Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents | Hacker News Reader

Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents

sas.upenn.edu

52 pointstokenadult47 comments

I think of myself as having average or even low IQ. Some background: I was partially raised in government housing as a child, had parents who were drug and alcohol abusers, and was never encouraged to do anything intellectually stimulating while growing up. I lived in a poor mixed raced city and attended a mostly nonwhite high school. Learning was never a concern of mine while in high school, not getting my face smashed in was (which happened).

I was not in an environment for intellectual growth, nor was I in an environment that would have indicators of high IQ.

Through pure luck, I had a high school teacher that somewhat set me on the right course. For half a day, two years long, I had this teacher for a CAD class. He told me attitude was everything and encouraged me to enroll in college. My first two years weren't great. I struggled in classes like algebra. I also didn't know how to study.

After two years of getting nowhere, I moved to a large US city as a result of certain life circumstances. I finished up my undergraduate degree and took a year off. I didn't feel very happy though. I wanted to get a graduate degree. My company was willing to pay for it, as long as I worked 40 hours a week and made good grades. It was a complete change for me, kind of a fresh start. I decided I would take the university serious. Because my undergrad wasn't computer science, I had to complete all of the undergrad computer science courses. So I had at least four years ahead of me to get my masters.

Only because I worked really hard and studied a lot, I would often be the top performer in my 3 calculus classes, discrete math, and so on (this wasn't always the case... but hey, I was working a full-time job too). I ended up with a masters in computer science, something I never thought was possible for me.

Something that inspired me was that I'd see the international students (mostly east Asian and Indian) study very hard. They would study all day long in the library. They seemed like the very definition of self-discipline. I adapted to that the best I could while still working 40 hours per week doing .net programming.

It seems like I fit the premise of this paper and can relate: Low to average IQ who often did better than my higher IQ classmates and friends.

I've had a similar experience to yours. I grew up with an alcoholic and domestically violent father in a poverty stricken neighborhood. I was encouraged to go to college by a girlfriend of all things. I graduated in the lower half of my class and scored only a 900 on my SAT but despite this I finished my BS with a 3.55 overall GPA and a 4.0 in computer science. I'm currently working on my Master's degree.

I also feel like my intelligence is average but what helped me succeed is how much I enjoyed all my computer science courses.

The good things is that one doesn't have to be gifted to do well in life. What matters are the values a person holds and how well they treat others, but unfortunately being a good person alone doesn't put food on the table. Work hard.

I think of myself as having average or even low IQ.

I'm curious. Did you actually know for sure that your IQ score was below average? ( or the score from similar type of test, like the SAT). It would be interesting counterpoint to the validity of IQ/SAT testing if you actually tested below average, and then ended up in a career that requires much greater than average cognitive skills.

I don't know for sure, I've never taken a real IQ test. I'm making this assumption based on few things. I had to study very hard to do well, but there were not many things that stumped me, but I have a feeling that it took me a lot longer to understand and get to the "ahhh ha!" moment compared to others. My spelling is horrible, as is my vocabulary. Speaking of vocabulary, I did horrible on the GRE verbal section, maybe 450, possibly lower. On the math, I made around 680~. I didn't study at all for the GRE, except for one practice test. Other than that practice test, I walked in and took it. I would usually be at the top of the class in math and sometimes be the one that kills the curve, but I would study for hours and hours two weeks in advance of the test. My friends would study very little, if at all, and do just fine. Usually listening to a professor didn't help, I might as well tune out. I wouldn't learn the subject matter until I read the book or online texts, while it would snap for others in class. I forget things very quickly if I don't continue to use them. For example, I couldn't do a partial derivative right now, but at one time, I was able to do them in my sleep practically. All of these things, plus my families background are indicators to me that I'm average or below in mental abilities.

What I do have is self-discipline, which is why I relate to this paper. Although I was surrounded by drug users, smokers, and alcoholics my entire life, I've never done those things. I wasn't around smart people or people to encourage me to grow intellectually, but around my 20's, I knew what I had to do. Since then (I'm 30 now), I study something nearly everyday, and have learned a lot of valuable skills. I work really hard at it because of the things described above.

A GRE of 1130 maps to an IQ in the 90th percentile ( http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx ). Hardly below average! Of course, in a good computer science program a lot of people will be at 99+ percentile, which can be a bit humbling.

