Disclaimer: the following post is very offensive and ignorant. Rebuke: for precisely these same reasons it is also a kind of entertainment.

Last semester we had weekly physics quizzes. About halfway through the course the quiz given provided a linear motion quantity and asked for the equivalent quantity expressed in rotational motion, so that net force in linear corresponds to net torque in rotational, etc.

When stupid kids were asked about v (linear velocity), they reasoned that this was an appropriately difficult question and they correctly wrote that the corresponding quantity in rotational motion was w (angular velocity) [and so on through the quiz].

Smarter kids thought that the questions must be asking for something more involved than simply writing down equivalent letters, and so they wrote down equations involving lots of quantities and ended up getting zeros on the quiz.

The smartest kids knew that the quiz was in fact trivial, that it was as simple as it seemed at first glance, that the prof was not about to try anything tricky on a core class quiz, and they answered the questions just as the stupid kids had. And so this strikes me as an interesting and probably rare instance where brilliant and stupid kids perform similarly and succeed whereas smart kids get the bad grade.