relationship between SAT scores and intelligence?

[Philo]

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one from Oxford Uni, one from London Uni both with the same class maths degrees.

The one from Oxford has proved themselves to a much higher standard. Anyone who says different hasn't got a clue.

chez

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I don't know anything about grading practices in the UK, nor do I claim to.

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Wasn't a dig at you. Its not just grading, the syllabus at Oxford is so much more advanced that people from London are doing a toy degree by comparison.

I'm almost ceratin this is a general trend in the UK. Be suprised if its not the same in the USA unless they have a common exam.

chez

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The content of many courses in the U.S., especially science and math courses, is pretty uniform. Often the very same texts are used. You can't take calculus at the University of Louisville and only be taught half as much as someone taking the equivalent course at an Ivy League school.

For example, in California the UC system has articulation agreements with all California community colleges where the work the UC's require for lower division courses in calculus, physics, life sciences, humanities, and social sciences has been evaluated for content and a student can transfer her entire lower division general education courses from a California CC. A friend of mine on the faculty in the philosophy department at UCLA just commented to me the other day how his son had taken a calculus course at Santa Monica College and was surprised at how difficult it was. I'm not saying this is the norm, but it is not that uncommon.

[southerndog]

Of course there's a correlation between SAT scores and intelligence. The test asks questions about vocabulary, reading comprehension, algebra, and geometry. Last i checked, you had to have a brain to answer those.

Hmm, let's see.. First take the test guessing at every question, without looking at the test, then take the test actually trying at every question and see how you do.

Now, am I saying that the test determines IQ or something with 100% accuracy?? No.. But, if you take 100 people from group A, and they average 1450, and group B has an average of 1150 who do you think is going to win the following competitions between the groups:

A. Chess
B. Poker
C. Physics
D. Mathematics
etc...

When evaluating people on an individual basis, the SAT should not be the ONLY thing that one uses, but that doesn't mean the test means nothing.

The same arguments hold when arguing race and IQ. If you give 100 people from one race a reasonable IQ test, and the same test to another race, if one race scores 2 standard deviations higher on average, THAT F'IN means something.

[Philo]

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as an aside - i attended Wisconsin (madison), which is one of the highest rated public schools in the upper midwest, for 1 year. i attended perhaps 10-15% of my class sessions and achieved a 3.1 GPA. I attended UW-River Falls, which is a school anyone can get into, for a year, and put in probably, i dont know, 20 times more effort to get a 2.8.



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This is more common than most people realize. I've known plenty of undergraduates from Amherst College and Columbia University who graduated with around 3.2-3.4 GPA's, whose actual academic work would not compare favorably to someone coming from the University of Louisville at the time I attended with the same GPA.

[Philo]

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Philo,

Here, I think, is the crux of the disagreement you and Sklansky are having.

Completely making up some numbers, it may be that 5% of students at Louisville get A's in their calculus class, whereas 20% of Harvard students get A's in their class. Sklansky, I think, is saying that because Harvard presumably has a smarter population to begin with, being in the top 20% at Harvard compares favorably to being in the top 5% at Louisville.

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This may be a fair characterization of the disagreement. I might agree with the claim as you have stated it, but I think it is more tendentious than most people realize.

I also think that there are also clear exceptions to the generalization, which is the main point I have been making. The exceptions are those students who do very well at a less heralded institution, and whose actual performance would translate well into any Ivy League type setting, but who are then penalized both for not having attended an Ivy league school, and for having their comparable GPA devalued for that fact alone. If I understand David's view, he doesn't see this as a reasonable possibility.

[luckyme]

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I also think that there are also clear exceptions to the generalization, which is the main point I have been making. The exceptions are those students who do very well at a less heralded institution, and whose actual performance would translate well into any Ivy League type setting, but who are then penalized both for not having attended an Ivy league school, and for having their comparable GPA devalued for that fact alone. If I understand David's view, he doesn't see this as a reasonable possibility.

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Exceptions for individual students sounds different than the original --

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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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or was that a point or two ago ?
sorry if I jumped one, luckyme

[tame_deuces]

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I think his point is that you guys are BADLY abusing the definition of intelligence so that every little kid gets to be called intelligence "in his own little way." Honestly you guys, intelligence isnt just a synonym for "vaguely good." It has meaninging. When you start to lump into intelligence basically EVERY SINGLE HUMAN CHARACTERISTIC that most people would consider positive, it starts to become foolish.

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look, i agree with you. there's not much worse than the self-esteem boosting attitude prevalent in schools today. but i'm being serious - i don't know what intelligence means. to me, it means "brainpower." i think i'm one of many that go by that definition. if you want it to mean "reasoning ability" or "mathematical ability" or whatever, that's fine. just define it as such when you use it.

is there a high correlation between "reasoning ability" and other intelligences? i'm sure there probably is, but that doesn't mean they are exactly the same thing.

i scored 1480 on the SAT, but i couldn't pass calc 2...in two tries. your average 12 year old can draw a better picture than me. i can't rotate an object in my mind. when i'm in the car and i'm having trouble hearing what my passenger is saying, i mindlessly turn the RADIO volume knob up even though it's not even on.

am i smarter than your average 1200 scorer? well, in some ways yes, and some ways no. my only point is that IQ tests measure what they measure. they do not measure mental superiority. is reasoning ability the single most important mental skill? i don't know, maybe it is. it's not something you can say for sure, because importance is relative.

