relationship between SAT scores and intelligence?

[furyshade]

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Not much has been said in this thread about the ease with which one can improve one's score by 100-200 points simply by memorizing some words. Obviously any correlation is going to be fairly fuzzy.

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you are stuck a lot in the old SAT, they changed it a lot, no more analgogies for one thing. the vocab section is really minimal, it still exists but the verbal section is now the critical reading section. the point is primarily to be able to understand context

[xorbie]

Ah, I hadn't realized they removed analogies. I personally upped my score (700 -> 800) in the Verbal section just by memorizing vocab, but this was, indeed, mostly for the analogies section (which sucked). The reading section was boring but always easy.

[AlexM]

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Creativity, social skills, ability to handle stress, outside the box thinking, leadership ability, empathy, openness, senso-motoric ability, spatial awareness, courage/ability to control panic...too name a few.

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While I agree somewhat with the point you're trying to make, a lot of these things have more to do with environment and personality than intelligence. For example, the 180 IQ child is more likely to be ostracized and self-reliant than the 120 IQ child, and both of these things will feed on each other, stunting the 180 IQ child's social development because he's intelligent. On the other hand, the 120 IQ child not only won't have these road blocks, but he'll also see things that other people are doing better than him (which the 180 child doesn't) and thus place more value on developing those social skills in order to have friends to rely on when they need a skill that they themselves do not have. So sure, all things being equal, it might be true that the person with better social skills is "more intelligent", but in reality this likely has a lot more to do with experiences than anything else.

By the same token, crappy IQ tests often include knowledge based questions rather than strictly IQ questions, and even in good ones, it's hard to not do it to some extent, so while IQ tests are a strong indicator of intelligence, some intelligent people are going to underscore on them, and the worse the test is, the more likely people are to overscore on them. In general though, assuming similar cultural backgrounds and education, they're a good indicator.

[willie24]

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I am grunching here a little bit. But there is no real relationship between IQ(if you want to use that as a standard for intelligence) and results on SAT or ACT. SAT is a test that will try and figure out how one will do in their first semester of college. ACT is a test to figure out how much of the high school information a student can remember.

I don't know much about the SAT, but I do know that there are classes that people can take so when they take the ACT they can improve several point. If you put a lot of effort into this class your test results increase greatly. If you're trying to gauge someone's intelligence they should not be able to greatly improve their results from a class once a week for a couple of months. Since I was not forced to take the SAT I would not know if there are classes that are capable of doing that.

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i'm pretty sure you are wrong. there is probably a very high correlation between SAT/ACT scores and IQ scores...much higher than the correlation between SAT/ACT scores and college performance. I have no evidence, and may be wrong, but i doubt it. seems like something that could be looked up.

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this is untrue, the SAT has been proven quite accurate in predicting college performance, that is what the test is designed to do. while there is probably some sort of connection between IQ and those scores, it isnt nearly as strong as that of academic performance. one thing that does appear true is that stupid people in my experience rarely do well on the SAT, it does tend to be a level playing field at least on a small scale. it is hard to expand it to a large field but within a school, or district i think it is a decent metric

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i just looked up some correlations. i'm sure different sources give different numbers yada yada yada but...

wikipedia IQ cites a study that puts correlation between SAT score and IQ at .82

collegeboard.com article puts correlation between SAT score and freshman college GPA at .62 for females and .56 for males.

doesn't prove anything as i'm sure different studies have different numbers, but at least i'm not definitely wrong.

[Fly]

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If SATs were not a pretty reliable indicator, the best colleges couldn't get away with using them.

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The best colleges barely look at SATs, but manage to accept a ton of 1600 scorers anyways (and reject a ton of 1600 scorers). The important thing here is that correlation does not imply causation. Yes, Harvard accepts a ton of really bright kids but there are better indicators of intelligence contained within an application than merely an SAT score. It's a bit of a sanity check, really, just as the GREs are a sanity check for a graduate school application.

