MUST DO BETTER...

If your exam results aren’t what you hoped for, don’t despair... Marion McMullen looks at geniuses who didn’t always flourish in the classroom

1 IT’S exam results season, but can brain power and potential be measured? Albert Einstein, left, developed the theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for physics, but felt out of place at school as a youngster and one teacher even told him he would never amount to much. Considered a 20th century genius, a 10-year forensic study of his brain found it was no different from anyone else’s.

2 BRITISH scientist Stephen Hawking was third from the bottom of his class during his first year at school and was not considered an exceptional student. He improved and later studied cosmology at Cambridge. Afterwards, he won international recognition with his book A Brief History Of Time.

3 SECOND World War code breaker Alan Turing, below right, regarded as the father of computer science, was bottom of his class in English when he was young and second from bottom in Latin. However, he did well in maths and science. His English teacher described his writing as “the worst I have ever seen.”

4 BILLIONAIRE Lord Sugar left school at 16 with no qualifications and began his business empire by selling electrical goods and car aerials out of a van. He funded his venture by cashing in his £100 postal savings. The business entrepreneur from BBC’s The Apprentice is now one of the richest men in Britain.

5 NATURALIST Charles Darwin shocked the Victorian world with his theory of evolution, but he was considered an average student at school. He described his education as “narrow and classical”. His father later sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine, but he also abandoned his studies there in horror at the surgery of the time.

6 LIGHT BULB inventor Thomas Edison once observed “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration”, but was described as “difficult” by one teacher. He later abandoned the school system to be educated at home by his mother. As an adult, the American innovator had patents issued for more than 1,000 inventions, including the light bulb.

7 MUSIC mogul Simon Cowell, below, left school with two O levels and worked in the mailroom of EMI Music Publishing. He went on to form his own record labels and found success on both sides of the Atlantic with TV hits like the X Factor, American Idol and America’s Got Talent.

8 THE writer behind Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol first left school at 12 when his father was sent to prison for debt. Charles Dickens ended up working in a factory for six shillings a week to help his family. He later returned to education, but left for good when he was 15 and an early job as an office boy put him on the first steps to writing.

9 SIR Richard Branson, pictured below, left school at 16 and was told by the headmaster on his last day that he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. His early business ventures included growing Christmas trees and breeding birds before he launched Virgin Records, which later became the Virgin Group.

10 MICROSOFT’S Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world and was a highachiever from an early age. However, he dropped out of his studies at Harvard to set up a computer venture with business partner Paul Allen. Gates once said: “I went to a public school through sixth grade and being good at tests wasn’t cool.”