Intelligence

Ever since school, I've wondered if it really is possible to quantify intelligence with the myriad of tests and examinations that most of us end up taking through the course of our lives. There are tests in schools, tests to clear to get into college, tests to get through college, tests to get a job, tests to certify proficiency with something, tests to test soundness of mind; it’s maddening.

Most of these tests don't really test how well you can handle the knowledge you have or what you can do with it. What they do test is how well you can remember stuff that you've mugged up. Application of skills or intelligence is pretty limited. And I hate that.

I don't have the patience to learn up facts and figures listed in tables for some subject. I hate having to cram up arcane details of some chip or board. I have no need to remember that the range of a byte in Java is 0 to 2¹⁶. If I want I can either calculate it or look it up somewhere. I feel that all these things should be in reference books and not memorized. If it does happen to get imprinted onto your mind in the course of using it then that’s great. But you shouldn't be forced to have to learn them.

And it really bugs me that people who know nothing about nothing manage to put in a few hours of hard work ( alright I'll give them that, they work hard at it ) to mug up the required stuff and then manage to excel at the afore mentioned exams. I know that I'm better than quite a few of them at figuring out problems and troubleshooting and understanding what is going on with a program; but I also know ( found out the hard way actually; through experience ) that in a straight test, most of them would beat me in the marks department if given sufficient warning and relevant material.

I know I'm not stupid. I can manage quite well with most stuff. I'm not brilliant or a genius, but fairly confident that I lie between average and above-average. But I have no patience with these tests. Which is not to say that I perform poorly on them. I do pretty well on most; but again, not brilliantly. And quite a few times the people who do do better, manage it because of some unfair advantages. However, other times, it’s my fault. I'm just too lazy to put in too much effort on the exam; especially if it is just some stupid test that doesn't really matter. At college and school, since the clearing exam was the primary goal and we were excused from all else to study for it, I'd do just that. But that was because that was all that was supposed to be done. I can't really handle multitasking too well; if I'm supposed to be working on the project at work, then by God that's what I wanna be doing! Not studying for some test or managing my finances or doing some other secondary thing.

I guess in the end it comes down to this: life itself is a test; but it doesn't matter much how you perform since everyone ends up the same way.