does getting top marks and ranks in school or college make one intelligent?
I think you have three core questions:


What is true intelligence and how can it be measured?
To what extent does school performance correlate with true intelligence?
To what extent does school performance cause  true intelligence to change?


Intelligence tests provide the best known means to measure general cognitive ability. There is a huge literature on intelligence tests. Good intelligence tests will generally sample from a wide range of cognitive domains (e.g., verbal, spatial, numerical, etc.). The literature on intelligence tests shows them to be a strong predictor of a wide range of important life outcomes. 

So in essence, I reject your assumption that seems to dismiss the validity of intelligence tests. Over a hundred years of research and thousands of studies tell a rich story about the inter-correlation of different ability tests and their correlations with variables like educational performance, work performance, and many other variables. The review by Neisser et al (1996) is an excellent introduction to this literature.

I think this existing question on the correlation between GPA and IQ provides a reasonable answer to your question about the association between school performance and intelligence. In short, there is a very strong correlation between the two variables.

The final question is actually very interesting. I.e., what is the causal effect of education on intelligence? and what is the effect of a student applying additional effort to their education on intelligence?

I'm not as familiar with literature evaluating the causal question. The default assumption given the stability of intelligence and the plausible causal mechanisms is that intelligence causes school performance.

That said, education must on some level cause forms of intelligence to develop. My sense is that interventions targeted at increasing intelligence have generally not had sustained success. Also, twin studies generally show a negligible correlation between adopting parent intelligence and child intelligence, which also reinforces the strong role of genetics. There may also be differences between education increasing domain specific knowledge as opposed to increasing general intelligence.

References


Neisser, Ulrich; Boodoo, Gwyneth; Bouchard, Thomas J.; Boykin, A. Wade; Brody, Nathan; Ceci, Stephen J.; Halpern, Diane F.; Loehlin, John C.; Perloff, Robert; Sternberg, Robert J.; Urbina, Susana (1996). "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns". American Psychologist. 51:77–101.