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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

So my stepson (so definitely not inherited IQ) didn’t have the standardized test scores to get into the school he wanted. But after 10 sessions at $100 a session with a tutor who was a college professor he more than made the score. Did he get smarter in 10 weeks or did he have the privilege of having parents that could drop $1100 on tutoring?

Another data point.

I had the highest SAT score in my school the year I graduated and the second highest in the county - not bragging it is consistently listed as one of the ten poorest cities in the US.

Do you think it was because I was so smart only or because my mom was not only a high school math teacher and whose best friend was an English teacher, they also taught SAT classes for years and I didn’t have to go get help before school from an overworked teacher who volunteered to help kids, but I could get all the help I needed at home?

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I'm confused by this comment - are you trying to say IQ isn't heritable? Or just that both nature and nurture play a role? And why rely on anecdotal evidence - just read the second paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ. It even agrees with your experience: "IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics, for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. [..] Recent studies suggest that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores; however, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease can have deleterious effects."

I’m saying that if you happen to grow up in a more affluent environment and/or with parents that have the right connections of course you will have better outcomes. But too many people who have had those advantages think they are “self made”.

Just because you had some advantages doesn't mean your accomplishments are worth nothing.

If you start out on home base and end on second you did well. If you start out on second and finish a home run you did well.

Let's please not have this attitude that the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances. It's just not true. Everyone has the opportunity to achieve something relative to their circumstances, and many do, and deserve credit for it, at all levels.

I didn’t say that my accomplishment are “worth nothing” but I’m also not naive enough to think my “success” is solely because of my “hard work” and none of it can be attributed to luck. I didn’t start programming in 65C02 assembly in middle school in the mid 80s because I knew a couple of decades later that it would be a thriving field. Even when I graduated college in the mid 90s, computer science wasn’t paying that much more than any other college degree. There are plenty of people who “work hard” in other fields that don’t make as much as I do.

>my “success” is solely because of my “hard work” and none of it can be attributed to luck.

That's near the opposite of what I said. Please don't lazily pattern match me to some strawman argument and attack on that basis.

I'm happy to continue if you want to respond to what I actually wrote.

Complaining about strawmen is pretty rich coming from someone who said that the person you're arguing with had the attitude that "the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances", considering that was never said. You just came up with it, and now you're all huffy about someone doing the same thing to you

What I responded to was

>too many people who have had those advantages think they are “self made”.

Implying that none of them are actually self-made. Which would mean that people born into decent circumstances cannot be self-made. In other words, they cannot take credit for any kind of accomplishment.

It's a reiteration of a common position; my interpretation is not extreme.

Perhaps I misinterpreted something, in which case I'm happy to be corrected. In any case, I certainly didn't explicitly reverse the meaning like was done to me.

The point is the resources make things easier.

HN commenters tend to ascribe a lot of value to IQ. The problem is that proxies for IQ like the SAT are very fallible. The $800 my parents invested in a Kaplan course, increased my score on the SAT by 6 percentile points.

For starters, he did get smarter in ten weeks. That's a fifth of a year. Kids get materially cleverer and more intelligent as they grow. I've seen this in kids taking math contests and standardized tests without any special preparation. FWIW I think test prep can help -- if you don't know the material.

You could have had him do that test prep for free, without paying a tutor. Or gotten a cheaper tutor, a college undergrad, instead of some fancypants professor.

He didn’t get that much smarter to improve his test scores by as much as he did. I know plenty of people who took the test more than once, got help by going to “SAT prep” classes before school etc. and didn’t get any better. The entire point is that money and connections opens doors. I didn’t grow up poor but I did grow up in a relatively poor city. I saw the lack of opportunity when I was growing up. When I go back home now, it’s even worse. All of the “smart kids” who just so happened to be the teachers, doctors, lawyers kids moved away.

Tell that to the parents who tried to bribe their kids' way into college. The fact is, SAT prep costs $0. You'll notice that kids growing up in trailer parks magically don't have these hurdles when their parents are recent immigrants.

Edit: To add some clarity about what I am saying: Preparation can certainly improve test scores. For example, I did poorly on the SAT verbal because I didn't even have the vocabulary for many questions. I was even, I dare say, unpracticed at reading. Actually preparing would have improved my score.

Also, some "professor" doesn't have access to special mind altering techniques that other tutors don't have. Teaching and test prep is not rocket science.

Isn’t that kind of the point of both the article and what I was saying? Reports are that many of the kids didn’t know that their parents were bribing colleges. They actually thought that they got into prestigious colleges because of their own “capabilities”.

