<p>Hi everyone. I am a senior in High School, and having discussed this topic with several friends before, i thought i would bring it up on CC, because, well, why not? And i thought there would be many people who would have interesting things to say.</p>
<p>In the first grade, my teacher had me tested, and i ended up scoring with an IQ of 142 at the age of 7, and was immediately placed in gifted ed program (this gave my immigrant, non college-ed parents great hope). I basically went through the entirety of elementary school and junior high being #1, and then when I hit high school, everything changed. I wasnt getting worse, but I just wasnt improving, and everyone was catching up to me. I was no longer #1, and maybe it had to do with high school itself, or maybe it was just me--but I just felt as if I was stagnating.</p>
<p>It really is an interesting phenomenon to observe, and I think it is important for people who have had this same experience to not feel like they have ruined their potential or something similar.</p>
<p>When it comes down to it, though, I think the main thing is that I grew up reading and writing "at a college level", and now that I am near college, welp everyone else is at a college level now too. Not as impressive now, I guess :P</p>
<p>Any thoughts, any similar stories? Do you think some people just naturally "fall off" later on, or do you think it is simply other people are "catching up"? </p>
<p>I wouldn’t say they fell off but they just find things more interesting than schoolwork. Most people start getting boyfriends and girlfriends and start partying a lot more in high school. These people are still very intelligent and have interests in ancient greek history or deep space cosmology but they don’t study a lot because (for obvious reasons) they would rather go out and have fun with the cute girl from history.</p>
<p>There are some people who just weren’t that intelligent to begin with and they struggled in high school. </p>
<p>I know some people who are obviously very smart but they just don’t try or they believe they can do well with just their natural smarts alone. For example, there’s a person in my AP World class who seems to know a lot and always has random facts to share but they don’t do the homework and so they don’t do well on the tests or essays. And this person was in some of my classes in middle school too and probably had really good grades back then. But here in high school you actually have to try and study to do well. Not that you don’t try or study.</p>
<p>I’ve been in more or less of the same situation. Conventional public schools simply measure a conventional sort of intelligence. It all just feels like busywork. </p>
<p>tacoperson123, IQ provides and indication of how someone compares to other people their age. So, someone with an IQ of, say 145 has performed better on certain tasks (those in the test) than approximately 99.83% (3 SD above mean) of the people that same age. Supposedly there are strong correlations in IQ across time, for adults. More variability for younger people. The premise is that performance on the test reflects incidental learning and inherent ability given everyone is exposed to similar learning opportunities and maturation happens fairly uniformly across people. Of course those assumptions are not reality. For instance, a child can be strongly motivated to learn skills at an earlier age than peers. That motivation can be driven by achievement oriented parents who also make sure their child is exposed to good learning opportunities. That child is given the maximum opportunity to make the most of his/her inherent skills. In contrast, a child with uneducated parents may have a very impoverished learning environment. If they were tested in say, 3rd grade, the one with the better learning opportunities would likely test way higher even if both were born with the same capabilities to learn. But say in 7th grade the one that used to be interested in learning now starts to be less motivated to learn but more motivated to do sports. Say the one without educated parents lucked into meeting a caring teacher who motivated the child and also helped the child access all kinds of activities that provide opportunities to learn. If you tested the two kids in 11th grade, there may be little difference between the two children’s test scores. People don’t really progress at exactly the same rate. </p>
<p>I feel that gifted students have either the desired innate ability or that they were just better prepared. (You seem to have the innate talent). Perhaps their parents taught them the basics in English and mathematics thus making them comparatively’‘brighter’’ than most other students in elementary school. By the time they reach high school, the gifted status stops mattering. Most students catch up but not by a relevant amount. Grades aren’t usually reflective of your intelligence as they measure obedience, ability to memorize information, and knowing how you are graded. Since you never exercised your intelligence and ended up in classes below you, your true potential never showed and remained limited to what you were being taught giving the illusion that the other students caught up. </p>
