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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, it is ridiculous that one of the main metrics used in admissions is a glorified IQ test. On the other hand, it is ridiculous that we don't have a single commonly used standardized-exam that evaluates proficiency and expertise in the core curriculum.

I know America has a serious NIH syndrome, but the situation could be improved overnight if every single public school adopted the GCSE/A levels or IB curriculum and exams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCE_Advanced_Level_(United_Kin...

https://www.ibo.org/about-the-ib/

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Please omit nationalistic flamebait from your posts to HN, regardless of which country it's about. It may not have led to a nationalistic flamewar in this case, but statistically it very much does, and such threads are the opposite of what we want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, that certainly wasn't my intention, and I'll be more mindful in future

Why would an IQ test for admissions be ridiculous? Any knowledge test at all will eventually test and select for higher IQ so there’s really no getting around it unless all ability-based admissions standards are dropped.

> On the one hand, it is ridiculous that one of the main metrics used in admissions is a glorified IQ test. On the other hand, it is ridiculous that we don't have a single commonly used standardized-exam that evaluates proficiency and expertise in the core curriculum.

You don't like the use of an IQ test in school admissions, and you want to establish an IQ test instead?

Standardized national exams on proficiency in math, languages, science, etc... are very different from IQ tests and only somewhat correlated with IQ, being instead much more strongly correlated with consciensciousness, and generally how good of a student you are and will be.

This is completely untrue.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10212-011-0099-9

Personality traits are much more strongly correlated with academic aptitude than IQ is. If you disagree, you should provide a source.

What are you trying to illustrate with your link? There is no standardized national exam among the measures.

Standardized national exams are normally very highly correlated to academic ability as represented by grades by the same teacher. Actually, where I live, this is essentially the explicit goal of the national exams - they then generate a score that normalizes the difficulty of each teacher and use it both for selection and to evaluate the accuracy of the exam and update it next year.

The data from which I learnt this isn't public AFAIK, but I'm sure similar studies exist for other countries.

The published literature doesn't support your claims, but that's OK because you have private data which you find more palatable? This is a fun combination with your posture of

> If you disagree, you should provide a source.

Well, I did five minutes of googling, and found a public article on the subject : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2333-8504....

>One index of that result was an augmentation in the correlation between the NELS Test and high school grade average from .62 to a multiple correlation of .90 based on the test plus 31 additional variables and corrections for unreliability and grading variations (see p. 72) [p. 105]

Here you go : test scores have a correlation of .9 with grades once you account for the grading difficulty of individual teachers and their unreliability (which is done by multiple national exams in the final synthetic grade). This means that they are excellent as a proxy for academic achievement, which can be restated as the following hypothetical : "what would be the grade of the students if they were to all be graded by the same, reliable teacher?"

Generally I think that the burden of proof on the statement "are exams better at predicting grades than IQ tests" lies on the negative, for the obvious reason that grades are generally composed of exams.

Also, the really cool thing with this is that you can also the reverse - after the teacher has had all of his students graded on the exam, you have all of the variables and can predict exam scores with a correlation of .9 (and thus general academic achievement with a correlation of .81), which means that you can avoid dispensing national exams at every level of schooling and simply use grades. You can even use this data later in college to evaluate how harshly a college professor is grading, and use that to generate much better grades in college!

Conscientiousness itself correlates with IQ.

Yes? And? General grades still correlate more strongly with consciensciousness than IQ.

And consciensciousness is actually negatively correlated with IQ.

Grades show a strong influence from conscientiousness, but exam scores do not.

> And consciensciousness is actually negatively correlated with IQ.

In the same way that SAT math scores are negatively correlated with SAT verbal scores, which is to say only in thresholded samples.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.paid.2014.06.014

Which exam scores are we talking about? Grades themselves are generally by preponderance the result of exams.

In non-thresholded samples there is still a small negative correlation, or no correlation at all. If you could show me a study thay shows big, positive correlations between intelligence and consciensciousness without thresholding I'd be interested.

It is shocking that the above comment is being downvoted, but not the comment it is responding to. Proficiency exams in specific subjects like Math/Biology/History/Literature etc are most certainly not IQ tests. Just because something rewards intelligence to some extent, doesn't make it an IQ test. Calling the GCSE History exam an IQ test would be like calling the YC application process an IQ test.

I agree with your implicit point, but GP is likely emphasizing the delineation between measuring aptitude and measuring proficiency.

> […]it is ridiculous that one of the main metrics used in admissions is a glorified IQ test.

SATs are a good measure of General Intelligence (and IQ).

“ This research established the relationship between SAT and g, as well as the appropriateness of the SAT as a measure of g, and examined the SAT as a premorbid measure of intelligence. In Study 1, we used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Measures of g were extracted from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and correlated with SAT scores of 917 participants. The resulting correlation was .82 (.86 corrected for nonlinearity). Study 2 investigated the correlation between revised and recentered SAT scores and scores on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices among 104 undergraduates. The resulting correlation was .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range). These studies indicate that the SAT is mainly a test of g. "

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0956-7976.200...

Maybe not in the top decile we are discussing here.

Things like age and prep time matter a lot.

I skipped two grades so I took the SAT at age 15 without studying, did well enough, and went to one of the top state schools for CS at the age of 16.

I took the intro to CS weed out class first year and got the highest score by a mile.

> Maybe not in the top decile we are discussing here. Things like age and prep time matter a lot.

Not really. Of course studying for any test and preparing strategically/emotionally/psychologically makes one able to perform at their potential. If you didn't study, didn't prepare, don't know how to sit for a test or what the test will look like, no one expects good performance. Even though I run several miles every day, I'm never going to have the innate ability of an East African long distance runner.

Your extraordinarily excellent performance was not about your preparation but about your brilliance.

“

Yet research has consistently demonstrated that it is remarkably difficult to increase an individual’s SAT score, and the commercial test prep industry capitalizes on, at best, modest changes [13,17].

Short of outright cheating on the test, an expensive and complex undertaking that may carry unpleasant legal consequences, high SAT scores are generally difficult to acquire by any means other than high ability.

”

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/7/4/26/htm

> it is ridiculous that we don't have a single commonly used standardized-exam that evaluates proficiency and expertise in the core curriculum.

We, for decades until this year, had a single commonly used set, of which different institutions mandated (or accepted as one of several alternatives) different subsets, the SAT Subject Tests (formerly SAT II, formerly Acheivement Tests.) Like the SAT itself, they've bee questioned for a while, and the COVID-19 pandemic on top of that led to their widespread abandonment and, as of this year, discontinuation.

Not sure about the SAT, and maybe the test has changed since I took it, but the ACT was mostly a knowledge & skills test. Math: did you pay attention through at least high school trig? Reading: how literate are you? English: how well do you understand the mechanics of SWE? Science: Can you read intentionally-shitty graphs to extract the correct information (yes, seriously, that's what it was, not anything to do with science, really) and so on.

The Math SAT is mostly straight out of the standard math curriculum. The subject tests are similar.

wouldnt this be the point? what woudl you be measuring if someone is smart other than IQ?

I thought the SATs were similar to the A Levels. What's the difference?

The SAT is a general knowledge/skill test. There's a math section (if memory serves, algebra and geometry, but not trig or calculus) and a language section (reading comprehension, vocabulary. There is an optional essay portion. Each of the 3 sections is weighted the same (800 points, so total of 1600 default, 2400 if you include the essay).

A-Levels are subject exams. They more closely align to AP exams in the US.

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