Not aware of your own intelligence/ability to process info?

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Hey, all!

I was just doing some cleaning in my room, and found the paper that I wrote this semester on genre theory as applied to the horror genre of film, and specifically, Dellamorte Dellamore. I beamed proudly at the A+ written on the 10 plus page paper...then chuckled in amazement.

You see, writing this paper was an absolute nightmare for me. The entire class (horror genre study) consisted of reading enormous packets of academic papers and essays, a mere fraction of which I could actually understand (or so I thought). I never though I got anything out of the readings or lectures, and while writing the paper, was convinced I was rambling and writing incomprehensibly on a topic I didn't feel qualified to discuss. When I finished the paper and read it, I had no idea what I was even talking about! My professor, however, felt differently.

He said the paper was, to name a few adjectives: insightful, thorough, well-researched, extremely well-written, confident, a delight to read, and evident of my high level of understanding of the subject matter.

WHAAAT?

This, of course, isn't the first time this has happened to me...in fact, it's the rule rather than the exception. On top of feeling as if I'm writing complete nonsense half of the time, I'm also a chronic procrastinator, often writing full papers or completing projects the night (or very early morning) before. Somehow, though, I'm a 4.0 student.

Anyone else experience this sort of thing? It kind of stinks, because despite my academic performance indicating a high level of intelligence/comprehension, I often doubt myself, and because of that, COMPLETELY stress out about papers and tests.

Quite the opposite for me. I am quite aware of my abilities, but, as an acquaintance told me yesterday: "The people I know... think you're a moron."

Mostly for my tendency to give good advice to people who, apparently, don't want good advice.

Edit: Which actually might be why you think that your intelligence is lacking. People might have told you that because of your social difficulties, and you think it's factual.

I remember one essay test back in my AP bio class, where I thought I totally botched one of the questions. In my opinion, I totally BSed that question. I got back 100 on the test. I informed my teacher that I'd had no idea what I was talking about. He shook my hand and told me that if I didn't know what I was talking about on that, he hoped I never knew what I was talking about ever again.

He always thought I was smarter than I actually am, though. And would pull the "Now Meg, I've been teaching for 33 years, don't take that away from me" when I tried to argue with him about it. But of course, I've turned out to be a failure, so I guess he was wrong.



I have that tendency too.. The thing is, that if people don't want information, then they consider information stupid. If they're inclined to say that someone who is having a dystonic reaction to Haldol is having a generic allergic reaction, they'll consider anyone who tries to point out that that is not, in fact, the case, to be an idiot. Doesn't matter how stupid it actually is to keep repeating "allergic reaction" when someone is clearly having none of the symptoms associated with an allergy... They'll consider YOU stupid for trying to tell them what's actually happening. Guess it was just stupid of me to try to point out that the guy didn't have an allergy to the stuff.

In what way?

Same thing here, I'm a leave it to the last minute type person yet always get top marks. I'll sit there at my laptop the night before, cursing myself for not getting it done sooner and type out what looks to me like a lot of twaddle with no real point. I'll have my piece of 'twaddle' returned to me with a smile from my tutor and praise for my work being of a high standard as usual. I'll see other students having their work returned to them to make corrections or amendments yet I know for a fact they had been studying hard for the past couple of weeks. It makes me feel a little guilty that I passed on so little effort when they've put in so much more time and effort and prioritized their work.

Yes. I have very little confidence in my abilities. Nothing I do feels right, but I find myself doing it anyway. And it used to be much worse in the past ("Imposter syndrome" and all that.)

I have heard this from normal people all the time.

They said they didn't have a clue of whatever we were discussing in class- and when I asked them about it because I had lots understanding of what we did in class, they indeed didn't have much understanding of the topic - but in tests they were real good and were congratulated on their understanding of the class.

He thought I could be successful, go to medical school, become something, contribute to the world.
As it is, I'm on disability and melt down when I try to do much of anything at all.

In school, all the time. I remember thinking how badly I botched the AP Biology exam, yet it came back with a 5 (the highest score). There were many other instances.

The glaring exception was honors English literature. I would slave over essays yet could not pull anything higher than a B. Ever. I always seemed to miss themes, symbolism, and character intention. I have read somewhere that being very good at school with the exception of English lit is quite common for people with AS.

