Did I jump from idea to idea without a clear transition or no? It makes sense to me but I want some verification:
"I got a 31 on my ACT, my friend got a 26. I'm smarter than him, right? My peers would argue that a quick glance at the two numbers can give them an accurate representation of our intellectual abilities. Not too long ago, I posed the question, "What is intelligence?" to them. The same peers of mine gave me a vague, consensus answer along the lines of 'the ability to learn and apply knowledge', which I agree with. Using that concept, why should the judgement of such an abstract ability be limited to a standardized test?
Based on experience, I will only critique the ACT. Now there are viable reasons for its popularity: its objective, understandable score and its relevance to typical American school curricula. It is considered a great test of aptitude because it is a summation of what everyone is supposed to learn in one test. When a stiff, objective curriculum is adhered to for virtually all of a student's time in school, it's hard to envision intelligence outside of that setting. What good is a person that has an in-depth understanding of his school's social interactions if he can't do trigonometry? Who cares if a person can poetically depict something as mundane as a regular school day if they aren't strong readers? My point is there are plenty of skills that people possess that students dissociate from intelligence because there is no use for them in the school system, a very rational reasoning for relying on the ACT.
It's one thing to be a college admissions officer and build a student profile based on several pages of information, but to intimately know a student's methods of learning and still subject your understanding of his/her intelligence to an ACT score is ignorant. No, test scores are not the be-all, end-all of people's comprehension of intelligence. But when an accomplished student receives a 25, you can't help but question the student. The ACT's convenience in providing a simple number is also its biggest flaw. It gives people a very strong first impression of academic promise and turns people off from making an effort to understand a person's intelligence without seeing it on paper.
Things like flirting with a girl that seems sad about something or adjusting your arm angle to improve your pitching are examples of learning something through observation or experimentation and applying the knowledge to make further progress. If this is the vague idea behind intelligence, why aren't athletes or social butterflies considered intelligent because of these skills? Filtering out things that aren't relative to us is commonplace among people, so a student trying to grasp the idea of intelligence in school will look to the high grade earners and good test takers as the epitome of it. But to do so is ignorant, and the more liberally people start viewing intelligence, the better communication will be amongst people of various mental abilities, creating progress in the general public's thinking, one way or another."
nah, I just quoted my whole essay. Doubt that was necessary but it was intentional, look at the end to see the other quotation mark. Anything else as far as the essay goes?