<p>I have two children. One with an IQ higher than yours, and one who is also very smart, but missed the “gifted” cutoff when taking the test. My first kid coasted through elementary school and could get 100 on everything with no effort at all. My second studied and worked hard for his grades. Now they are older. “Gifted” is is doing very well, but has no idea how to study. She is used to everything being super easy, and now that it is not her grades have fallen a bit. Other kid makes study aids, and goes over materials a bit every night. His grades are higher as a result. Natural ability only takes you so far.</p>
<p>When I was in elementary school, I was immediately placed in the gifted and talented class without even the placement test (the removed me from an ESL class to the gifted and talented class). Everything was effortless, even that class. In Middle School, all the subjects were a breeze. I don’t remember studying or doing much of anything except homework. Students struggled with their tests but I found that I finished them in a fraction of the time.</p>
<p>Now, in high school, I struggle. It’s not because I don’t know the material, because I do. It’s because I don’t know how to study. There is now an overload of information that has to be memorized then relayed again. I’m not used to testing under pressure and making stupid mistakes, because everything was once so simple.</p>
<p>So while all the other high school students <strong>know</strong>* what to do and how to study, gifted students such as myself have to learn all of that from scratch. That takes time and because of that, grades tend to suffer a bit.</p>
<p>It should also be noted that gifted students struggle sometimes because they challenge themselves even more in high school. In junior high the gifted curriculum was about two years advanced whereas in high school you can accelerate three or four years. </p>
<p>If gifted students only took honors classes which are one year advanced then they would normally be able to coast but if they took college level calculus and science they would struggle but still perform well compared to the non gifted students in the class if there were any.</p>
<p>I was in the GATE program for gifted kids but they didn’t even do anything special. Before I went to elementary school they had special classes and field trips for GATE students but then they stopped because parents complained that it was unfair. I wish they didn’t change it. Sorry, this is kind of off topic.</p>
<p>I’ve seen this phenomenon a lot in the local public school. I tested into the gifted program as a third grader and many of those who were my gifted classmates are so-so students. For me, it comes down to a couple of things -</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Ambition and work ethic. These things are so much more important, especially in high school which involves a lot of “busy work” and studying, than innate intelligence. Some people have it, but don’t have too much of a desire to use it. </p></li>
<li><p>The nature of IQ. I personally don’t believe IQ can be used as a measure of intelligence - there are so many types of intelligence, and it’s silly, in my opinion, to say that solving these abstract problems correctly means one has superior intelligence. Furthermore, being able to solve this type of abstract problem is a culturally learned trait - it reflects the education one has received, not one’s natural ability. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>The same thing happened with me; although more from elementary school to middle school. In elementary school, I was one of the five smartest people in my grade–I was in “Advanced Math” (the only gifted class there was), I was in the GATE program (our gifted and talented program) in every subject and had been since third grade, the earliest you could get in (it still carries on today, allowing me to take almost all honors and AP classes with lower grades than people who aren’t in the GATE program); I almost never studied and still managed to pull straight As. Even in seventh grade, where I skipped a level of math, I did really well; but my grades weren’t perfect anymore. I still understood the information better than anyone, but I never studied. In eighth grade, it got worse; I got a B+ or two in a few classes. I wasn’t the smartest person in the class anymore.</p>
<p>Then I reached high school.</p>
<p>It was an entirely new experience–there were plenty of people who did better than me on essays and tests and quizzes; I still managed to pull okay grades without trying, but I actually had to study at this point. First semester of freshman year, I got B+s in two classes–both of which lay in my strengths (H. English and H. Algebra II) and I couldn’t believe it. I knew that grades counted; but I hadn’t tried, and had forgotten homework and not studied for tests, making me pull a lower grade. I still don’t study nearly as much as my peers, simply because I don’t have the study skills. I can’t focus on a topic–especially if it’s one I find dull–for a lengthy amount of time; I prefer to do things that I like. I’ll read something for fun, but not for school. I’m “average” at my high school; I still pull okay grades, but I’m not one of the people in the top 10% or anything. There are people who took AP tests freshman year and got 5s; people in my grade (I’m a sophomore) who got 2400s on their SATs. I’m no longer the smartest person–and maybe it’s because I don’t have the study skills or whatever.</p>
