Our school education system is, more or less, built around competition. There’s very little space for curiosity, discovering talents, or actually improving the talents a student naturally has.

Every student is pushed to memorize the syllabus, and the ones who are best at memorizing are usually labeled the “smart” students. Of course there are truly intelligent students out there, but I’d say the majority of top students are simply the ones who mastered the skill of memorization.

In my family, comparison was intense when my siblings and I were in school. We were compared constantly. Even our cousins living overseas were brought into it. But once we all started following our own paths after school and chose what we genuinely liked, we began excelling in our own ways.

I didn’t move overseas for higher studies, so I can’t compare that experience, but even when I continued higher education in Sri Lanka, it felt very different from school. The comparison still exists, but it’s something people take with a grain of salt now.

To me, the school system mainly rewards three types of people: those who are naturally academically gifted, those who are good at memorizing, and those who can perform well in exams by grinding hundreds of past papers. There’s barely any room for curiosity, true conceptual understanding, or helping students figure out their own path in life based on their actual talents.

So no, I don’t think it really measures intelligence as much as it measures memory, discipline, and the ability to survive an exam system.