Usually listening to a professor didn't help, I might as well tune out.

I think that's pretty normal, even among the very smartest.

I forget things very quickly if I don't continue to use them.

I think that happens to everyone. I sure can't do a derivative anymore.

No surprise at all. I'm reminded of the famous marshmallow test: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...

The executive summary is that children's ability to delay gratification at age 4 was one of the best predictors of future academic success decades later.

Anyone who's participated in academics /should/ know this intuitively- but people seem to really, really want to believe that academic performance and intelligence are the same thing.

It would certainly make hiring easier.

But then again, would we rather hire people with extraordinary IQ or extraordinary self discipline?

Then again, the question is also: Do you really want to hire people who do exceptionally in Academics?

From my experience, you will very often see a very intelligent student blow off tests and homework, only to do average in the class, despite having easily picked up the concepts. On the other hand, you'll see someone with average intelligence (or slightly above average, but nothing remarkable) get straight A's because they spend hours every night studying.

Personally, I would rather have the intelligent person who may get sidetracked easier, but is able to pick up new concepts easily than a extremely disciplined person who may take 3 times as long to learn new concepts. I like to think of the intelligent, non-disciplined person as someone whose time to complete a task has very high variance, but averages low, and a highly disciplined, average intelligence person as someone whose time to completion has very low variance, but a higher (possibly considerably higher) average.

Do you really want to hire people who do exceptionally in Academics?

I think that is a good question variant. I would definitely want to hire someone who is

a) smart (as demonstrated by something I can observe)

and

b) self-disciplined (ditto). I might or might not care about a job applicant's school grades, depending on where the applicant went to school, what I'm hiring for, what the applicant's accomplishments outside of school are, and so on.

In most real-world hiring situations, it is hard to find an applicant who is at the top of the heap in all hiring criteria, so one must make trade-offs. My own taste runs less to regarding school grades as a good sign than to giving applicants work-sample tests, but I tell my children that many hiring processes give very high regard to school grades, so that it is expedient to work to get good grades.

Only takes one completely blown off task to ruin the brilliant ADHDer's average though.

Besides, a student blowing off tests and homework may not be less disciplined at all, they may just be working much harder on other things.

The answer depends entirely on the job role. For instance a QA person needs attention to detail which is far more likely to be found in the academically successful person. But a senior software developer needs flashes of brilliance that you're only going to find in the intelligent person.

Best, of course, is someone who is good at both. But they tend to be rare.

And in my experience, "picking up the concepts" isn't enough. The learning that matters happens in the doing.

Is that a trick question?

Put me down for a few of both, please.

So, to turn this around... Google hires primarily for self-discipline, not intelligence?

I can certainly see why discipline would be important for the majority of your team-- but I've always wonder how many geniuses Google passes on because they don't fit this mold.

This is something that's painfully obvious now but would have been considered blasphemy if you told me when I was an adolescent.

They did tell me this when I was an teenager: "You're a smart kid, but you need to put in more effort".

I tried putting effort towards school for a while. I figured if I had to play, I may as well win. The problem with treating high school as a game is that it's not fun. Learning the material doesn't get you anything, not even more advanced material to dig into.

For me, digging my teeth into a difficult problem is it's own reward. In high school I wasn't asked to work on difficult problems. Instead I sat in the back of the class, ignored the lecture, worked on whatever I was doing at the time, and coasted through the tests well enough to pass.

Plenty of effort. Plenty of work ethic. Plenty of smarts. Nothing I wanted to work on.

Yeah, they told me too. I wish I'd have seen this paper... though I might not have taken it seriously enough. But still, it's probably better then some old guy who pesters you to work more without any obvious reason.

It's not about effort, it's about self-control. If you had been able to make yourself work on the class assignments, even if you didn't like them, you would have better grades.

If you had been able to make yourself work on chess problems, even if you didn't like them, you would have been better at chess.

Indeed. For those of us raised in the heyday of the tragicallly misguided self-esteem movement, studies like this are vindicating.

I'm with everyone else in not being at all surprised. Maybe that's because of the fact that as an adolescent, I had a high-IQ, low self-discipline, and a low GPA.

I'm curious. How did you know your IQ? Did your parents have you tested?

