"I understand the math, I'm just really bad at taking tests."

>"I understand the math, I'm just really bad at taking tests."

What's your response to this?

I don't associate with brainlets.

It's worse than not understanding and getting A's like most of the people i know, and it's not only math.

Today's education is retarded, schools teach you specifically what you need to know in order to pass a test, not the actual concepts, you never truly understand the subject unless you do some research by yourself, and in tests outside of school you're fucked.

Well there legitimately are some people with kinds of test anxiety who spaghetti out when put in those situations

Most people who claim that sort of thing simply don't understand the subject matter as well as they think though

I don't know, desu. I've always been good at taking tests, but when I had my real analysis exam I remember not knowing what the fuck to do on the first exercise (because hey, actual math courses required me to think on all the questions, and I was used to the first exercises of an exam being braindead easy). Made me feel like a complete brainlet, and I just sat there panicking for like 15 minutes, thinking of what possible jobs I could get after dropping out etc. After I stopped being a fucking pussy, I went on to the next questions then came back and finished the first one towards the end.

Just wanted to blog this, because I just remembered it. The relevance to your question is, of course, that maybe, if someone is panicking all the way through the test, instead of just the 15 minutes I experienced once, then maybe yeah, they'd be fucked on tests.

I literally forgot how to fucking average, (AVERAGE!!!!) when taking a test and I got to the math section. Holy fuck, right in the front part of the math section it literally had steps showing you how to average right fucking there. 2 fucking strikes. Why? Because of test pressure due to draconian-tier bullshit going on in the class during the test. So do you know what I did? I skipped the entire math section and aced every other section 100% and still ended up with the highest score in the class.

It's like my math side needs a certain type of relaxed environment and frame of mind then I can whiz out all sorts of complicated shit without even thinking about it.

I'm so glad I don't have to fuck around with school anymore. I really was fucking terrible on so many levels. American education is fucking shitty.

Yes, it's the education system's fault that you couldn't remember how to find an average

The fundamental disconnect is that kiddies want to think:
"It made sense when i heard something talking about it" = "I understand it"

>What's your response to this?
Smile and nod. "Yeah, tests are tough." Maybe throw in a comment about how it's better than being some A student who doesn't understand what he's doing. Then smile and nod again.

There's no way to convince them they're wrong, and it's rude to tell them they're rationalizing. Brainlets are excellent at that. I actually overhead an autist talking about failing some basic course because he "understood it too well and the tests are designed for idiots to pass them"

In your autist's defense, I feel that way about social science. I understand the subject matter, but i'm pained by validating my delusional professor's bullshit by choosing the answer he or she wants.

It was an engineering course, like electrical circuits or something, it's applied physics and mathematical models.

there's little room for argument or interpretation especially when I can hook up any of the test problems on a real breadboard and the reality WILL match the model.

>my test grade depends on whether or not the teacher agrees with me
Another brainlet trait, don't be a snowflake that refuses to understand reasoning you don't agree with

I took a summer macroeconomics course taught by a hardcore conservative who taught us that global warming was a Chinese socialist conspiracy to undermine the free market. He also talked a blue streak about the diseased mexican immigrants coming over the border making our children sick, the fat black welfare mothers, and gave writing assignments about how Obama's going to fuck up the economy for good. Brainlets were catatonic when they heard this guy speak. They were dropping the course in protest instead of just collecting the easy credits

Nothing if they have demonstrated to me they understand the maths. A test doesn't really show your understanding of anything.

>Fuck up a step or do some arithmetic wrong while racing a clock
>you now apparently don't understand derivatives

That's not how it works in reality.

If you understand, you should get straight As in HS with minimum effort.

The rational response is that life isn't fair and you're going to have to find a way around this defect or find a new career path. Be a pragmatist.

snowflakes actually are unique though
this is like calling someone "entitled" instead of "self-entitled"

quit ruining english

Considering he is sitting here, relaxed, and can remember how to find an average, what would you consider it?

If the high pressure environment is removed and he can do it, but it's added and he can't, would it not be reasonable to say it's because of the high pressure environment that he could not do the task?

Now what was the high pressure environment in his case?

