relationship between SAT scores and intelligence?

[luckyme]

[ QUOTE ]
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.


[/ QUOTE ]

So I can follow this, is there any prior selection that needs to be taken into account?

I need to kill off this -
All high school grads with an A average go to Harvard.
All high schools grads with a B or lower average go to Smavard.
Harvard awards a higher percentage of A's than Smarvard.

I'm not sure what you meant by "much harder". generally, or you personally or ??

thanks, luckyme

[furyshade]

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

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[/ QUOTE ]

What exactly are the best colleges looking at?

[/ QUOTE ]

i find it really hard to believe that the best colleges dont look at SATs much considering, to my knowledge, they invented them

[David Sklansky]

"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."

Almost certainly doesn't matter. I'm betting the Harvard courses are much harder. Especially the science and math courses. They probably go through twice as much stuff and in more detail. Most Louisville calculus B students would flunk out of freshman calculus at Harvard, if I had to guess. In fact I will specualte that the elite schools give out a lot of A's because they don't want to give the wrong impression to outsiders. If they gave out the typical percentage of B's some people wouldn't realize that their B students are usually better than average college's A students.

[joker122]

[ QUOTE ]
I scored a 180 on the LSAT. This should be ample proof for 2+2'ers that there is no significant correlation between standardized test scores and intelligence.

[/ QUOTE ]

where do you/did you goto law school?

[Philo]

[ QUOTE ]
"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."

Almost certainly doesn't matter. I'm betting the Harvard courses are much harder. Especially the science and math courses. They probably go through twice as much stuff and in more detail. Most Louisville calculus B students would flunk out of freshman calculus at Harvard, if I had to guess. In fact I will specualte that the elite schools give out a lot of A's because they don't want to give the wrong impression to outsiders. If they gave out the typical percentage of B's some people wouldn't realize that their B students are usually better than average college's A students.

[/ QUOTE ]

If you're generalizing in saying the Harvard courses are much harder you're wrong. In fact, I took calculus at U of L and it was an incredibly difficult class even for very good students. Getting a B in that class was absolutely comparable to getting a B in calculus at Columbia, and I would suspect Harvard as well. And no, they don't go through twice as much stuff. The idea that Ivy League classes are always more difficult is just a misconception. No one flunks out at Harvard unless they just don't do any work. Harvard is not in the business of flunking out students.

What do you base these conclusions on?

[David Sklansky]

I was just guessing. If you know for a fact that I'm wrong, I can't argue. But what you are saying doesn't make sense. I remember the students from my high school who went to Harvard and those who went to, let's say, Penn State. The difference in intelligence was pretty huge.

[joker122]

philo i have no experience here but if you look at it logically: why does a degree from harvard open more doors/mean more to just about everyone than a degree from some huge state school? it isn't because of how hard it is to get in to harvard, it is the quality of education the school bestows on the degree holder. the academic demand of a school is a function of the quality of education. put another way, you can't expect a school to administer excellent education without it being very demanding for the student. it's just not possible.

that, or everyone in the world is wrong about what a degree from a top school means. is that what you contend?

[Taraz]

[ QUOTE ]

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

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm claiming that IQ is only weakly correlated with intelligence. IQ tests are evaluating fairly specific kinds of problem solving. You have to think the way the makers of the test want you to think. If you aren't intelligent, you probably won't be able do well. But if you haven't been trained to think like the testers want you to think you won't be score well either.

Before anybody brings up the fact that IQ tests are supposed to be culturally neutral, consider the case of the Raven's IQ test. It is supposed to be the least culturally sensitive test, however the scores on this specific test have increased more than any other over the past 50 years. Either people's intelligence is increasing over time, or people are learning to think differently. I would go with the latter.

[Philo]

[ QUOTE ]
I was just guessing. If you know for a fact that I'm wrong, I can't argue. But what you are saying doesn't make sense. I remember the students from my high school who went to Harvard and those who went to, let's say, Penn State. The difference in intelligence was pretty huge.

[/ QUOTE ]

How did we get to the claim that students who go to Harvard aren't more intelligent than students who go to Penn State? I never said that, and in fact I completely agree that students who go to Harvard are on average more intelligent than students who go to Penn State.

I'm making a very specific claim about grading practices, which is that there are many classes at schools that are not considered top-tier schools in which it is harder to get A-range grades than it is in comparable classes at top-tier schools. I don't think that claim implies anything about the relative intelligence of students at top-tier versus non top-tier schools.

[furyshade]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I was just guessing. If you know for a fact that I'm wrong, I can't argue. But what you are saying doesn't make sense. I remember the students from my high school who went to Harvard and those who went to, let's say, Penn State. The difference in intelligence was pretty huge.

[/ QUOTE ]

How did we get to the claim that students who go to Harvard aren't more intelligent than students who go to Penn State? I never said that, and in fact I completely agree that students who go to Harvard are on average more intelligent than students who go to Penn State.

I'm making a very specific claim about grading practices, which is that there are many classes at schools that are not considered top-tier schools in which it is harder to get A-range grades than it is in comparable classes at top-tier schools. I don't think that claim implies anything about the relative intelligence of students at top-tier versus non top-tier schools.

[/ QUOTE ]

i think the point david is making is that the grading practices are differnet at harder schools because they realize as a whole the education is more difficult, so it wouldn't be fair for someone going to a worse school to have a signficantly higher GPA just because they took easier classes. obviously this wont be true for every school or every class, but i think as a whole it is solid reasoning.