You Both Can't Be Smart!

Do twins really have the same intelligence? Many people seem to believe that this is not true, that one of us has to be the “dumb” twin.

Although many people hold this misconception, this is not true for Bri and me. It’s actually freakishly weird how similar in intelligence we are. Our similar intelligence caused a lot of problems for us throughout grade school, middle school, and even high school. We were usually in the same classes, but sometimes we just had these classes at different times with the same teacher. We would have similar assignments and many of our papers were similar even if we never even read each other’s before! Because of this, many teachers assumed we were writing papers for each other and cheating, but this wasn’t true at all. I guess we just think a lot alike. It wasn’t our fault that the school scheduled us for the same classes!

It was even worse when they believed we cheated on quizzes and tests…from across the room. How ridiculous is that? One teacher even went as far as putting us in separate rooms to take a test. The results were pretty much identical and we got the same answers wrong. Surprising? I think not. She was pretty blown away but the results though, especially since she thought she could catch us cheating. She just didn’t understand how we could get the same answers right and wrong in different rooms. She even questioned telepathy as our way to communicate throughout tests. She was…different. My mom got calls home about these issues every single year. She had the same question that we had, “How could they cheat from across the room?” And no, it is really not telepathy!

Maybe the teachers should have realized that we study together for tests. If we’re focusing on the same information, we’re more likely to remember the same things. However, during Freshman year of high school, we had one English teacher who was convinced we had to be cheating. She took random points off from papers that she thought were too similar. She even went as far as saying we weren’t allowed to study together! It was a little ridiculous.

I guess some people just don’t understand how we can think so much alike. Anyone who has been in a psych class knows that children who have the exact same genetics and live in the same exact environment develop similarly. Why would intelligence be any different?

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