[thomassmith65]

The list of attributes that correlate to academic performance is long and picking from them is arbitrary. Eg:

{ People who study, people who cut class }

Country A: one freak Nobel laureate who likes to study, and a million citizens who scrape by but cut class.

Country B is the inverse: a million studious citizens, and one class-cutting deadbeat.

A's single Nobel laureate scores better at Math than than B's million nerds, and A's million deadbeats score better than B's sole deadbeat. Now country A is better at Math.