Exams

Passing an exam doesn’t mean you are really intelligent and will get the best and most high paid jobs

Today I had a bit of a lecture from my A Level Geography teacher about exams and success in this society compared with in the past. He believes that just passing an exam isn’t the best way of measuring intelligence and potential success, financially or in terms of quality of life. He reckons that some people are just very good at exams, and others aren’t.

Lots of great names in the past were not good at exams

Albert Einstein, according to my Geography teacher, was not good at taking exams. He didn’t get the best grades because he had an idea, and he wanted to pursue it:

he didn’t want to learn what everybody else was learning.

He wanted to develop his own ideas, not to learn what the teachers and lecturers

already knew.

So he got a low paid job which would allow him to work on his ideas and earn enough to get by, then when it came to exam time he borrowed his friends’ revision notes and studied to pass it. Over a period of years he created the fundamental basis for which all modern physics is based on, and he wasn’t good at exams.

Charles Dickens didn’t do well in exams. But he was, and still is, possibly the most influential figure in English literature.

And modern day equivalents such as Bill Gates who built up the Microsoft empire, and Mark Zuckerburg who created the Facebook phenomenon both dropped out of college. These people had figured out what they wanted to do, and they knew everything they needed to do it – what was the point in carrying on in University learning the same things as all the other students?

It made me think about my choices and aspirations for this year and beyond. I’ve applied to study History at University and have had a few offers already. But I don’t know what I want to do after that, hopefully University will inspire me while I’m there and I could spend endless nights like Einstein, working away; not partying, like everybody else.

Yours