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Well, people were using it to mean hand-eye coordination or athletic ability or essentially any possible skill that someone might be good at. While I certainly think charisma and charm are traits that lead to success in life, I dont know why they have to be lumped into intelligence. Intelligence is such a tricky beast because everyone wants to always be expanding the definition and making it all inclusive, rather than trying EXCLUDE as many things as possible and find a more limited but more specific definition. It seems to me that this is because no one wants to be left out of the intelligence circle. So, if I suck at pretty much every skill that anyone would call intelligence, I'll simply add in my skills to the definition.

But of course, there is the "I know it when I see it" problem with intelligence. Were Mozart or Bach intelligent because they wrote masterpiece music? I say yes. Is the guy who plays first chair viola in the London Philharmonic intelligent because he plays that Bach piece better than anyone else in the world? I say no. But this ought to be easy enough for you to poke holes in. I guess its just about motivation. I have no inclination to try to include any more skills or abilities than are absolutely necessary into "intelligence."

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The only meaningful definition of intelligence is the ability to perform a necessary mental task well. It is meaningless to limit the intelligence measure to a specific subset of mental tasks, especially if they might not even be needed.

[pzhon]

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The content of many courses in the U.S., especially science and math courses, is pretty uniform. Often the very same texts are used. You can't take calculus at the University of Louisville and only be taught half as much as someone taking the equivalent course at an Ivy League school.


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In my experience teaching at elite schools and discussing teaching with mathematicians, scientists, and engineers elsewhere, this is dead wrong.

You can find many exceptions, but in general, mediocre schools do not have anywhere close to the same depth of curriculum as schools like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, etc. Almost all (over 95%) of the students taking freshman mathematics (Math 1) at Caltech have passed AP BC calculus or the equivalent in high school. The content of the course is not set by keeping pace with the other calculus classes in schools with students with weaker backgrounds. It is determined by the demands of later classes, which are also much more demanding at Caltech than elsewhere. The text books used at elite schools are sometimes the same, but sometimes very different.

Let's see. In one year, students in Caltech's Ma 1a (the first term of freshman mathematics) were required to be able to prove differentiability implies continuity, and to be able to rigorously derive Stirling's formula (from error estimates in Simpson's rule applied to a particular function; they also had to be able to derive the error estimates). By the way, this was not for mathematics majors. Many mathematics majors at Caltech would skip Ma 1, and would take classes like Ma 5, introduction to abstract algebra, which used a text used for graduate abstract algebra courses elsewhere. Please point to anything remotely resembling that, in a class called calculus, for non-majors, at a school where the average SAT math scores are under 600. The material you teach people you expect will become accomplished scientists and engineers is very different from the material you teach to future middle-level managers.

Some schools of all types align the calculus classes with the high school courses, to let students who have passed AP Calculus pass out of the lowest level calculus class(es). This often means that there is a college class designed to substitute for an AP class, which therefore does not cover as much material as a normal college class. These classes are not representative of the courses taught to students in later years.

[blah_blah]

the best incoming math majors at harvard take math 55a, a course which is limited to first year students but which your typical first year graduate student at the university of louisville would almost certainly fail. in general the courses that a typical math major will take at harvard/princeton/mit will be completely different in breadth and depth than the courses that a typical math major at an average public school will take (of course, your typical math major at harvard/princeton/mit is significantly more intelligent than your typical math major at the above schools).

this being said, there definitely are grade inflation issues at ivy league schools in non-quantitative majors. for the most part these issues aren't shared by academic peers of ivy league schools like caltech/mit/berkeley/chicago etc (not sure about stanford) etc.

[Philo]

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The content of many courses in the U.S., especially science and math courses, is pretty uniform. Often the very same texts are used. You can't take calculus at the University of Louisville and only be taught half as much as someone taking the equivalent course at an Ivy League school.


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In my experience teaching at elite schools and discussing teaching with mathematicians, scientists, and engineers elsewhere, this is dead wrong.

You can find many exceptions, but in general, mediocre schools do not have anywhere close to the same depth of curriculum as schools like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, etc. Almost all (over 95%) of the students taking freshman mathematics (Math 1) at Caltech have passed AP BC calculus or the equivalent in high school. The content of the course is not set by keeping pace with the other calculus classes in schools with students with weaker backgrounds.

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These are obviously not equivalent classes then, and I would not expect them to be evaluated for content as equivalent.

[jogsxyz]

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does a 3.8 from harvard indicate better potential than a 3.95 from Minnesota? of course. did it require more effort? no, not necessarily.

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Yes. It opens more doors.