Noted for factual reference here is that almost no one gets the same IQ score twice, if tested more than once, so it can be a little bit better to say, "My IQ score when I was tested at [age] on [brand of test]" rather than to say "My IQ." That said, there is a known phenomenon in the literature on education of gifted students of high-IQ young people being bored with school because it is underchallenging and getting poor grades. That is inexpedient, but I definitely saw it happen in my generation and I have seen it happen in the current generation.

> there is a known phenomenon in the literature on education of gifted students of high-IQ young people being bored with school because it is underchallenging and getting poor grades

Reminds me of some of the parenting books I've been reading since we had our first child. The advice is generally not to try to teach your children to read ahead of when they do it in school. The reason being that you will probably achieve at best mediocre results at the expense of completely ruining the novelty of it for your child, guaranteeing that when time does come to learn and they are fully developmentally receptive, they will be far less interested than otherwise. Studies have shown that there is (on average) no developmental benefit from early reading and a mild possibility of negative impact.

The advice is generally not to try to teach your children to read ahead of when they do it in school.

That seems like a classic example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Because we know that schools are slow and underchallenging, let's not let our children advance at all academically. That advice is not for me.

It's true that not all precocious readers become eminent adults, but maybe the mechanism that results in that observation is precisely that many schools are too lock-step in their organization

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

and too likely to slow children down.

Reminds me of some of the parenting books I've been reading.... Studies have shown that there is (on average) no developmental benefit from early reading and a mild possibility of negative impact.

What books and studies suggest this?

The particular book where I read this is:

http://www.amazon.com/Expect-Toddler-Years-Arlene-Eisenberg/...

I went back and checked and unfortunately the book itself simply says "studies support the following general conclusions..." and don't give references (not exactly a scientific publication!).

Note that it's not in any way suggesting preventing children from learning to read if they want to and show an active interest, nor from stimulating them with an environment rich in reading-relevant material (games with letters, numbers etc.). It is simply saying that sitting them down and giving them lessons in how to read or anything else they are not developmentally ready for is probably going to be counterproductive.

Hmph, I'm teaching my kids to read as soon as I manage to interest them. But then I'm probably not going to send them the school till fourth or grade anyway.

Curiously, I've heard the opposite. A friend who went through a Master's program in education relayed something his special education professor said: "I don't know what IQ tests measure, but they do it precisely."

A friend who went through a Master's program in education relayed something his special education professor said: "I don't know what IQ tests measure, but they do it precisely."

I haven't met the friend or his professor, but either something has been lost in relating the saying, or a different issue is being addressed. The best literature on IQ testing

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

would make any practitioner aware that there is an error band around ANY mental test score from any brand of mental test, and also that IQ scores change over the course of life for most individuals, and anyway no IQ test has even perfect test-retest reliability, much less perfect correlation with any other IQ test.

I was pretty severely ADHD, and one of the things the check for is various learning disabilities, etc.

I didn't know at the time, but my parents eventually gave me records of all that stuff.

More informally, I was just one of the "smart kids"

Though I'm a big fan of self-discipline, I worry this study tells us more about eighth grade than human nature.

Come now. High School curriculum doesn't require much intelligence. Most of it is just completing brain dead assignments. It would be interesting to compare the results to something much more challenging.

Chinese' success is an example: http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Americans-Achievement-Beyond-Iq/...

Note that Flynn (yes, that one) is no racist.

"the only one among 32 measured personality variables (e.g., self-esteem, extraversion, energy level) that predicted college grade point average (GPA) more robustly than SAT scores did." Is college GPA really indicative of anything? Probably more so than high school GPA, but given the wide variance in difficulty, perhaps high GPA people are simply the people that choose to do things that are easy...

Reading that, and the other article on grades, suddenly something clicked: what if the reason that getting rid of tracking (separate classes for high & low achievers) in schools hurts the upper end of students is because when they are competing against all the poor & mediocre students they no longer need to try very hard, and so they lose practice in self-discipline?

The article should be renamed to Parental Guidance and Aptitude Outdoes IQ. There's are a lot of "smart" people out there who are the result of very fortunate parenting rather than actually possessing any intelligence.

Oh, irony. I'm at work, right now. Reading this instead of actually working.

Think I can successfully rationalize this as a focus-enhancing short term break instead of a lack of self-discipline?

Let's see if you can spend a day without visiting HN... :->

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