<p>Funny, I have noticed the same thing in my kids’ big public. Some of the students who were in GT in elementary school are not particularly good students later on. </p>
<p>I agree some of it is personality. The hard workers catch up. The easily distracted smart kids get distracted by the opposite sex, etc. I wonder if some of it is the tests given in elementary school, and the application of other selection criteria. Some of those little kids were just well turned out; there were some teachers’ kids who knew how to play the game, for example. They could get nominated more easily, and performed better in the tested areas. These kids were never smarter, they just knew the system better.</p>
<p>High school is a bigger, more diverse pool of kids, too. </p>
<p>My situation is almost the opposite of yours. I was always the smartest kid in my regular elementary school, but then I went into the gifted program. This was rigorous. We were assigned so much homework that I would work on some of my projects literally every day from the time it was assigned until the time it was due and it would still take around 2 hours a night (on top of other homework, studying and other projects). Ironically, I felt so dumb being in the gifted program. I got more Cs in 6 months than I got in my entire high school career. This was actually more intense in the lower grade levels than the higher grade levels. I wasn’t the smartest or dumbest kid in the class though, it really depended on the subject. I was one of the best students in English and math (in my math class though, there were kids who were a year ahead of me in math but I’m not counting them), but not so hot in my language class, science and history. When the gifted program ended and I had to go to a regular high school, I felt like the work was nothing in comparison to how much I worked while in a gifted program. I maintained at the top, probably the smartest kid in my grade but how can you really determine that anyways? There were people who came close, but always fell short in one category. In my later years of high school, I still had to work very hard to get my grades, but it was probably less than someone trying to maintain the same grades. This isn’t intended to be a brag fest, but I just wanted to share with you how someone can have such a different experience. I did the opposite of falling off and I actually became a much stronger student because I learned how to work for my grades early on. </p>
<p>The point of all of this is that I think your gifted program wasn’t actually effective. If you’re in a gifted program and you’re still the smartest kid in your class, then it’s no different than going to a regular school. Was your gifted program just a program at your school or did you go to a school for gifted students? I went to the latter, so it was like bringing the top 2-3 students from 20 elementary schools into one program. Before that, I was also in a gifted program at my school. These programs are usually useless because they don’t take only the true gifted students, but enough to keep the program running at your school. In my elementary school there were maybe 3 students who were honestly above their grade level and being hindered by the normal progress of school. But can you have a gifted program with just 3 students? Of course not. So they took like 20 in total of a class of 50. The teacher couldn’t teach things that were too advanced because there are 17 decently smart but not necessarily gifted students (my distinguishing factor is that for gifted students, stuff just clicks in their head and they don’t have to process and practice it as much as others). So the gifted program isn’t effective at all really. I would say half the people in the program in elementary school have at least 2 Fs on their transcript now in high school. </p>
<p>TL;DR Not all gifted programs are created equal so you were probably put in a pretty crappy one. Also, school isn’t based on IQ but rather work ethic. It may not be your work ethic that’s decreasing, but the work ethic of others that’s increasing. </p>
<p>@BipolarBuddhist I must disagree. I didn’t study, nor did the majority of the people in the gifted program, to get in. It was the latter: none of us knew about the program entering third grade (and who studies in second and third grade?). A letter was sent home and we were invited into the program.</p>
<p>I believe that students who started school able to do more advanced work may over time not develop the study skills needed for tougher work in the future years. There is a lot of research now on “grit,” which refers to tenacity or perseverance. Students who found school very easy in the early grades may end up not developing enough grit, which is needed in future years. </p>