In terms of absorbing information rapidly, I have been called a "sponge" by my boss. I often forget (or find hard to believe) that others are so much slower than I am to pick this stuff up. It kind of makes me a bad teacher.

I'm similar. I find it very hard to understand how or why others find certain things to be difficult. If I can get it, I assume they will as well.

Now, English Lit we differ on -- it was always one of my best subjects, along with History. Math -- forget it! I still can't multiply well past 6 X 6. I calculators.

Regards,

Patricia

Yup, math was one of my best subjects. And computers, which in many way is applied math.

Just shows you that even if something is common, it certainly isn't the rule!

ROFL, the same thing happened to me! You know how they always said "there will be some you won't know, it's designed that way, so that someone would have to be an expert in every area of biology to know all of them. If you can't narrow it down at least to 2 possibilities, don't answer that one." and there were only two that I couldn't narrow down, so I thought I must have totally done something wrong! ... but it came back with a 5



Yup.. After 9th grade, I took regular English, it was the only regular class I took. Although, despite the fact that I barely passed my 11th grade regular English class, my teacher offered to recommend me for honors the next year. But the non-honors classes are different. There's not the focus on tests that the honors classes have. So if you do well in honors classes because you're a good test-taker, you may very well do poorly in a regular class.



That's particularly true when there's a disconnect in what you're good at learning, I think. It may be easier for NTs, I'm not sure.. But if you're good at one subject and not another, and someone else is good at the other subject, it's going to be almost impossible to watch that person quickly pick up on stuff that you can't, but then not understand things that you find easy. Actually, I don't think it could be much easier for NTs.. otherwise they wouldn't have so much trouble fathoming why someone who can pick up something academic easily can have absolutely no clue in a social or real-world situation even after it's been explained. When they say that NTs are able to more easily conceptualize what it's like to be another person, does that actually just mean that they live in a world where other people's minds do tend to be similar to theirs? Hmm, I don't know. Usually if I can imagine what it would be like to be someone else going through something, it's only because I've been through the same thing (usually bad) and it's always incredibly upsetting.

Oh yeah, forgot to add:

it has usually been the other way around for me.

I knew I was doing well, I knew I had understood it all, I knew I had performed exceptional on a test, I knew I had spent a lot of time pondering and figuring out the perfect answer that wasn't dead obvious...

Yet teachers only ever claimed I didn't know what I was talking about, that I had no idea of the topic, that what I said didn't seem to make sense and that they didn't understand what I said/wrote.

Oh, actually knowing something is a miserable thing.

It's pretending and being similar to normal people that's much more advantageous.

I think the issue here is who you ask. If you ask people your age, of course they're going to say that you're not bright. They want to feel better about themselves, so they take your social ineptitude and make it seem like that is the sole determiner of intelligence.

If you ask your teachers, you may get a positive response, you may get a negative response. Try to find those who actually know what they're talking about when they teach their subject. They're more likely to appreciate intelligence, and they're also less likely to put down students to feel better about themselves.

Who you should be asking, however, is yourself. You have evidence before you. Does the evidence say that you're brilliant, or that you're not bright at all? The evidence says that you're brilliant. If you don't even try to succeed, and you manage to do it, then that's what you should consider as most important. People are stupid. Wizard's First Rule.

So here's the question: Were you in honors classes? If you were in regular or lower-level classes, perhaps you may have done better if you'd been in honors. Both for the reasons that I mentioned before about why I did better in honors classes than I did in regular, and because in lower level classes, they expect students not to know much, and assume that anything out of the general scope of the rest of the class is wrong, even if that's not true. Particularly if you're smarter than the teacher. (A huge percentage of teachers can't go beyond the level that they teach. So if you say go more in depth, they're likely not to understand it, figure that it's you that doesn't understand the material just because THEY don't. Someone teaching an honors class is likely to expect that some students will go beyond their own abilities... Someone teaching a regular class is going to assume that their students are at least as stupid as they are.)

In my case, I always did really badly on multiple choice tests because I tended to "see things differently"; (I could only do well if the questions were purely factual, i.e., black or white). I usually felt quite good on essays, because then I could logically explain my own thinking. All of my classmates preferred, and did quite well on multiple choice tests. When we had to take an essay test, I was usually the only one- (or one of the few)- with an "a".