Why Grades Should Not Be Used To Measure Intelligence?

“Grades are primarily a measure of how good students are at getting good grades, not a measure of how much they learned,” a blog post written by a professor entitled “What do our grades measure? Academic savvy or actual learning?” mentioned. This had me thinking, what is the purpose of our grades? Should we use it as a basis to determine if whether or not we are intelligent? Then I realized: No, academic grades should not be the basis for measuring intelligence since they are based upon standardized tests, they can be influenced, and they do not measure learning. According to an article entitled “What is Standardized Testing? – Definition and Types,” when a particular group of students take a standardized test, they take the exact same set of questions, and will be scored and analyzed in the same way. We, as human beings, are unique. But more than that, it is a psychological fact that we have different intelligences. Howard Gardner, a Doctor of Philosophy and a Professor of Education at Harvard University, brought about the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The theory expresses that “human beings have all of the intelligences,
And no, I am not going to go on and talk about the teacher’s pets. There are many different factors which can influence grades. For one, we have cheating. On an article entitled “Most High-School Students Cheat,” Kenneth Kiewra, a study researcher and a professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said that students are aware of what constitutes cheating, but they do it anyway. And at times, students don’t grasp that some dishonest acts are cheating. (Most High-School Students Cheat, 2010) In this case, a student’s grade is based upon how skillful of a ninja he is and not on his “ability to learn and understand things,” which is the definition of the word intelligent according to the Merriam-Webster