The admissions process to universities in the province of Ontario in Canada has a direct solution for this, which applies to well-known universities in the global technology industry, such as the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo.

Most of these universities look at an applicant's grades for just six courses. After looking at the courses required for certain programs (such as calculus and physics for certain programs), the remainder of the six courses comprise the student's top grades for any courses at the Grade 12 (final year) level.

So, a high school student aiming for a top engineering or mathematics program will not be hamstrung by a poor grade in Grade 12 English, nor will a student aiming for a top international relations program be hamstrung by a poor grade in Calculus. At the same time, the student going into a STEM program will have an exposure to Shakespeare, which can provide inspiration and a rich set of works to explore later in life. The student going into international relations may later be inspired some years later to study mathematics for its beauty as a hobby, some years later.

I remember the feeling that I was wasting time with many of my courses in those years, despite having good teachers for many of them—I thought my time spent on mandatory humanities courses like music took time away from more practical subjects, and I wish I took a programming course (though I did love my English classes). Perhaps this remains true for many students, but I personally took an interest in music performance as a hobby years later in life, and the years-old lessons in music theory came back to me. My English classes also introduced me to literature, which has remained a very important part of my life that has guided me through highly consequential life decisions for the better. It is unlikely that I would have taken an interest in literary works without my exposure to English in school.

A few points on this:

- How and when would you know a subject doesn't click? In my case German (my first language) and English sucked for roughly 8 years. I ended school with A in both and was the only student in my school without a single mistake in my exam.

- School gives you good grades if you managed to learn the topics at hand. Being able to learn what is needed or what you are bad at — not what you want and are good at is a skill in itself that can be important in life. I'd argue unless you are an exceptional genius (unlike 99,999% of pupils) you gain more from pulling through than you would if you called yourself a genius and focused on a single topic. Schools goal is to educate the majority

- pupils (and often also their parents) are utterly unable to judge which bits of school will be essential to their later life. I had many collegues who utterly hated every second of a multitude of subjects, only to years later tell me how glad they are now to have had been subjected to it (which brings me back to my first point)

We could (and should!) argue on how school works as a system of grades, teachers and pupils — ideally teachers would motivate students to become curious about and proficient in subjects without the motivation of good or the threat of bad grades. But if my experience as an educator at the university levels (without grades in mh case) shows one thing it is that those first semester students who are really able to judge what will be useful to them later on are not many. Many of them are more like the dog in the meme: "Only stick, no take" — they want to be able to do the cool thing without knowing what is needed to do the cool thing.

So in grade 5 you maths is A++++ (like college entry level), you're excused from English, Civics and what not, and when by the time of graduation you've fizzled out (which most prodigies do) you're just an unemployable nerd.

School education standards are the barest minimum and anyone of IQ > 85 can make them.

That is an advantage of the British system. You have a wide education until 16 and sit a broad range of exams at that age (GCSEs) and then specialise in a few (most often three) subjects from 16 to 18.

You usually need to pass English and maths GCSEs, but universities mostly care about the subjects you do in the last two years (except for very competitive courses).

This can be a problem for those who want to keep options open until they are 18 (like my younger daughter).

Even the system up to 16 is pretty flexible. There is a huge range of available subjects - although most schools offer only a limited selection (my kids were out of school by secondary school age so we had a huge choice and did some less usual subjects like astronomy and Latin).

> Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well.

Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good.

> Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't.

I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.

To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.

Something about this sniffs as elitist to me. A person who’s intelligent is curious and a person who’s curious should be curious about all things, not just some limited set.

Now, that’s not to say the only issue is someone’s curiosity. Traditional teaching methods make it very hard to be interested in some topics (history and language comes to mind), but barring that, I’m not sure I accept “it’s not interesting” as a reason not to explore a subject.

The school should form decent individuals before than useful workers, and for that it's necessary to have a passing level of culture. For example, everyone should have a basic grasp of ethics (and know a bit of history), even those of us working in technology or science. Geniuses like Ramanunjan or John von Neumann are such a rare occurrence that the school system can not and should not optimize for them (and my very personal view is also that we'll have even less geniuses in the future, as our distraction-based society is not conducive anymore to cognitive development).

> but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well.

It requires a very small success on a very basic level. It is not good to be a super math genius and know nothing about geography and history.

If you’re sufficiently good or accomplished at one thing then you’ll be fine. But most students aren’t. Most students who are good at math are just good at math. But if you win two golds at Math Olympiad while in high school or publish a groundbreaking result then your mediocre grades in history will be ignored.

But a 780 on the math SAT isn’t likely to put you in the company of people whose math is sufficient to ignore poor grades otherwise.

I was put into the "advanced" class in grade school, only to hate the increased homework load, and I missed my friends in the non-advanced class, so I intentionally refused to do the work so that I would be put back in the "regular" grade school classes. I was great at math, I taught myself fractions and algebra at a young age. I just didn't like spending so much time on the other subjects, they seemed too easy or too boring and took up too much school time. They wouldn't let me into the computer programming class in High School because I hadn't passed geometry, and the teacher was a total asshole - I failed his class, but I got an A in the make-up class with a different teacher. I got kicked out of electronics class because some other students stole stuff and blamed me for it - I had nothing to do with the theft, I was the teacher's favorite and had access to everything, I didn't need to steal anything, he gave me anything I wanted. God I hated High School so much.

After graduating High School, I couldn't really see myself sitting through 4 more years of basically the same subject material - history, English, social studies, etc... when all I really wanted to do is use my talent in electronics and computers that I'd been accumulating since I was 5 years old. So I went to a trade school for electronics and computers instead of a college, this was back in the late 80's.

I can't say that not going to college hurt my job prospects at all, I've been highly paid for many years for doing something I love. Jobs hired me based on experience, not because I went to a college. That may have changed a bit now, since some tech companies favor college graduates, but I've worked with some college graduates that are just dumb as shit and couldn't get anything done - not all are like that, but going to college isn't an indicator of success at all.

In my country there is a system where a kid applying to high school gets accepted based on a standard test, or can skip the line by performing well on a contest organized by the ministry of education. In my class something like 80% of kids were admitted through contests. When applying to the university there's a similar thing, except it's much harder to skip the line, but universities are free to set up their own admission rules as long as the rules are based on the national standard test. In my case, the final admission score was calculated something like "90% maths 10% everything else"

In my experience, people who are really good at something usually are at least average on many others. Thus they can do the minimum in other courses to pass, it's just a matter of working enough.

In my country, there are several students (12-18 years old) who can mix sport at high level (national championship) and a lighter school activity. They work like mad but they do it. But they have to prove there are good enough to get it, which is OK to me.

Being really good is not something you appreciate yourself, it's the others that notice.

> maybe you should be able to get an A++++

What does an A++++ mean? I guess it's equivalent of publishing a novel result/idea, solving a long standing conjecture sort of ability? If yes then I'd say the system does accommodate them. Terrance Tao for example was fast tracked and didn't get lost in the system.

Though it probably requires some effort from parents to figure out the right path for their prodigies.

>but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well

It doesnt, at least in my country.

Here you have a few school leaving exams that you need to perform at

Math, native lang and english.

And one at advanced level, but its your choice when it comes to subject.

What you are talking about is GPA and GPA is meaningless tbf

That’s irrelevant to 99.99% of people. An A in math is not especially difficult to achieve.

To actually be meaningfully better at math you need to go far, far further than the coursework presented in schools, at which point it becomes an extra curricular which is already considered. If you’re a math savant proving novel theorems, they will notice that.

But nobody gives a shit if you’re just really, really good at factoring polynomials from Algebra 2 tests.