Comment by kaladin-jasnah

Unfortunately, I have heard logic like this throughout my life, leading me to decide that because I struggled with (some subset of) math, I am not an intelligent person, which led to forcing myself to do pure math in college to prove my intelligence. This led to many significant and awful mental health issues. While this is a bit of a fallacious logical leap, it's not impossible that other people have went through this because of this sort of information being hammered into their head.

I choose to believe succeeding at anything is mostly about persistence and interest, barring other immense structural factors. I have zero interest after doing difficult pure math classes, so I stopped. I now think I am good at what I do, but everyone's intelligence and interests are different.

I think this sort of quantification of intelligence is really harmful to people. I don't want to exclude people from pursuing their interest because their SAT score wasn't high enough. I have met math PhD students with bad GPAs and poor math class grades in their undergrad.

On a tangent, CS undergraduate programs are insanely competitive and filter in crazy ways, and most of my friends who were passionate about CS (especially systems CS and SWE) did ECE just to avoid the competition and dispassionate culture. Your GPA and SAT scores had to be insane to get into almost any undergrad school for CS.