Cindy talks about Indonesia's GPA system and why students' intelligence can't only be based on scores, but also a good attitude and diligence in class.
Society believes that GPA is the most important thing in university life. As the result, some of the students do not value the process of true learning in class. They do not care about knowledge, but instead care excessively about GPA.
But the assessment criteria to get a high GPA depends on the university requirements itself. Every university has different requirements. But in this case, I will give an assessment criteria in one of the universities in Indonesia.
The assessment of this college says every student must attend the class at least 80% in 16 meetings of each semester.
For 2 credit-subjects, the student could only be absent 3 times, and for the 4 credit-subjects, the could only be absent 6 times.
In Indonesia, the process to get a high GPA can be hard yet easy because it is not always about academic rules, but also the student's overall attitude.
In my humble opinion, a student's intelligence cannot be measured by GPA. Why?
Here some reasons:
1. Some lecturers give a subjective score.
2. Some students who have high intelligence don't embrace pure learning in class. Maybe, they utilize rote memorization.
3. Diligent students can beat the actual smart students by GPA, which is distorted.
It is not a new thing in academic life if a student gets a high score from her lecturers for personal reasons. For example, if the student is perfect in her class or the student is active in her class, she gets a high GPA. Or, if the lecturer is the one who does not know her student well, the lecturer gives the same score to all of the students. These are all the subjective factors.
Another sad fact is, it is more difficult to find a lecturer who gives objective scores nowadays. There's less lecturers who give scores based truly on student effort.
In my experience, until the third semester I only found one lecturer that gave an objective score.
In my opinion, high intelligence is not the only important thing, but diligence and perseverance are important too. If the student is diligent yet her knowledge is under the most clever student, she can still
beat that one's GPA because in Indonesia, GPA includes the attitude and effort. The lecturer feels appreciated because the is very enthusiastic in class and following all the learning processes. To conclude, smartness without a good attitude is not enough to get a high GPA.
So, from the three reasons above I believe that a student's intelligence cannot be measured
by GPA, because the score is not coming from a person’s intelligence; students having a psychological adjacency with their lecturer or diligent students with a positive attitude can beat a smart student's GPA any time, at least in Indonesia.
GPA only tells the score, not the knowledge behind it.