Formerly G.G.
Are we little hard on Book Dumb than we are on anyone else?
"Thanos is a happy guy! Just look at the smile in his face!"
" For example, studies show that, in France, people who have been reported to have a higher IQ than average (above one standard deviation from the average, meaning approximately superior to 130). . ."
There are various competing standards for measuring IQ but with the most commonly used 130 would be closer to two standard deviations above average. One standard deviation above average is intelligent but not outstandingly so (~2/3 of the population fall within 1 standard deviation).
Wereboar
I think that people who do not have formal education (i.e. a diploma) but show exceptional knowledge nevertheless do not qualify. Being 'Book Dumb' means lack of academic skills, not the lack of a diploma. It is a common (and pretty strange) misconception that one may learn anything only through formal schooling, which is simply not true. In other words, a 'Book Dumb' person is a good tinkerer who doesn't know much about physics, not someone who never went to school but learned on his own from academic sources (especially when parents provided some structure to his learning) and displays vast knowledge. Well, it is not uncommon that a homeschooled people make their graduate peers look 'Book Dumb' in comparison.
Thought I'd add a note, as if it needs to be said: 35% of the country's billionaires having no college education is not a causality, it's a rare combination of ingenuity, opportunity, passion and luck.
If you drop out of school because of statistics like this and end up working in fast food the rest of your life don't say you weren't warned...
Does it count as an example if a character ends up with pathetic grades that mysteriously shoot sky high in any kind of anonymized testing, meaning that for whatever reasons, the teachers did have it in for them and graded them much lower than they should have, but people who only knew them as a number graded them fairly?
Edited by ElodieHiras