I'm a grad student, and I teach undergrads.

I'm a professor student, and I teach grad students. ALL of them are not as smart as they think they are.

From this, one can infer:

The more formal education one has, the less likely they are to be as smart as they think they are.

Grab the next six year old who claims to be a genius.

Or rather, the more formal education one has the more likely the person is to overestimate their intelligence.

SMRT wrote:

Almost all of them are not as smart as they think they are.

Do you remember how much you struggled when you were their age? For me it's hard to compare.

I always thought grad students were smarter than me until I became one. Then I realized that they just knew more -- they weren't smarter.

It is the opposite for me. When i got my undergrad I thought I knew everything, then when earned my Masters I knew I did not know as much as I thought. Now working on my PhD you really understand how very little you actually know.

I'm a grad student (physics) and most of my fellow grad students bitch about how stupid their undergrads are. I never really understood this. They get upset when they don't easily understand the initial concepts (they teach intro physics labs, for the most part). I think what it really comes down to is most people not realizing that they have 4-5 more years of education in a specific subject compared to who they are teaching.

Of course they don't know much! That is the point of taking an intro level course.

As for me, I know I don't know a lot. I'm at a point (3rd year now) where I am so focused, I know more than almost anyone in the world on my specific topic. But if you asked me to calculate scattering amplitudes for some process, which many of my high energy friends could do, I would be just as lost as an undergrad.

I agree with you. I also tend to get mad when my peers diss on the undergrads. I just made this thread in jest as a response to the "I'm an undergrad ..." thread.