In childhood I remember reading a story where a girl who loved to eat garlic went to a party. Shy, she was afraid of talking to people face to face. Now I con’t remember the story line, but remember it is a happy one.
In IITs, contrasy to media, other IITians, where we have been led to believe that they are God’s gift to human race, filled with intelligence, the fact is that IITians on average score close to 60%ile on quantitative skills on tests like the GRE general. Some rare exceptions are there, but the average IITian is in that range. Even companies like Microsoft and Google.
The smart IITian has learnt well to hide his score from others. It you dare to ask them you will be welcome with “You don’t believe me?.”
Average IITian is secure in the fact that privacy laws does not force him to reveal his scores to even the top bosses. Like the medical condition.
The worst thing these anti-privacy groups can do is to leak out the GRE, GMAT scores of all the elites. Death sentence might be possible. You can leak out the total wealth – Jeff Bezos might be happy so that he does not have to tell the ladies about his wealth, and he is quite smart too, but in general, American silicon valley and especially IITians don’t want their scores to be known to others.
In recent years only one, FBI chief, Ben Bernanke, had his score “leaked” out – 1610 on SAT or something. Pretty decent, a perfect score, but tens of thousands score similarly, does not prove a thing. Maybe somebody, some disgruntled employee of Federal Reserve spread the rumor that he was pretty dumb and to counter that his score has been made public.
It is very tricky. Humans have been led to believe that it is their native intelligence that makes them superior. What if it is discovered that George Bush was in fact less intelligence than an average chimpanzee, as many suspect, what will happen.
For example a billionaire investor Vinod Khosla, who appeared on CBS’s 60 minutes on IIT, was found to have been in Carnegie Mellon, a prestigious institute, but detractors have found out that he went to a diluted department there, and while he was a good talker, a gift to Indians, which helped him in his investments, the actual technical skills of Sun Microcomputer were with an American, the silent, nerdy type.
To cut it short, stop believing in superiority of IITians. Even in my case, my roommates from IIT Kharagpur, in the USA, tried to make me feel bad about me by stating that their friend had gotten fellowship but he didn’t accept it. It was by sheer chance that I opened the glove compartment, his scores were there, and they were among the lowest possible. He too was from mechanical engineering from IIT Kanpur.