McDonald 1
Carmen McDonald
Professor Christopher Peace
ENG 105.01
17 March 2017
Do Grades Determine One’s Intelligence?
Many people are convinced that grades determine one’s intelligence and academic
achievement. Growing up, children are taught that an A means smart and an F means stupid.
This causes distress in students who are very smart but, proclaimed not proclaimed as such by
the educational system. To tell the truth, students who are receiving higher grades are not
necessarily the most intelligent. Eventually, people will come to realize that the grades received
on tests, in fact, are not an accurate representation of one’s intelligence, but merely a display of
their ability to memorize information. Many times, tests have been inaccurate representations of
one’s altitude. Students and people in general cannot, or maybe preferably should not, be deemed
intelligent or unintelligent based on the scores on tests. Sometimes students have good days, and
just as naturally they will also have bad days. Some suffer from test anxiety or have difficult
lives at home that make it hard to get work done or focus in class. Everybody has varying
strengths and weaknesses, however, if someone fails to succeed in one subject many will
perceive them as being less intelligent than others who may be successful within that particular
subject area. In my opinion, grades will never determine one’s intelligence because lack of
memorization, failure in effort, and academic dishonesty could all lead to poor grades.
First, grades are based on a student’s tests of memory, not their intelligence. Some exams
require one to have good test taking skills. If someone knows how to take an exam, chances are
they can answer a lot of the questions that they are given without a whole lot prior knowledge.
McDonald 2
Tests are given to examine how much students have memorized in a certain subject. Author
Samantha D. Hartman states “Test anxiety refers to abnormally high levels of apprehension
concerning evaluation that overall negatively impact resulting performance. This process may
become cyclical, as students who have significant difficulties with emotional dysregulation, may
in turn be more likely to also develop test anxiety. In turn, this may lead to additional draining of
resources, and thus increased difficulty in all areas” (142). This means that students may fear
failing right before the exam which in turn may lead them to not performing very well. Just
because a student performs poorly on a test, this does not determine how intelligent they may be.
It just shows that the student may not have retained much information from a certain subject. A
student may simply be a bad test taker or bad at memorization or a lot of dry information for that
matter too. Sometimes a student may not like the subject they are learning and this could
