Do Poor Grades Mean You Aren’t (or Weren’t) Really Gifted? And What’s Underachievement?

First, when a child is clearly capable and smart — possibly gifted — it is common for both teachers and parents to see “bad grades” as either underachievement or maybe they have a disability. But is it that simple?

Interestingly enough, a great proportion of gifted adults who didn’t get good grades come to believe they aren’t all that smart. Or if they didn’t go to college, they must not be that smart. They couldn’t be gifted. Well, that’s simply not necessarily true and not a great way to evaluate whether or not a person might be gifted.

I started to see this issue of collapsing “grade getting” behaviors with intelligence during the time I was in my doctoral program. My first major writing project ever was my PhD dissertation [1]. I invited many people from near and far whom I either knew or suspected were highly intelligent. At least half the people I asked denied that they were gifted and cited their not doing well in school as the reason they knew this about themselves. Their responses were not usually correlated with their adult failures or successes, either.

In case readers here are interested and not sure about their intelligence level, look into taking the qualifying test with American Mensa or the Millers Analogies Test yourself. They…