relationship between SAT scores and intelligence?

[Taraz]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I'm sure Philo's points are truer for non science classes.
A motivated student at Iowa State is going to get better at English Literature than a lazy student who barely skates through Brown. But the same is much less likely to be true in Physics. Innate intelligence, unfortunately plays too great a part.

[/ QUOTE ]

Taraz and Tame Dueces,

Disagree with this? If so, why? How are you using the definition of intelligence differently to DS?

[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree with the usage of the word "innate", but I agree otherwise. I would agree that there is probably a lot of mathematical thinking and understanding that is relatively immutable by the time you reach college though. This doesn't mean that this ability is inborn necessarily.

[DougShrapnel]

the sat provides a standardized test that you can rate yourself against other persons. There are ways to increase your score by studying and finding test taking strategies, so it's not an excellent measure of intelligence, yet it's a good indicator of intelligence for those that have a high school diploma.

[southerndog]

[ QUOTE ]
I haven't read the whole thread, but there is a decent chance the SAT has impacted my life more then maybe everybody in this thread. I went to a pretty horrible high school and I was not a great student. Pretty much half As and half Bs. I figured I was pretty decent at math though as I was better then all the teachers. I assumed kids in good colleges where much better than me as I never knew anybody who went to school out of state. I took the SAT my freshman year at the request of the principal since she thought that I may "have potential". I think I got a 1560 or so (nobody in the past had broken 1400) and they decided that I should be bussed to a school 40 miles away, that should tell you how bad my school was.

The new school was much better and i met quite a few kids (maybe 6 or so) with 1500 or 1600 scores. I think the scores were pretty much meaningless in comparing people in this group though. Only one of the kids at my new school was a genius in any real sense of the word and it was pretty obvious to everybody that he was on a different level but there was no way an SAT could show it. He only got about a 1300 though and was horrible at verbal. Just didn't know what the words meant. There were exams that could tell him apart though, we got our hands on a Putnam and he got maybe 6 or 7 (though the teacher that graded them was not really qualified and was way nicer than the real graders) and I was second best with a 2 (would have certainly been a 1 with the real grading).

I think the SAT is pretty good at picking out people who are smart. I think everybody I know who got a 1500 is smart, but it is pretty bad at picking out the ordinary smart kids from the truly special. I guess nobody really expects it to though.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good post, bud. Can I axe where you ended up going to college?

[tame_deuces]

To make it perfectly clear, I am in no way denying that IQ tests correlate very well with school results, and thus also that there is good correlation between those two and SAT results also.

There is good data to point that out.

What I'm saying is that those three can not on their own be a complete measure of intelligence, since they only reflect on a small portion of possible mental tasks posed. Basically I'm arguing against the narrowing of the intelligence term, and giving academia 'sole ownership' of true intelligence.

[Jon1000]

[ QUOTE ]
What I'm saying is that those three (SAT, IQ, grades) can not on their own be a complete measure of intelligence, since they only reflect on a small portion of possible mental tasks posed. Basically I'm arguing against the narrowing of the intelligence term, and giving academia 'sole ownership' of true intelligence.

[/ QUOTE ]

Within a certain range of IQ/SAT tests that seems pretty reasonable, but there is some point where a lower score crosses an individual over from maybe less intelligent to most likely less intelligent than another. And the convergence of all three is certainly a fair indicator of intelligence even if it is not a complete one.

I volunteer taught the math side of the SAT in college and occasionally tutor the math/verbal side for one of those big prep companies now. I'd say that lower than a certain SAT score makes a student academically inept. That is not the same as unintelligent, but the two conditions are so similar that they amount to the same thing in most quasi-academic situations I can think of such as basic math and problem solving ability needed in everyday life. In my experience, significantly low SAT scores reflect poor education most often, but given that there is no math above very basic geometry and no verbal requirements above an intermediate grade school reading level, I would call most students who score below a certain level completely unprepared for higher academia.

To me, these students are not innately unintelligent, but if you asked me to characterize them in a vacuum, I would not be kind. Bringing things like social skills and work ethic into a discussion of their intelligence/academic preparedness seems silly because at that point you're talking about their ability to succeed (if you catch them up somehow), and that seems to be completely separate from almost anyone's definition of intelligence.