Should You Blame Genes For Your Grades?

Can you blame your genes if you get bad grades? Crystal Dilworth joins DNews to reveal the shocking truth!


Read More:
Why Is Education Achievement Heritable?
“New research, led by King’s College London finds that the high heritability of exam grades reflects many genetically influenced traits such as personality, behaviour problems, and self-efficacy and not just intelligence.”

Why is educational achievement heritable?
“The study, published today in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked at 13,306 twins at age 16 who were part of the Medical Research Council (MRC) funded UK Twins Early Development Study (TEDS).”

The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence
“Differences among children in educational achievement are highly heritable from the early school years until the end of compulsory education at age 16, when UK students are assessed nationwide with standard achievement tests [General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE)].”

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[AndrewProTV]

Mom: You failed your english test didn't you?

Me: Who telled you?

[DannySwish]

You can blame basically _everything_ on genes, and it'll be true to some extent. You could blame someone's lack of willpower on genes. You could blame someone's reluctance to admit to school structure on genes. There's a million other factors that could affect any one aspect of someone's function.

[savvageorge]

I think nurture is more important than nature. That's why I'm currently training my pet chimpanzee to become an airline pilot.

[MrHugosantos]

Yeah, I learned all this in school; in all the wrong and negative ways. I soon realized I was in big disadvantage. I was never confortable physically, I was always very nervous, I felt threatened all the time, it all seemed like a game or a compretition, and ultimately, completely useless and a waste of time for me. Only good thing about school was that I would get to have a break from my parents....

[redhotkido]

No one wants to admit it, but the genetics thing is true more than anything.
I'm a prime example of genetics working "negative" towards me.

[daveslave]

Its genetics I tried my arse off academically  and got nowhere, yet was one of the fastest runners at my school and I never even trained

[ImTabe]

Yes, like intelligence has anything to do with grades....

[SwanPrncss]

I studied genetics and I remember somewhere in our textbook 47% of our intelligence was dictated by genetic variance. Meaning any factors that contribute to our genetic expression whether through heredity and so on. Imo, 47% is a lot. It's almost 50%, while the other 63% is due to environmental variance such as parenting, not starving, living comfortably, etc. You might not think this is an issue, but it is in terms of inequality between the wealthy and poor.

For the wealthy, they have access to more resources and are generally living in a healthier household environment compared to the poor. Thus, a poor child is already at a disadvantage at birth, but you don't need genetics to prove that. I honestly think certain tests or exams should have different measuring standards for different neighborhoods or a bracket of household incomes. How can a poor child that is not getting enough to eat at home, have families that can't afford yearly school supplies for them, and so on compete with someone born into wealth in the same field?

[MarshmilloJB]

I'm going to put this out there:

I'm a Chinese woman, which means I have many advantages:
1. Chinese parents who both have university degrees.
2. Their genes, which made it incredibly easy to both memorize and reason. I'm good at languages, then math, then science, then music, and even art.
3. As a millenial, there is a flood of encouragement for me to go into the STEM field because of all the guilt society feels for the last generations of sexism.
4. I find that the school system is better built for girls, who want to please and like to follow rules. Of course, not every girl does, but I did, very eagerly because they were rules that I'd reasoned were good for me (like alternating between subjects so you don't get tired of one, or being forced to go outside for recess because being outdoors is healthy).

Of course, I had a tonne (yeah, I'm Canadian) of disadvantages as well, but I honestly can't complain. My gifts in this life are intelligence, being female in a feminist culture, and being born with a desire to please.

[ashleyashleym]

Nature seems to be a bigger factor but I definitely think that environmental factors play a role. I know I am better at math and science then most people my age and I know I see it differently then them. My grades are always excellent as long as a put in some effort. I know some people have much harder time understanding and grasping concepts and I think it's unfair to say it's environmental.

[candiceblack]

I also think there is different types of "intelligence" a whole country of straight A students might sound good but I'm sure it wouldn't be as amazing as we think. We need creative people, emotionally intelligent people, book smart and street smart people to build up a dynamic functioning group of citizens that have break through ideas and the capability to change the world.

[npip]

As far as I've ever seen, genetics is the sole factor of intellect (assuming you don't hit your head or anything), and intellect is strongly correlated with grades. This appears to be obvious already.

[KrK-EST]

I tried as mush as i i could at school.
I was perfect in math, physics and good at fields that had logic in it.
I had massive troble in any class that had pure fact to remember bases (worst was history and geografy, had to re do everything several times to be able to pass).
So i truely agree with the gene theory.
My memory still is terrible, even tho i have done memory training (different techniques same time) for several years starting from 2008.

I do remember some dates now and few other things i allmoast remember if i really try to(have troble with remembering exact details), but mostly only remember things i need/use/do time to time.

For example with the training i almost remember numbers, like when number was 8 i remember it was in bedween 6 and 10, i dont remember the correct, so i assume the answer and that's the best i can do.
It has allways made things harder for me for shool and with work (with personal life a bit too).

