Are School Results a good gauge on how 'smart' a kid is?

School results do not reflect your way of thinking, and therefore do not reflect how smart somebody is accurately.

 

If one is capable of memorizing a large mass of questions and their answers they are obviously smarter than others that cannot as memorization is a rather useful all around skill.

 

It has been proven that people learn more from hands-on experience, than they doing just hearing it. Therefore, school can gauge the smartness of a kid -- but not to their full potential.

 

A school is designed to teach more in specific areas of the curriculum: for example math, science, and language. Every one of the problems or tasks set these curricula follow a certain template, which represents a very narrow type of thinking. not only does effective learning require hands on experience, it requires problems that have many types of thinking and skills put together. Because of this, schools can only actually grasp a small portion of potential intelligence, and harness an even smaller part.