<p>Mockingbird7, you are a fool. If all forms of intelligence are correlated, then why do girls get, on average, lower SAT scores, yet stronger GPAs? </p>
<p>I, for one, have a strong GPA and a relatively low IQ. Don’t blame your failures with women on me.</p>
<p>^Source of the correlation?
Even if girls have slightly higher GPAs than guys, you cannot say that GPA/IQ are inversely proportional(girls get smarter while guys actually get dumber? eh) after a certain threshold. </p>
<p>Pure obedience doesn’t work in college. I’ve seen many smart people get by with barely of hardwork and get mediocre grades. Like many others had said, intelligence+some obedience = good grades. So yes, grades measure your ability (I don’t wanna say intelligence because it’s so hard to define) relative to your peers.</p>
<p>You have not offered any concrete proof to refute the research of Spearman and others.</p>
<p>Read this article.
[General</a> intelligence factor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“g factor (psychometrics) - Wikipedia”>g factor (psychometrics) - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>I was careful not to say GPA as it involves a measure of a person’s effort and not solely cognitive abilities. I believe the culture of gender has some effect on both differences you described.</p>
<p>On a similar note, GPA must be highly correlated with effort put into all the classes. Many of you are choosing to call this effort obedience, but I must disagree. Everything the professor does in class they do (in an ideal situation, but all applies to most cases of most professors) to better your education. They are not ordering you as you would a dog to sit, bark and do tricks. Instead they are helping you achieve, by requiring from you what they feel necessary in their course. Many offer office hours to allow a person to get their questions answered. Nobody is required to go to these and they do not directly help or hurt your grade, however they should that if anything show that the professor is not trying to control you like a puppet and not requiring obedience and submission, just hard work to achieve the level of understanding that they believe you need from completing the course. </p>
<p>Remember you are the customer, if you do not like the services offered (like obedience training) you can choose not to purchase them or go somewhere else to do it.</p>
<p>I forgot to add:</p>
<p>The obedience argument also fails because if you do every assignment like the teachers requests of you, but you do not put much effort into them, you will not receive a good grade. You are being obedient, and may be intelligent (the two criteria brought up in the thread), however you are left with a C in the class and a low GPA.</p>
<p>You shouldn’t take ‘obedience’ as an insult, mockingbird7. I think what the OP is getting at is that many people with strong GPAs have personalities that make them naturally obedient. Obedient person = more effort.</p>
<p>Well, here obedience = doing things that your professor has arbitrarily decided is a good way for students to learn what they teach. Not everyone can be smashed together in a nice big “students” category where what the professsor does works for everyone. If it doesn’t work for you, you are doing it merely out of “obedience.” Also, if part of the grade is determined by attendance, and your professor is bad, you might have been better off studying the material independantly and just taking the tests or whatever.</p>
<p>In my experience, people who complain that grades are based on “obedience” are the same ones who believe that they are smarter than the professors, and that a lot of the assignments are useless busy work that is beneath them. They will carry this attitude with them to the working world, and will be failures, unless they wise up.</p>
<p>sithis exposure to the material in any form will increase understanding, so even if it does not work for you, you will be able to get something out of it. Also a chat with the instructor about your learning and their assignments I bet would cause him to help if the asking was done in a respectful and courteous manner.</p>
<p>Whistlerblower1 if obedient person=hard worker (implying they are interchangeable), then yes obedience does help, however this is not true.
ex.
“My dog is obedient.” is true, it listens when I tell it to sit and roll over.
