this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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In my experience, if you're the smartest kid in your class, you're not smart. You're just in the wrong class.
Also, if you're the dumbest kid.
But I'll spot one further. Standardized testing exists to place students on a curve. You don't want everyone failing. You don't want everyone acing the exam. You want to be able to point and say "These are the good schools/students and the bad ones".
Coincidentally, the wealth, the politics, and the ethnic composition of the districts tend to speak far louder to exam performance. Schools that are targeted for privatization can suddenly find their students doing very poorly, year to year. Schools that have a partisan administrator with friends at Pearson can find themselves doing amazingly well, practically overnight.
If there really were a single dimension axis of smartness, won't there be a "smartest" and a "least smart" in every classroom? And if they're in the wrong class and they leave, won't there be two new pupils at the extremes? This argument of "you're in the wrong class" always sounded elitist to me.
The important is that the teacher tailors the teaching to the students. Spend more time on the ones who struggle, give extra stuff to do to the quickest (e.g. help teaching to other pupils).
I've also always been against separating children by "intelligence". Having a "smart" class and a "dumb" class is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That being said, there are children who have special needs and who require a teacher who has the proper formation to help them.
Moment to moment, presumably. But your cognitive ability waxes and wanes for a host of reasons - mood, exhaustion, calorie consumption, experience on the problem set. If you test ten kids over ten iterations, and each testing gives you a different permutation of rank, which kid is the smartest? If you have four kinds of intelligence exams and four different kids all place 1st in one of them, who is the smartest? Is the kid who aces Numeric Problems but flunks Word Problems smarter or dumber than the kid who middles in both?
Sure, which is why you want to cluster kids by current ability rather than some holistic but ambiguous attribute like IQ score or head shape. But you don't really see this sorting by ability until upper-end high school elective classes (sorting the Bio 1 kids from the Bio 2 kids or the Honors musicians from the fuck-offs).
Sure sure. But we're defunding all that under the current administration, so its a moot point.
Just a quick comment that I am not american ;)
And with homework, grades are an approximation of how much your parents can help you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd7fb5oQhVg
I was in the "smartest in the class" group when I moved from a major metropolitan area where my grade had several hundred kids to a rural school where my grade was 28 kids.
It really screwed me in college when I suddenly wasn't the smartest in my class.
Eh, my kids are the smartest in their class, and the only real option is to put them a year ahead, where they're likely the "dumbest". They're still in elementary school, so I would really rather they spend their time enjoying their childhood instead of trying to catch up in school.
I was the same way as a kid. I did all the extras, was in "honors" classes, did "AP" (college credit) classes, and even went to the local community college while in high school and got a 2-year degree simultaneously with my high school diploma. I'm not some savant or anything, and if I skipped a grade at the wrong moment, I might have merely graduated a year early and not gotten that 2-year degree. My friend group also would've been impacted since I'd be a year different from everyone my age.