And general intergenerational income mobility isn’t that high. Also, statistically (and no fault of their own), English as a second language students don’t do as well as native born speakers (https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/02/23/512451228/5-milli...) so I fail to see the relevant of bringing up recent immigrants.

I edited my post right as you responded. Immigrants are relevant because they're often poor but because of language and happenstance, for very specific reasons, not because they're stupid or unreliable. Their kids have a lot more upward mobility and they outperform academically.

Not according to the citation I posted.

That doesn't have a breakdown by income, so it's impossible for your link to address anything I've said.

So do you have a better citation of immigrants doing better or is it just the meme of “the model hardworking immigrant”?

I said poor immigrants' kids doing better than other poor people's kids.

Citation?

I’m probably a failure in the eyes of people like you. I’m 23. What should I do now instead? I only got a 1500/1600 on M+R. Didn’t get into any elite schools.

This is a serious question. I didn’t score well on the SAT and didn’t have prep tutors despite having very intelligent parents and lots of prep.

I went to a no name state college in the same city I grew up in - you know the one I said was the one of the poorest cities in the US?

Why? They gave me a full ride scholarship including room and board even though I stayed at home. I really just wanted the piece of paper to get pass the HR filters of “needs a degree in CS”. My first job out of college based on an internship I had the year before was as a computer operator. I took it so I could move to the “big city” where I still live and figure out my next steps.

Well, I didn't get into my school's full ride scholarship either....

Well, right after I graduated, any state resident with a 3.0 GPA and 1000 SAT score (out of 1600) could get their tuition paid for any public college in our state thanks to the lottery funding. The standards are slightly higher now and it only covers 90% of tuition I believe.

So there is that....

Yeah, that's definitely a difference.

I still feel the sting of not performing well on my SAT to this day, and it's been 5 years! It's like a mark against my humanity.

99th percentile is "didn't score well" nowadays? (going by the 2018 charts - the ones from when you were presumably in high school are out of 2400 - and in 2012 the cutoff for 99th percentile was 2210/2400 [0])

0: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-historical-percentiles-for-...

My superscore was 2230. 99th percentile or not, it’s irrelevant because it’s not good enough to get into any top schools.

That's actually around the median for Harvard students, IIRC. It's not enough to guarantee your admission, but then 2400 isn't either.

The median includes recruited athletes and legacies. It’s effectively useless as a measure.

Half of Harvard students are athletes and legacies? In any case, my experience was that SAT basically doesn't matter past 2200/2400 - everything after that is extracurriculars, connections and luck.

I have doubts - most people I know got far more than me and none got into elite institutions. I can’t even imagine how exponentially superior the people who got into multiple must be.

Oh, I don't mean that getting higher scores makes you likely to get in - only that having a 'low' score (less than 2100, let's say) makes it far harder to the point of being nearly impossible. If you check out some stats from Stanford [0] and MIT [1] you can see that admit rates fall off VERY quickly. For instance, Stanford's fall 2014 freshmen had a 5.1% overall admit rate, climbing to 13% for those who received an 800 on their critical reading SAT but only 2% for those scoring below 600 on the same. Or look at MIT - 9% admit rate for 750+ Math SAT, 0.05% for <700. (Literally one person out of 1828)

0: https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/profile14.htm...

1: https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats/

Right, I’m in the middle ground where I’m still considered to be exponentially inferior to the admits.

Being tutored one-on-one by someone with enough education to be a college professor is about the most intense education a youth can get. It's vastly more intense than the same time spent in a class of twenty or thirty students.

That’s exactly what I’m saying - that he had a better outcome not because of any innate capabilities but because he had parents who could afford to give him that advantage.

And I had the most “intense” help you could have - a parent who had all of the know how and resources to ensure her child did well in school and on the SAT. How many kids struggling in Calculus or Trig can get as much help at home as they could possibly need. Did I mention that I had an aunt that taught science at my school and that one of my math teachers were taught by my mom?

Your comments are all over the place, from asserting that "money and connections open doors"* and some people do test prep and get no better to bragging you got the best help from unpaid relatives who knew their stuff.

I have no idea what point you are trying to make. There seems to be zero consistency to your various remarks.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012049

He's been extremely consistent in his remarks: privilege and wealth result in higher test scores for environmental reasons.

I'm undecided as to whether or not I agree, but she/he's been very consistent in their stance.

Also, accusing someone of "bragging" when they're providing anecdotal evidence for their point of view assumes bad faith where there may be none.