All Tho i dont mean i'm stupid or something, i do speak 4 languages and know aboat 10 different programming languages, am a part time inventor, and time to time do some consulting aboat computers, software, security, electonic tehnology and late years aboat linux and related (putting together a common person distrobution, with bad memory it's really hard and takes years :( ).
As i can not give the exact details i at most times can not ask money for the consultations and offer it as extra for anything else i do for money.

As my memory is really really bad, i only had 1 thing to do professionally aka computers (mostly software, you still need to remember more facts with hardware), the shool days and after highshool i had 3 options.
I was really, equally tallented in Cooking, Massage and computers. But as the other fields i had to remember aloot of facts the only still doable field for me was computers.

I still do some cooking but only for my extended family and friends.
And the eayser stuff, not from any cookbooks but see what ingredients i have and just do it with my intuition and it allways comes out so it gets eaten in minutes and asked for more.. (i usually do in only medium portions). I allways only use sugar, salt and pepper, rarely cinnamon, vanilla and cocoa for flavor/spices/condiments, so my foods are eatable for basicly everybody.
You do not need spices to make your food taste good you just need to make it good. :)

Anyway in writing the message here i still needed to use google(aboat 12 times) to get rid of some spelling mistakes cos as i told you i remember things aproximately.

English is only the 3rd language i speak, so not the best (much easyer in speach).

DNews 
Conclusion, Yes, "Blame Genes", but still try to overcome it and be as pest with the shortcomings it have presented for you.

[bkw]

teacher: "johnny, did your dog eat your homework AGAIN!?"

johnny: "no Teach! My parents had sex and I have dumb genes!  I sweat it's true!"

[shamtradtam]

However hard you work, you can't do better than a similarly hard working smarter person. Unless, of course, they get hit by a car or something

[iamarobot]

This means that every child learns differently, and needs a proper education. Every child can't learn the same way in a class full of children. Everybody has a different type of brain and needs to be treated differently and that is all.

[fernandocurbelo]

To tell you the truth nor nurture nor genes decide wether or not you'll succeed in school it's all on you. You can be a very intelligent human being and score outstanding test scores but if there's someone who works harder and study's and turns in all their work with full given effort they'll always come up on top. Remember it's not your intelligence that gets you any where it's what you do with it that defines your future

[tonyreno]

I like to think that the question should not be, "What matters more, nature or nuture?" I think the question needs to be, "What can we do, given what we've got?"

Here's the thing about IQ verses training. Few of us reading this have the IQ of daVinci. And yet he is reputed to have considered fractions as mysterious. And long division, which we all learn way before we're 12, used to be considered worthy of University study.

Now the commenter says a strange thing. She just finished reporting the results of a study of 6, 600 twins, then she says, "But I think ..." and proceeded to say something diametrically the opposite of what the study showed.

Is there any purpose at all to doing large studies if the results will be ignored?

Still, giving her the benefit of the doubt, I disagree with the baseline, but agree that it doesn't predict how far we can go.

But here she is choosing a very strong word, predict.

Still, I think the bigger point was the "genotype-environment correlation." And here she seems to have missed the point.

And the point is that there are genetic factors that causing you to seek out certain types of environmental factors. 

So while on the one hand the authors are saying that genes are more important than nurture, on the other hand they are not saying that it is only innate "ability" genes that matter. They seem to be saying that innate "desire" genes matter even more.

In chess, one of the former smart-guy looks, this was studied heavily to see what the correlation between grand master and innate ability were. And by far the biggest correlation was not innate ability, but instead, innate desire.

So the best news from this study is that the "Innate" thing isn't a limit on your potential caused by hard limits in the brain, but instead limits caused by the level of your desires and aspirations. This is borne out in chess, as I mentioned earlier, but also in fields like Martial Arts where the instructors will tell you that the best students, long term, are not the ones who it came easily to, but the ones who's desire held out the longest.

Probably the only mistake to take away from this study would be to say that environment doesn't matter at all. It has been demonstrated many times that a certain baseline environment is required, sufficient nutrition, love, shelter, access to opportunity, to have a chance. You can't stick a baby in Antarctica and then blame his lack of success on his genetics.

But I think a totally different type of study needs to be funded, one that determines how well different training approaches succeed at allowing people to get where they hope to go in life. I mean, it's all well and good to say that genes are the big decider. But if we take that to the logical conclusion, then there's no point in having any schools, or training programs.

That logical conclusion clearly isn't borne out by history. History makes it clear that we do build better training methods over time. And that's the thing we can most easily do something about. Our genes, not so much.

[cosminpopescu]

I don't think that how intelligent you are has anything to do with how good you do at tests, I know people that had great memory and did very good in tests because they could remember every word from the books but if you introduced even a simple variable they wouldn't be able to make sense of anything anymore, and I also know people that had crappy grades because they had a bad memory but if you asked them to solve a problem by using just logic they would be awesome.

[LarryPhischman]

Intellectual potential, or how smart a person can become, is controlled by the structure of the cerebral cortex, which is controlled by genetics. Whether or not people reach their potential is controlled by life. So i'm more or less 50/50 on nature vs nurture. My genetics gave me a far above average, just below genius, IQ, but also gave me ADD and Asperger's syndrome.