There is, however, a difference between Adina's friend and me. I no longer doubt my intelligence. I'm pretty sure by now that I am not intelligent. I had the impression (and still do) that I'd done quite well for the stats module, but the reality is that it's as bad as ever. I really have no explanation for this, and it is due to this that I can now quite confidently say that I am not intelligent in at least one thing, the ability to consistently and knowingly produce a favourable outcome in exams. Either I do not know myself, or the enemy, or both. For the other module, I'm short of two marks to get a distinction. If I for some reason got two marks more, I just might feel a lot more intelligent.
I spent a few years in NUS computer engineering before dropping out and going to Australia to study a completely different field, doing psychology. In my first semester at NUS, I flunked three subjects. To the uninitiated, this might seem to require extraordinary intelligence, but trust me, it doesn't! You just need to be crazily lazy and brave! Anyway, I think it's seriously abnormal, and I'm not too sure how I survived that period of time. That experience essentially changed me. It was emotionally draining, frightening and absolutely traumatic. And also, I gradually became a left-wing person. It's like a thorough cleansing process. I personally do not recommend this to anybody. There is a reason why kids jump from the top of buildings when they get less than desirable grades, and I know that there are enough justifications for this sort of behaviour given the right set of social conditions and individual push factors. Anyway, to get rid of the demons of the past is not an easy process, but I believe I've done quite well in my time in Australia, all things considered, in that regard.
Adina talks about the tendency of the system to 'overlook people who don't seem to perform in school'. That's probably me. But I also think that if one scraps the current system (which is really a tradition that has existed for over 2000 years from the time of Imperial exams in Confucius' China and is what makes Chinese people, Chinese), what does one replace it with? Or what I think is a little similar to what Hui Chieh asks in the last sentence of this entry, what sorts of things should determine/quantify our abilities? For a long while now, I've felt the idea of separating people according to a mutually agreed set of criteria (such as exam results) is not really an exercise to determine good allocation of jobs to different people, but a more urgent necessity to justify picking one person and rejecting another. This is just a realistic situation in a supply and demand market. Some people use a more 'holistic tools' to measure ability, like if you've a Starfleet cadet, you'd probably have to go through the unwinnable Kobayashi Maru simulator. However, all we have are current technologies and methodologies. But sometimes, winners succeed despite what they hear about their abilities. Just look at the alumni of college dropouts. (Also not recommended for the faint hearted!) Maybe they are more intelligent in other areas, as Wang shows us...
Coming back to my intelligence and ability, or the lack thereof, I think there are some who think I'm intelligent in other ways. They may well be right, to a certain extent. In the meantime, I'm still not sure what went wrong. Without the ability to control the outcome of the evaluation process, I don't see a way to get better in the future. If this continues, I won't be able to become more intelligent in this particular area. Hopefully my prof would give me some leads soon. Abide with me...
Update (!): The wacky Blinkymummy has related thoughts on this issue...
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