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June 8, 2005

Liberals and I.Q.; professors and grades

Steve Sailer has the best of the Kerry Transcript coverage, because he understands, as he likes to point out frequently:

First, that IQ is a meaningless, utterly discredited concept.

Second, that liberals are better than conservatives because they have much higher IQs.

That's why the Kerry transcripts matter. Because Howell Rains said: "Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I'm sure the candidates' SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead." Well, yes, Mr. Rains, some of us did doubt it then and now we know.

Now as a college professor who just attended a college reunion weekend I can tell you that grades are not a particularly useful predictor of life performance -- something that irritates academics to NO end. That's part of why lots of academics were eager to believe that John Kerry had higher grades and a higher I.Q., because we not particularly secretly resent our C students who do well. Colleagues and other professors regularly allege that poor student who do well must have used family connections, family money, or well-planned marriages for advancement.

Good grades tell us something about raw ability, but they tell us a good bit about hard work and more about study skills (the last being why senior science majors with nary a humanities course often do so well in humanities electives if they get interested). What bothers me isn't that our C students (or, nowadays, our low B average students) do so much better than we might think they should, but that we have so failed to interest them.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at June 8, 2005 6:29 AM