Top students

I watched recently a TEDx talk about education and what top students do differently than most others. Here is my summary of it:

We don’t have to worry about IQ (Intelligence Quotient)

The results presented in the TEDx talk pointed out that IQ did was not significantly different between top performers and others. On the other hand, other personality traits that are learnable influence more student results, such as self-discipline and resilience. Anecdotally, this makes sense to me. After all, studying is more like a marathon than a sprint. We need to keep ourselves motivated for long periods and push through many setbacks and boredom, which for most of us, occur at some point during our studies.

I really liked this result because it resonated with how I view life. A long time ago, in my teenage years, I was perturbed about my IQ because I thought that it played a massive role in my career success. I decided to take an online test and measure it. I scored around 115, which is more or less average. This annoyed me a lot since I thought it wasn’t enough (what for?), so I reasoned that I just wasn’t used to the test format and decided to give it another try studying the structure of the test. The second time I scored much more, around 130, and reasoned that this new score was more likely to be accurate than my first one. I repeated many times this process until I maxed the test score up to 160 and got a message telling me that the test was not accurate enough to measure my super brain (of course). I happily closed the test and fooled myself into thinking I was somehow more intelligent than 99% of humans. Odds are that the first result was accurate, and my IQ is just average. However, this episode made me think, how many people would repeat an intellectually exhausting 45 minutes test enough times to get the maximum score? Nowadays, I believe that other skills are way more important in career success than IQ, such as determination, self-discipline, tolerance to frustration, in summary, emotional intelligence. This happens to be great since IQ is more or less fixed by genetics, but the other traits are learnable and can be improved with work.

I ended up completing an Engineering Degree and a Master’s Degree in Computer Science with Honors.

Working hard is not sufficient to obtain top results. The work also needs to be smart.

First of all, hard work is an absolute requirement for success in almost everything in life. But it is usually a requirement, not a guarantee of success. The way they work is also crucial for obtaining top marks for students. Top performers spend less time memorizing than the majority and practice more with exam simulations. Studies found that the best estimate for students’ exam scores is their previous simulation scores.

I actually had the opportunity to test this idea in the past. When studying for the Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English (CAE), I did many exam simulations and saw my marks rise steadily towards the upper end. I thought that my score on the actual exam would be way lower than the ones I was obtaining on the simulations since I was achieving almost the maximum marks and didn’t think those really reflected the actual exam conditions. To my surprise, I ended up doing even better in the final exam and was almost awarded the next-level certification. So I can second the idea of exam simulations, at least with my anecdotal evidence.

Model what top performers do.

The main two differences mentioned are those top performers stick to their studying schedule and practice a lot with simulations exams. Additionally, top students not only schedule time for their studies but also for other activities they enjoy, such as sports, socializing, and games. This makes them more likely to stick to their schedule since there is also room for activities they like, not only work and study.

Conclusion

The three main ideas presented seem particularly interesting since I believe we can extrapolate them to every other aspect of life:

• We should probably not worry about things we can not change and focus on the ones we can.
• working hard is an absolute requirement to succeed in any endeavor but it is not enough, we also need to work smart
• most of the time if we want to achieve something, it makes sense to emulate people who have already done so and learn from them, instead of just doing something that we think might work.

Have a good day and happy learning!