Subj : Re: Screens Distract Stud
To : AARON THOMAS
From : Rob Mccart
Date : Tue Apr 08 2025 01:10 am
RM> Not at all a comment on you guys but the number of people I've run into
RM> over the years with university degrees that were total idiots is amazing.
AT>This probably depends on where you end up working.
Actually, my most memorable experience with that was a woman I dated
for a year. I figured having a University degree was no guarantee of
high intelligence if she was any example.. B)
Oddly, during one long day when at the family home I met her brother
who was about to graduate university and he started off talking
down to me because he'd heard I didn't have a degree, but then we
got into talking computer programming and other complex issues and
he ended up changing his thinking about me..
He was a lot smarter than his sister though.. B)
RM> Ha.. On a somewhat unrelated line.. I once applied for work at
RM> the post office when they had a hiring blitz going on. I figured
RM> it was a relatively stable job with good pay and benefits, but
RM> the hiring process was pretty extreme with I.Q. and Psyche tests
RM> required. I later heard back from them and was told that I was not
RM> suited for the job because I'd scored too high on the I.Q. tests.
AT>I had the opposite experience. I took a test to become eligible for a postal
>ker job and I failed, bigtime. It was a memorization test, and I couldn't mem
>ze the stuff. They gave us like 5 minutes to read and try to memorize address
> and I couldn't do it. (But I swear that I could deliver mail just as well as
>e next guy if I were given the chance.)
That was so long ago I don't even remember what was on the tests but
it took a couple of hours to do it as I recall.. But there was a
whole room of people taking the tests. Maybe they were opening a
new post office branch or something.
In more recent years I wrote 3 hours of tests for a possible job,
the tests supplied and marked by an outide agency at a cost of
$300 to the place wanting to hire you. In the end I didn't get the
job because someone in head office decided to give the job to an
existing employee instead, but when they called me back to explain
that to me, the guy who was there when I did the test, laughed and
said he shouldn't probably show it to me but he got out the test
results and the two main comments on it were that I would have to
be careful because I might be too friendly with the workers which
can make giving orders a challenge..
But the funny part was, they said that I had scored so high on the
Math and Physics parts of the I.Q. test they *highly* suspected
I had cheated. Since the guy who gave me the test was sitting
there with me the whole time he knew that wasn't possible.
As for memory, I'm not sure I was really great at that, although
in school I never studied for tests or did homework that wasn't
going to be marked and still managed to get through.. But later
I went into Real Estate for a while and the college courses for
the licensing involved a bunch of long, complex, legal phrasing
to draw up a legal sales document. In real life you can just
copy that from somewhere in the office but not when taking tests.
You needed 80% to pass the test, and I got 89% I recall, but after
the final class where we were given our marks the teacher pulled
me aside before I left and said that I had all the legal phrases
in my clauses that were required but my wording was quite a bit
different than what they had given us to memorize and he asked
where I'd gotten them. I told him that I didn't memorize the
clauses, I just learned what they had to contain and then wrote
them from scratch on the exam..
So.. still memory work I guess but not empty memorizing that a
lot of people might do without understanding why it was required.
---
* SLMR Rob * Four out of five herrings that smoke get bagels
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