Are You Too Smart?

Regardless of professional field, we all remember how we got to where we are. We were told all our lives that we had to study hard, get good grades, and do really well on the professional school entrance exams, or we would never make it into graduate school, medical school, professional school, or whatever the last educational level was to be. As we got closer to going to our respective advanced schools, this level of expected excellence as determined by grade point averages (GPAs) and test scores was repeatedly emphasized. Everyone knows that only the smartest people with the best grades and the highest intelligence quotient scores (IQs) are accepted into graduate school. It also is known that when people look for health care professionals to treat them, they look to see who graduated at the top of their classes, attended the most prestigious schools, and received the most prestigious residency and fellowship programs. I know in my medical school class, the class average college GPA was 3.8 on a 4.0 scale. It would have been higher if it weren’t for the dumb guy who went to Rice University with only a 3.5 GPA and the football player from SMU who had a 3.6 GPA! (By the way, the current national average GPA for students entering medical school is between a 3.6 and 3.7.¹) It is now being reported that we may have been wasting our time! We should have enjoyed life more and not studied so hard to make good grades since a high GPA may not be so important in determining a good health care provider.²

Emanuel and Gudbranson² state that “Although good test scores and grades in calculus, physics, or organic chemistry may signal one kind of intelligence, reliance solely on those metrics results in an incomplete and inaccurate assessment of a student’s potential to be an excellent, caring physician.” They also suggest that smart people may not be the best health care providers, that an equally important quotient is a person’s emotional quotient. This is a person’s “ability to manage emotions and interact effectively with others.”² He also suggests the ability to manage a multidisciplinary team of health care providers and convince patients to change their behavior is as important as being smart.

I believe everyone would want a smart health care provider who knows copious amounts of medical information and can recall it quickly without having to utilize an iPhone; who can evaluate a patient, order the appropriate tests, and make the correct diagnosis; and who is familiar with all the treatments of diseases so that their patient can be guided toward the appropriate therapy. I would agree that doing that does require some degree of emotional quotient but would suggest that a bit of book smarts is also necessary. Why is it an either/or situation? Why can’t we have smart, well-rounded health care providers? What we need are smart people with wisdom. 

As you know, being smart and being wise are not the same. Being smart is determined by what you learn; being wise is what you do with what you have learned. Maybe our graduate schools need to figure out how to develop a wisdom quotient in addition to an intelligence quotient.