“My dog is a hard worker.” is false. It is old and sleeps most of the day unless I wake it up and does not try to go out of its way to please me or do anything but sleep.</p>
<p>“sithis exposure to the material in any form will increase understanding, so even if it does not work for you, you will be able to get something out of it.”</p>
<p>This is not neccessarily true, unless you wish to explain what you mean further? Also doesn’t help if one can understand something 50% from doing what the professor wants and 100% from say, watching an online tutorial video</p>
<p>“Also a chat with the instructor about your learning and their assignments I bet would cause him to help if the asking was done in a respectful and courteous manner.”</p>
<p>I doubt the professor is going to dramatically change their assignments (or offer alternate ones) because 1 person (or a few people) has a problem with them. You are basically arguing that because the professor is not allowing a person to utilize their time in an efficient manner that works for them, that person should go to office hours on their own time to get extra help, adding insult to injury.</p>
<p>My homie Stephen J. Gould would grab his Glock on the first sight of some of the arguments made in this thread.</p>
<p>IQ is merely one measure of intelligence, a flawed one that is. It is absurd to believe that IQ is unchangeable and determined by genes, and it is equally absurd to think that one can rank all of the individuals in the world from lowest IQ to highest IQ.</p>
<p>I have always wondered why humans are so obsessed with IQ. It is a human flaw, our desire to simplify the complex, our wish to take something so complicated and even intangible such as intelligence and reify it into one single number: IQ.</p>
<p>Spearman’s factor analysis was flawed- correlation does not equate with causation. Any good scientist knows that.</p>
<p>The inventor of IQ tests- a frenchman named Binet- did not intend it to separate people based on intelligences. It was merely a tool to diagnose students struggling in class, and to assign them extra help.</p>
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<p>Actually, I’m pretty sure that every English professor at my school would prefer a well-written essay with an unusual argument to an essay regurgitating a more obvious thesis already mentioned by the professor. In fact, I’d say it’s necessary to have an original idea for the essay to cross into A/A- Land (not an easy plane to reach here).</p>
<p>Lollybo my argument was not based on causation only correllation between the two. Also, I was not arguing the use of IQ to determine anything. I used the correlation argument to show error in whistleblowerr1’s point.</p>
<p>Sithis, if he/she were inddeed knowledgeable, would know of additional resources that would help teach the material.</p>
<p>Also I have discoveered that the thing about collegeb is that you are reqired to learn much of the material by yourself, so even though lectured may waste time you have a large bulk of the classwork to do it by yourself. Also I have found sitting in the helps you not waste class time.</p>
<p>However I believe we are discussing an anomaly that is by far not the norm.</p>
<p>If it is a subject like Maths, then no not really. For other subjects yes it is.</p>
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<p>Rolling over is a lot easier than getting a Strong GPA. For your dog to be, say, Best in Show, he has to be both obedient and a hard worker. Ditto for Seabiscuit.</p>
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<p>Unchangeable, no. You can just study for the IQ test, or go from being illiterate—>literate.
Determined by genes, hell yes it’s determined by genes. You’d be a fool to think otherwise. I’m willing to bet you’d concede that culture has an effect on one’s development. Well, culture is determined in part by DNA. Most things are determined by your genes, it’s just politically incorrect to say so.</p>
<p>I don’t think culture is determined by genes at all. I think culture is primarily a response to the environment if anything, and we do not have enough data to argue that culture is completely or even partially determined by genes.</p>
<p>A lot of these arguments have huge social implications but little to no data to support them. I believe that it is folly for people to jump on the IQ/G/correlation-super-statistics-this-must-be-right-because-a-phd-said-so bandwagon without substantial evidence backing it up, especially when the claim is so controversial.</p>
<p>I am not arguing that “intelligence” is not heritable. But heritability should not confine one’s intelligence. There is no evidence out there saying that someone born with a low heritable intelligence cannot reach normal or even above normal intelligence given proper training. </p>
<p>It is very easy to see perceived heritable differences in intelligence, and blame it on genes. But our understanding of the brain is extremely limited, and our data is often from pseudo-scientists or psychologists like Terman and Spearman. To me, a sociological explanation for IQ differences is far less controversial, and makes much more sense given limited data. Low indicators of intelligence can exist and persist in generations due to persisting sociological factors. A poor minority mother with few educational resources will give birth to a child in the same conditions, etc. A professor will give birth to an economically privileged child in a very strong academic environment. Sure, there are studies with adopted twins in different families, but my argument still holds in that that only applies to initial intelligence. Society is not doing a good job of helping those in need for us to draw conclusions about the maximum capability that individuals can reach.</p>
<p>GPA may be a result of both hard work and intelligence. But, like using IQ to measure intelligence, I don’t think we have any strong data to draw any good conclusions with.</p>
<p>Grades to me measure the amount of work you put in, the amount of effort you contribute.</p>
<p>Which is ultimately what you need to be successful in life.</p>
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<p>Not enough data, you say?</p>
<p>[Sex</a> and intelligence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence]Sex”>Sex differences in intelligence - Wikipedia)
53 footnotes</p>
<p>[Race</a> and intelligence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence]Race”>Race and intelligence - Wikipedia)
126 footnotes</p>
<p>You want a sociological explanation just because the brain is ‘too hard to understand’ and intelligence is ‘hard to measure’? What is it going to take to get you to critically think instead of being a thoughtless sheep?</p>
<p>Why is it acceptable to refer to a breed of dogs as ‘intelligent’ or ‘violent’ or ‘obedient’ or ‘dumb’, but not so with humans? Many dog owners hold their pets in higher regard than 99% of humans. I am among them, and you are among the 99%.</p>
<p>Grades are a measure of diligence. Talk of “hoops” to jump through are, in my opinion, the complaints of students who are too lazy to put the work in and get an A.</p>
<p>Grades measure a combination of aptitude and committment.</p>