It could be that they just haven't been exposed to it enough

Like when the teacher explains something step by step to me and I understand but when I get given a problem sometimes I can't do it because of a lack of exposure

I understand the feeling of getting stressed out while in a test. I am really used to be able to blow through a test-level problem set without issue so when I am stuck at a problem I become very anxious. I start doubting my intelligence and think that maybe I should drop out of pure mathematics and go be a doctor or some other brainlet job. But then I calm myself the fuck down and just think about the problem some more.

I think that confidence is part of intelligence. The confidence that you know your shit. If you have this confidence then you can, like me, calm yourself down when faced by adversity. And if you do not have this confidence then maybe you aren't as smart as you think. Because I know a lot of "smart" people who can memorize the formulas and then pass a test but give them a problem that cannot be solved without reasoning and they break and that is when their anxiety starts. And they can't control their anxiety because deep down they know they are a fucking fraud.

So yeah, brainlets. Or confidence-lets.

Being smart has shit to do with confidence. Being able to calm yourself down and face adversity isn't intelligence, it's discipline. It's why high IQ pampered kids still choke. They aren't stupid, they just lack that particular skill.

>Being able to calm yourself down and face adversity isn't intelligence, it's discipline.

No, I just described the relation between intelligence and confidence.

If you are not confident then deep down you must know you are a fraud. You must know that you only have a surface level understanding of things.

> It's why high IQ pampered kids still choke. They aren't stupid, they just lack that particular skill.

IQ is a shit metric designed by someone with a really small penis who needed something to balance that out but had nothing else going on so he had to literally invent his own big numbers to have something to brag about.

And to this day, every IQ bragger is the same.

The same way I respond to people who say they understand organic chemistry but are bad at taking tests: Get gud

Are you a brainlet trying to make yourself feel better because you can perform well in certain situations?

I'll put this in the simplest terms I can so even you can understand this.

What you are describing is not intelligence because I can teach it to somebody. I can go to any person around and teach them to remain calm and use all of their problem solving ability even when things are tough.

I cannot however go to them and fundamentally teach them to solve problems at the level I can. That is intrinsic, and is intelligence.

You feeling good about yourself for doing okay in life is irrelevant to this because that is not what is being discussed. Intelligence is not measured by success in life or anything like that, it's your raw computational ability. You are born with a potential for it, and through a decent environment it will reach that peak. Given the same or a similar environment for all people, the ones who get higher on this peak would be more intelligent, and their ability to "calm down" has nothing to do with it. You are just saying a bunch of psychology pseudo science right now with no merit, but please feel free to show me all these studies that prove anything you are saying.

Bein a fuckin brainle thats what

>high pressure environment

real life

Neither of these are actual arguments and just you guys flinging insults. Maybe you are both the brainlets and not him.

why are you defending a guy who blames the education system for failing to find the average between given values? It's certainly someone who never studies, never practices, just skims through the book and thinks he's 'got it', even people with down syndrome can average.

It would be one thing if he forgot a certain theorem specific to the course, or some proof or whatever. That I can easily see happening due to stress. But forgetting something as basic as finding an average? Something you learn as a little kid? That could only happen to a brainlet.

>If you are not confident then deep down you must know you are a fraud
whoa, proof on this? maybe some people are anxious around people, maybe they would do test in a heartbeat if they did it alone at home in their room?

Because you are both making arguments that are not solid. You cannot just assert that somebody is an idiot and not prove it. Isn't this the science board? You guys are completely ignoring the scientific method and now pleading to me "Dude no the guy is dumb I mean just LOOK AT HOW DUMB HE IS!" yet you didn't do anything to quantify that and prove it wasn't the systems fault.

Makes sense. Sometimes it's hard to see ICs and BCs.

it's much more likely that he's just stupid, only a small percentage of people fail to find averages in these "high pressure environments". If half of the class failed then you could think about blaming the system.

People who are "bad at taking tests" simply just dont know the material. If it was trained to be intuition then it comes easily in any situation.
The "bad test taker" meme is just an excuse for brainlets that dont want to try

This is not actually true.

In many colleges I've heard of and experienced myself the exams very accurately reflect what you can do.

For example, if the topic of exam is "Advanced differential mathematics" and you don't get ~80% of the score, I'm sorry to say but you don't truly understand the concept.

>Now what was the high pressure environment in his case?

Being told that the test matters so much that if you don't ace every part of it, it will fuck up your entire life from there on. Among many other things designed to remove imagination, free thinking, while ensuring a future of wageslavery.

