SMART ENOUGH

Engineers are assumed to be smart. However, scholars have demonstrated that rather than existing as an inherent trait of individuals, smartness is really a cultural practice, which results in hierarchical social positioning (for example, students are judged as more or less smart). Evidence shows that the cultural practice of smartness functions in oppressive ways and therefore has direct implications for equity in engineering education. Yet, little research has focused on undergraduate engineering students' understanding of what it means to be smart. Here, Betz et al interviewed 20 students at a predominantly White institution about the role of smartness in their education and found that students described evaluating smartness by social comparison, consistently describing their goal as achieving higher grades than others with less effort, and they speculated about how much effort someone must have had to put in to obtain their outcome, which introduces bias and can propagate systemic inequity.