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Comment by byrneseyeview | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't that seem kind of redundant? "People who do well on IQ tests have systematic advantages which allow them to do well on IQ tests, but IQ tests are meaningless."

Obviously, it's possible to imagine a world in which IQ is not largely heritable, and in which rich people pay lots of money to game their kids' IQ numbers, and then the kids somehow use these IQ test numbers to get better jobs (even though IQ testing from employers is basically illegal).

But we can adjust for that. I'd be happy to do the same bet controlling for parental socio-economic status.

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"it's possible to imagine a world in which IQ is not largely heritable, and in which rich people pay lots of money to game their kids' IQ numbers, and then the kids somehow use these IQ test numbers to get better jobs"

You don't need to imagine that world, we live in it. Kids who go to private schools with SAT prep classes and practice the test dozens of times are at a several hundred point advantage to kids who don't. This gets them into better colleges which gets them better jobs and gets them better income.

The SAT is not an IQ test, it goal is to measure the probability of someone finishing their freshman year of collage and when adjusted for the collage it's better at that than HS grades.

No it's the worst predictor of finishing freshman year. The claim is that SAT + high school GPA is stronger then GPA alone which is a pretty weak claim.

As for what it actually measures (as opposed to what it trys to measure), opinions differ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Correlations_with_IQ

"Frey and Detterman (2003) analyzed the correlation of SAT scores with intelligence test scores.[20] They found SAT scores to be highly correlated with general mental ability, or g (r=.82 in their sample). The correlation between SAT scores and scores on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices was .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range). They concluded that the SAT is primarily a test of g. Beaujean and colleagues (2006) have reached similar conclusions.[21]"

"Certain high IQ societies, like Mensa, the Prometheus Society and the Triple Nine Society, use scores from certain years as one of their admission tests. For instance, the Triple Nine Society accepts scores of 1450 on tests taken before April 1995, and scores of at least 1520 on tests taken between April 1995 and February 2005."

It's seen many changes over time, but gave up the idea of being an intelligence test over 20 years ago.

The name originally stood for "Scholastic Aptitude Test".[35] But in 1990, because of uncertainty about the SAT's ability to function as an intelligence test, the name was changed to Scholastic Assessment Test. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#History

Spoilers: I don't think SAT measures "intelligence" any more then IQ tests do. That's what this sub-thread is about - IQ tests don't measure what they purport to either.

I took a course with Clark Glymour when he was visiting my school. His speciality is trying to determine if we can infer causation. (See: http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-glymour.php)

At one point, the administration at CMU came to him and asked if he could figure out what was the best predictor of students finishing college. (Or it might have been just freshmen year. It's been a few years since that course.) He had access to all of CMU's data on students. The result: SAT scores.

Whether or not the SAT itself is a predictor of actual intelligence is besides the point.

I haven't seen anyone claim it's the best predictor of college performance. Some say it's an ok predictor, some say it's near useless, a good summary of different sides of this can be found here:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/592879.html

There is a huge gap between saying SAT's relate to finishing your freshman year and your GPA. Granted finishing your freshman year depends on GPA, but it's more a question of doing the basics. AKA doing your homework without mommy and daddy there, handing things in on time, not cheating, going to class and those activity's are far more independent of HS GPA than parents want to admit.

On the other hand GPA's over 3 depend a lot on how hard your classes are, how heavy the work load, if you have a full/part time job which are less dependent on the student's innate qualities.

Right, but there's a glaring statistical error. Schools are very stratified by skill level. So you may have someone with a 1550 and a 2.5 HS GPA, sitting next to someone with a 1300 and a 3.8 HS GPA. One smart slacker, one hard worker who isn't quite so facile.

Of course SAT scores won't be predictive in that case. You'd want to look at SAT scores controlling for other admissions factors, which is basically SAT scores controlling for every variable admissions cares about, which of course means that no variable in particular has predictive power.

But if you want to see how strongly SAT scores correlate with academic performance, the way to do it would be to take some students who belong at, e.g., ASU, and somehow sneak them into Harvard.

I beg to differ: I grew up in a trailer park, with an alcoholic carpenter for a dad. We certainly didn't have the money to send me to prep classes or private school. I did have one thing going for me: a love of books. I read more books than an whole classroom of kids at my school. As a result, my SAT scores were in the top 1%. I make well above the average now, and my family enjoys the type of lifestyle that I could only dream about as a child.

Observing that preparation generally improves scores =/= you can't score well without preparation. Moving the bell curve a little to the left or right doesn't cut off the tail on the other side.

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