You know the old saying there are people who can see the trees and those who can see the forest. I look at it as there are people who can see the leaves, trees or the forest. The academic world is mostly made up of skills related to those who can see the leaves and in some cases the trees.
My opinion is the IQ and processing speed tests are biased toward primarily leaf related skills. Those who do extremely well on these tests will often do quite well academically, but have limited potential to deal see the trees and to a greater extent the forest.
Whereas those who score fairly high, but not at the top end may be shifted more into the tree range. In this case, they are more rounded.
Those who score low may in fact be very good at forest type skills, but as these are not tested in the academic world, their skills are often overlooked.
I don't think it is quite as simple as this.
