Here's a bold statement that is sure to make underachievers everywhere applaud:

Grades and test scores are overrated.

That's right. They're weak sauce when it comes to predicting what someone has to offer and how well they will do in life.

When I took the SAT test, I had a panic attack about not scoring well enough to get into Harvard. During the panic attack, which lasted 16 minutes (yes, I timed it), I couldn't fill in any little bubbles. As a result, I got scores that did not get me into Harvard.

And you know what? It didn't mean I'm a dummy. It didn't ruin my life. It simply meant that in that particular situation, my brain wasn't able to do what I wanted it to.

For me, the disastrous SATs were something new. Up until then, I had been a good, albeit extremely nervous, student. For a lot of people, though, anxiety about school and poor performance are a way of life.

Unfortunately, schools can be pretty hard on people who can't get their brains to fire in the "right" way. I'm putting "right" in quotation marks because I believe that schools often use a limiting definition of intelligence.

If you can spell, do math, and remember lots of facts--and if you can do these things well under the extra pressure of a test--then you will get good grades and are officially smart. You might even be a member of the "best and the brightest," which is often how academically elite schools refer to their students. Think about that for a moment: It's not just the brightest. It's the best, meaning you're a superior human being if you can do calculus.

Well, that's ridiculous. Calculus is useful for some people. But the true measure of a superior human being has nothing to do with the ability to derive the quadratic equation or translate Latin.

It makes me crazy to hear politicians talk about higher test scores as the proof of quality education. And don't even get me started on the belt-and-suspenders types who talk about how dumb kids are today because they haven't memorized the Magna Carta (which anyone can look up on Encarta, anyway). Often, these are the same people who can't figure out how to find things online or troubleshoot their computers--they have to ask their kids to do it for them.

It's easy to understand why schools look to test scores to measure how students are doing and how teachers are teaching. There are a lot of kids out there, and the pressure to get them to a point where they can be independent, thinking, self-sufficient adults is huge. Tests are a convenient dipstick we use to make sure kids are absorbing certain types of knowledge.

But that's all they are. Beyond school, our ability to cope in a largely test-free world has a lot more to do with how we get along with people, how we solve problems, and how well we persevere. Who's testing those qualities?

The bottom line is that tests are a lousy measure of someone's capacity to contribute to the world.

Moreover, the cost of judging people by their test scores is potentially huge. History is full of so-called dunces who went on to give great things to their fellow human beings. What would have happened if those people were so discouraged by school that they quit trying?

So, right here and right now, I am giving three cheers to dunces. It's about time bad students got their due.