“For the world of the fixed mindset, there is no way to become an Eagle”. I found this quote to be very important in the book Mindset. I found it in the section “A test score is forever”. This quote explains that people with fixed mindsets will insinuate that a simple test is measuring how smart they are. When testing a fifth grade class, they told the students, “This test measures an important school ability”. After that they asked the kids if they thought the test measured how smart they were. The students with a fixed mindset said that their intelligence was in fact being tested. Other children with a growth mindset knew that it didn’t test their intelligence. One of them even affirmed that no test in the world can truly measure how smart we are. This happens in real life too and has certainly happened to me, especially around that same age. I remember seeing a picture about testing. You can’t test different types of animals on how skilled they are at climbing a tree. Clearly some will be great at it since they are testing a skill and some will fail. But those who did fail might have some other abilities that the given test is not looking at. In my personal experience, this happened to me when I took a science exam. I did poorly in it, but after that class I had a math exam which I did really well on. The exams did not test how smart I am; they were just testing some skills about me.
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