That being said, the correlation seems pretty good.

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What exactly are the best colleges looking at?

[Philo]

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There are many colleges that are not "Ivy League level" at which it is harder to succeed academically than at Ivy League institutions

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i would assume so. i meant "ivy league level" to mean highest tier, not necessarily actually membership in the ivy league. sorry for the lack of clarity.

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Yes, I took it that by "Ivy League level" you meant highest tier. There are many non top-tier schools at which it is more difficult to succeed academically than Ivy League level or highest tier schools. Once you get into an Ivy league school or many of the top tier colleges getting good grades does not require much effort.

Grading standards are more difficult at many schools that are not top tier, which is one reason why admissions standards for professional schools like law schools are doubly prejudiced when it comes to comparing applicants from those schools to those of Ivy League type institutions (the applicant is penalized relative to the Ivy League level applicant for not having gone to a top tier school, and then penalized again for having gotten similar or lower grades at their institution).

[David Sklansky]

I find your comments hard to believe. Do you stand by them comparing, lets say, Georgia Tech and Cal Tech?

[Philo]

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I find your comments hard to believe. Do you stand by them comparing, lets say, Georgia Tech and Cal Tech?

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No, I can't compare Georgia Tech and Cal Tech because I have from no first-hand knowledge of grading standards from either school, nor any statistics from those particular schools.

I certainly wouldn't go so far as to generalize across all schools, but speaking from my personal experiences in higher education (which I've been in for over 20 years as a student, professional academic, and administrator), it seems clear to me that many schools not considered top-tier for an undergraduate education do not have the same level of grade inflation as Ivy League schools and many top-tier private colleges. I have had numerous discussions with colleagues from different institutions around the country about this very topic which seem to confirm this as well.

From a quick search on the internet here are two examples of grade inflation from Ivy League schools: The Dean of the College at Harvard reported that for the 2002-2003 school year 47.8% of grades for undergrads were either A's or A-'s. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported that in 1997 43% of grades at Princeton were A's, and only 12% were below the B range. I saw the same grading practices at Amherst College as an undergraduate.

I was a doctoral student at Columbia University, where I taught undergraduates and also worked in the Dean's Office and read the internal reports from Ivy League institutions about grade inflation. I have taken classes at eight different colleges and universities, served on graduate school admissions committees at both Columbia and UCLA, and worked as an academic counselor for the College of Letters and Science at UCLA.

The toughest grading institution I have ever taken classes at was the University of Louisville. It was much harder to get an A at U of L than it is for undergrads at Amherst, Columbia, Harvard or Princeton to get an A.

[Taraz]

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I think that if you score very highly on an IQ test you probably have a high intelligence. Unfortunately If you have a very high intelligence you won't necessarily have a high IQ score. Does that make any sense?

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To me---no. But I guess I'll just have to accept that "intelligent" is now a billowing portmanteau of a word that envelopes bloody close to everyone. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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It is hard to score exceptionally well on an IQ test if you aren't pretty smart. This does not mean that if you are pretty smart you will score highly on an IQ test. Think of it as a filter. You will filter out a lot of the "dumber" people with an IQ test, but you will also be filtering out a lot of the smart people as well.

There will be some correlation because only moderately intelligent people will be able to score highly. This does not mean that people who score poorly aren't intelligent. You can get a bad score for a large variety of reasons, only one of which is that you aren't actually smart.

[luckyme]

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There will be some correlation because only moderately intelligent people will be able to score highly. This does not mean that people who score poorly aren't intelligent. You can get a bad score for a large variety of reasons, only one of which is that you aren't actually smart.

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If you are claiming that IQ is not 100% correlated with intelligence in every case, np. If you are claiming that the "large variety of reasons" add up to a big percentage of mis-testing, then you are wrong. There are a large variety, huge actually, of ailments I could be suffering from, but the long odds are that I don't have any of them.

luckyme