I dropped out a year later, opened two businesses, sold them both, and "retired" in my late 20s. Funny thing is, through all the IT, programming, and PC stuff my businesses did, I didn't once need more math than addition or subtraction and I did most of that using a calculator. It was kind of a slap in the face really. The different between being smart and being a brainlet simply didn't matter. All that mattered was drive and ambition.

...

you opened your own crack den huh

lol you guys don't want to study.

I don't get why high-schools give out math homework. Studies show how students are more likely to resent learning if they're given homework for class. Maybe people here don't mind the homework but high-school students will resent math class. Also, it's very often how people won't do the homework at home anyways instead of having a 2 hour math class giving a student one hour to do in-class as assignments.

Kind of related, but has Veeky Forums ever caught someone cheating on a test?

What did you do?

>be me
>kid that sits next to me in Calc 1 is a lazy asshole that doesn't take notes during lecture or do in-class worksheets
>always, without fail, sends me a text around 10pm the night before class asking for answers to homework problems
>this has been going on for 5 weeks now

fast-forward:
>in midterms today
>reaching for paper pad on top of backpack to get scratch paper
>catch a glimpse of the aforementioned kid's lap
>phone out with YouTube video about derivatives with captions on playing

Do I tell the professor? What are the ramifications of cheating?

>Friend really good at math and get 10 in math thought high school and never getting less than 10
>I struggle to barely get a 5 because I didn't give a fuck (I really regret that)
>Both me and my friend do a test to enter college, I get way high score than him 2 years in a row just estimating the result and not even doing anything

How you guys explain that then ? he was even better than the teacher at math but I got a higher score than him, which is a bit sad because he's really smart.

you understand the math right when the teacher explains it, but you dont actually understand it for yourself. Lern 2 Studio.

dont do anything. Theres no hope for a kid that cant derive

Guy on hacker news once told me that he coasted through university math until he did the exams, then he discovered he didn't know fuck all because he couldn't complete them and radically changed the way he studied in order to understand the material and pass.

I was doing the same thing, coasting through exercises thinking I knew something then surprise you don't know fuck all when taking the exams. Now I always take exams if they're avail from university calendars instead of just assuming I know the material.

Generally speaking it's an excuse but it can be hard to tell sometimes.
Sometimes it's obvious; if they're making huge conceptual errors or leaving entire questions blank, that's obviously not just stress. If they're just dropping multiple signs every test or saying 5+6 = 13 they're probably sloppy because they're jittery.
But sometimes you just can't tell. If I ask for standard deviation and you give me the variance, were you not paying attention because of anxiety or do you legitimately not know the difference?

i once said 9 was prime on an exam :)
everyone spaghettis once in a while, claiming you never have an off day or something like that just ain't true senpai

>snowflakes actually are unique though

>Tells someone not to ruin English
>Doesn't understand English
It's an ironic term in this context, because they're not actually unique at all. Try to keep up, Cletus.

it's sometimes true

I used to have that issue, and whenever I went back to my dorm, I could go through the problems that I freaked out on and do them perfectly

I was prescribed meds for anxiety and now I ace all my tests and am at the top of all my classes

It can be a legitimate issue. For me it is the time issue. Give me a standard hour exam and ill likely get a B at best. Give me a much more difficult take home exam and a weekend to do it, I always get an A.

Definitely means that the person saying that lacks practice. I am like that back then, when i haven't a good study/homework habit yet. I understood the lectures as the instructor/professor discussed it, but when it came to the tests my knowledge and understanding seemed incomplete, and is reflected on my scores.

That's not true at all. Take an ODE or one of the mid-tier calculus classes and all the midterms and finals will test you on your integration and computation skills and hardly on anything conceptual. In fact, ODE classes of engineers is literally all about computations.

Me too, that's why I only get a 9/10 and not a 10/10.

this, pretty much

I never outright fail, but when my test anxiety acts up, I get a low A instead of a top score

blaming test anxiety on any score less than a B is a brainlet coping mechanism

"You dont understand anything."

As a brainlet I know that I do bad because I am not very smart, period. 99% of normies have too much ego to admit that they are just stupid.

It's just like with martial arts. If you can't perform it under a stressful situation you don't really know it.