So I said:

I didn’t have to go get help before school from an overworked teacher who volunteered to help kids, but I could get all the help I needed at home?

And

I know plenty of people who took the test more than once, got help by going to “SAT prep” classes before school etc. and didn’t get any better.

The difference being that while SAT prep was offered by overworked teachers who volunteered to help a class full of students before school started, that was a lot different than having one on one help with a college professor. Also, even the kids who could get help before school were fortunate enough to get a ride to school. Some students couldn’t make it before school because their bus came too late and their parent(s) couldn’t take them because they had to be at work.

Have you ever thought about instead of just lashing out you could ask for clarification when you don’t get the point - that others actually did get?

And how is it “bragging” to say that I had relatives who were teachers and I did very well in what I admitted was one of the poorest cities in the country?

In fact, growing up in the segregated south as my relatives did, one of the few and ways to guarantee a middle class job was to go into education. My relatives were among the first to actually be able to teach in an integrated school - we aren’t talking about a lot of “privilege” here.

I'm not lashing out. Characterizing my remark that way is a personal attack.

I stated that I have no idea what your point is and explained why I'm confused. I consider it bragging because you say that your stepson was simply fortunate ("privileged") to have someone able to pay for it, talk about doing well yourself without monied solutions and also state that it is your stepson, so, no, he didn't inherit your IQ. At every turn, it paints you as the only person with some kind of virtue, whether smarts or money to spend, and dismisses the idea that it genuinely makes other people "smarter," denying them a claim to virtue.

I think the overall picture painted here is one where you see yourself as innately smart but your stepson as just lucky his mom married a rich man who could "open doors" with his money.

I still don't really get what your point is. Your remarks strike me as very inconsistent.

But, in the grand scheme of things, it isn't at all important that I get your point. I'm just a stranger on the internet.

I consider it bragging because you repeatedly try to say that your stepson was simply fortunate ("privileged") to have someone able to pay for it, talk about doing well yourself without monied solutions and also state that it is your stepson, so, no, he didn't inherit your IQ.

I’m a bog standard “Enterprise Developer/Architect” who makes the median income of “Senior Software Engineer” in a major metropolitan area that’s not on the west coast posting on a site where plenty of people work for companies where the starting pay right out of college is $50k - $100K more than I make. I’m self aware enough to know that HN is the wrong place to brag about either how smart you are or how much you make.

I also mentioned that I grew up in one of the ten poorest cities in the US and that my mom was a high school teacher - not exactly a high paying job. By the way, my dad was a factory worker. I didn’t come from a “monied family”.

I also never mentioned what my IQ was. My wife was already living in the one of the most affluent areas of our state raising two kids. She was doing fine before she met me...

Am I “innately smart”? I don’t know. I’m just a bog standard full stack Enterprise Developer. I’ve never started a company or come up with a great money making idea.

It's better to just walk away from this type of thread before it spirals any further. It's not going to go anywhere.

Look, I was simply answering a direct question put bluntly to me. I don't care who you are or what you think of yourself. I only know what was in your comments here in this discussion just now. Your username doesn't ring a bell.

This is getting overly personal and completely pointless and you being personally defensive in no way clarifies what point you were trying to make about tests or IQ or whatever.

And it's really not important, so I'm leaving this discussion at this juncture.

Well. Since this thread is already collapsed to keep people from seeing it, what the heck? You seem to be the only person who is “confused” while others seem to understand the point whether they agree or disagree.

As far as you not “recognizing me”, I don’t pay any attention to who I respond to accept to see if I’m responding to the same person on the same thread. I’m done with this.

Standardized test scores are not IQ (though correlated). A good IQ test should have high test/retest reliability (ie you don't get better after taking it again)

I agree. But the point is that people who grew up with more resources, better connections, parents who helped them start off, etc do have better outcomes and think they are “self made”. The entire point of the article.

>A good IQ test should have high test/retest reliability (ie you don't get better after taking it again)

This isn't actually true. Most people improve if they take the same style again which is why Mensa, for example, asks that you wait a year before re-taking their proctored tests.

One source of many: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1932-00905-001

"When a Stanford-Binet test is repeated within a period of three or four months the experience gained while taking the first test appears to result in a median gain of four or five points in the second IQ."

IQ is almost by definition performance on standardized tests.

The SAT in particular was developed as an IQ test.

I am off the top of my head unaware of any IQ test that you can't get better at by studying, but there may be some.

Don't look at me; if we plotted the changes in my IQ over my childhood out, I'm likely a potted plant now.

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