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Comment by montyf | Hacker News Reader

I was always under the impression that SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ, not with practice. I had almost a perfect score[0] on my SATs, and I only used about half the time available, and I did zero with a capital Z practice problems beforehand -- many other kids took practice tests every weekend and still performed abominably.

[0]: I only got two questions wrong on the entire test, both math problems. Since I was practically unstoppable at math back then, I always suspected that there were errors in grading.

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For the record, while I agree that evidence suggests that SAT correlates strongly with IQ, your comment is a great case study in how SAT scores correlate poorly with tact

Tactful people are boring. :)

A large portion of the SAT is knowledge of English vocabulary which obviously has nothing to do with IQ.

The mathematics questions nearly all use the same basic rules and are presented in the same format, and can easily be learned and trained.

SAT prep courses are ubiquitous and expensive because they work. Do people without training do well? Sure. Do people with training still do poorly? Sure. But a good SAT question would be "does this mean that training doesn't help or that there isn't a correlation between training and success?" because the obvious answer is no.

Vocabulary is a component of IQ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

>The many different kinds of IQ tests include a wide variety of item content. Some test items are visual, while many are verbal. Test items vary from being based on abstract-reasoning problems to concentrating on arithmetic, vocabulary, or general knowledge.

That's odd, when I learned about it a long time ago I was told it was intended to measure "inherent" intelligence, not the level of exposure/memorization of a massive set of (likely trivial) data points.

Vocabulary very clearly belongs on an achievement test, not an aptitude test (as I imagined IQ to be).

The prep is for turning a 1250 into a 1400 or so which basically determines if you get into Stanford or not.

For the record, I practiced math the most, writing second and literature last and scored exactly in that order. I also tracked my progress before and after practice and I got dramatically better. I really don’t think the SAT measures anything useful other than how well someone can solve SAT problems.

SAT questions, especially the math questions, follow an extremely predictable formula that is told to the world in advance.

Can you practice to get good at quickly solving basic algebra problems? Yes. Which means that you can practice to get better at the SAT.

I don't see how it would be possible that SAT scores would not correlate with practice. The fact alone that SAT correlates with IQ is proof, because IQ test scores themselves can be improved by practicing.

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