simply because they haven’t got a school report that says so? Again when one considers the many spheres of human proficiency and ability where marks are no indicators at all…literature, cinema, business, politics, drama…the list can go on and on. So why make such a big deal out of them, correlating them to intelligence when in fact, they symbolise one singular facet, that of academic skill. And while that certainly plays an important role in shaping our thought process to some extent, it cannot be the sole factor in deciding whether we are ‘intelligent’ or not.
Another point that needs to be made here is the decay of the personal passions of young people in their struggle to prove to universities, parents and society how capable they are. The compromise of private obsessions and spiritually satisfying pursuits for the sake of a few marks more than the other guy is, for lack of a better word, criminal. Einstein is a shining example of this. Brilliant at math and science, he kept failing other subjects at school and was unsuccessful at entering university at his first attempt. A girl who may love art and wish to devote as much time as possible to following in the footsteps of her idol, again maybe Picasso or Van Gogh, may be compelled to keep working her way through her thick Math textbook to get 90 instead of 85 in her exams. At the end of the day, the kid wants to go to art school, so why does knowing the formula for trigonometric ratios so vital?

Instead of allowing us time to develop and evolve as individuals with distinct opinions and generous ideas, by reading, listening, watching and learning we are imprisoned in classrooms, cramming the same equations over and over for reasons that have nothing to do with the joy of learning. We must return to everything that is virginal about our curiosity and eloquent about the magnanimity of genuine education and honestly, earnestly endeavour to learn. We mustn’t let our heart’s desires and aspirations become removed from our sincere willingness to imbibe philosophies and dictums of science and arts but must combine the two. This can come about only when we stop trying to measure ourselves through 3 hour question-answer sessions that we never cared about in the first place.

A frequently repeated side to this whole debate is that a person who scores 95 and one who scores 94 are more or less on equal cerebral planes, within the arena of scholarly merit. But that one extra mark might prove a deterrent for admission into university with the cut-off percentage increasing every year. Moreover it might have a deep psychological impact on the student who secured that one mark less that his/her opponent. He or she might have sacrificed all their pleasure and happiness in life for that one mark and it might indeed intensely affect the equilibrium of that person. This brings us to the potent issue of suicide rates among students. Quoting figures is hardly the premise of this argument. It is the mere fact that so many teenagers and young adults decide to take their lives just because they attained marks that they weren’t satisfied with which is so horrific. Putting our lives on a backburner to work hard for exams is bad enough without the added pressure and terror of everyone placing so much value on our marks that it seems our lives begin and end there. It is not the fear of getting an 86 or 87 which victimises students so much as the thought that everyone would think they were stupid if they didn’t score in a certain bracket.

It’s as if no matter how bright and interesting a young person is, scoring a 75% suddenly makes them ineffably moronic. Whereas a decidedly not very smart person scoring a 98% makes them intelligent? It could be that the 75%er is working on a book of poetry and thinks that attaining a reasonably decent percentage suffices in the large scheme of things. Her or his personal attributes and the power of her or his character convince them and in course of time, the world, what remarkable people they are. The 98%er who only notched that number up by staying up till 3 a.m. for one year and knows nothing of any subject beyond the textbooks that she has learnt by rote and no doubt highlighted in a triple colour scheme, might coast for a while on that percentage but eventually will end up schlepping papers around a stifling office. She may earn a lot of money maybe but she will live and die in obscurity, having contributed nothing to the world. A nameless, faceless, dispassionate and dull specimen of a slave to the system as opposed to the poet who has revitalised and revolutionised the way that perhaps a whole generation thinks.

Finally, I would like to point out that quantifying intellect is futile and even absurd. It is like trying to measure the time between two thoughts and devise a formula for falling in love. I repeat what I said before – a number is just that, a number. It can never replace a living, breathing, thinking and most of all, happy human being. And to that effect, our education structure should stop trying to substitute people for percentages. If it really has become about the marks then, to quote Pink Floyd,

“We don’t need no education; we don’t need no though control.”