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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

SAT / ACT are basically IQ tests. Grades are far more fuzzy but generally show an ability to stick with something over the long term and execute on projects.

I think both are important to being successful. Ignoring one for the other is probably bad. That said I prefer IQ over grades.

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I think a major counter point is how these tests can be improved upon individually without much improvement over other subjects. The first time I took the SAT, I went in totally blind and got 1320, a few months later, with a bit more practice with pre existing precalc, I was able to get 1490. I also had many classmate report similar trends of their score increasing as the number of retakes increases.

This has been studied. There is a retest effect on most "cognitive performance" tests: scores increase on the first and second re-test, then level off. (i.e. the test scores for the 3rd and 4th time you take the test end up about the same)

The term of art is practice effect.

https://www.explorepsychology.com/practice-effects/

It measures your ability to perform on a new subject after studying for it, plus your willingness to study. The fact that you can study for it and improve your score (but not entirely - raw abilities still matter) is a feature not a bug.

But SAT is the aptitude test, and recognizing the importance of aptitude and working on that aspect would benefit the candidate greatly. You are supposed to be able to work and improve urself and benefit from it. A person is not an static object. What happened to `bring the best out of oneself`?

I'm not sure you're making the point you think you are. As I recall the SAT many years ago, there were definitely question forms like X:Y as A:? which rely on vocabulary to some degree but may also be hard (or at least take some extra time) if the form is unfamiliar. Also even a surface-level understanding of some areas of math you realize you sort of didn't really get can be useful. So with that fairly modest knowledge and refresh, you got what's a possibly useful but also relatively modest uptick.

Don't discount the bump from understanding the pacing and difficulty of the exam. You might have 25 questions in 30 minutes for a math section. Understanding that which sections are easy and which are hard allows a student who has seen the exam before to allocate their time more efficiently.

Sure. And even taking the test once under real live conditions is probably beneficial to complement a bit of study. Just as really giving a presentation to even a few people almost certainly beats just mentally walking through it in your head.

Obviously you can try to create a real simulation but it's probably not the same thing.

The increase from 1320 to 1490 is pretty significant when it comes to college rankings. Although 1490 isn't anything stellar, it's the top 10 or 5 percent at my school. My main point was just the fact that, by paying collegeboard more money for more retakes, your score will increase. The SAT doesn't seem like a great indicator of anything besides one's ability to perform on the SAT

There’s a range you can improve on. If you are an idiot you don’t have a chance of improving that much, but mommy and daddy can buy you a 4.0 at a private school. Can’t bribe your way to a 1600 SAT anywhere near as easily as the private school game can be played. And this is another reason why I like SATs over grades - the poor can get a leg up over the rich.

Yeah, let's base it all on a test mom and dad pay for after all the prep classes they paid for. High school is free most places, friend.

I'll take a standardized test over arbitrary grades any day. Grades are far, far easier to game in so many ways (switch to an easier major!) than the SAT. Just ask anyone gunning for med school or law school - they will opt for the easier class over the harder one if it means their GPA has less risk of dropping.

> Grades are far more fuzzy but generally show an ability to stick with something over the long term and execute on projects.

What grades show is how well the student presented what the teacher wanted returned. Generally, but not always, students that are more intelligent than their teachers and may even have a better grasp of the subject don't receive the highest grades. Grades are about obedience, not learning. The "best" students are children of teachers.

> That said I prefer IQ over grades.

Why would any rational individual take an IQ test? IQ cannot be changed and whatever outcome doesn't change your course of action, being the fact that you have to work hard.

Low IQ: Gotta work hard

High IQ: Gotta work hard

> Why would any rational individual take an IQ test? IQ cannot be changed and whatever outcome doesn't change your course of action

From what I can tell, most professions have a rough IQ floor. If you're above the floor, more IQ can always help, but other traits like conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to matter more. But if you're substantially below the floor, there's almost no chance that hard work will help you bridge the gap.

Have you taken one?

It certainly felt like the kind of test that could be improved with practice. Not as easily as the SAT, sure, but certain patterns seemed to appear, in a way I bet I could prep for.

I haven't tested that hypothesis, but if anyone wants to fund me to take a bunch over the next year... let me know ;)

(Why did I take it in the first place? Curiosity. Maybe also a bit of vanity. "Rationality" seems like a false idol to focus purely on in general, for decisions.)

I've taken at least 5 over the course of my life. Possibly a 6th that I didn't know about (possibly age 5 or 6?), but I know of taking multiple between ages 9 through mid 30s.

Regardless of the test, the percentile numbers didn't change.

I've read people claim on and off for years that you can "study" for them and "improve" your scores, but that's not been my experience. Any variations you get might be slight, but you're extremely unlikely to get any statistical difference... unless....

I had a test at age 9 for a specific 'gifted' program starting in our school district. 2 months later, we moved districts, and I was given the exact same test again. I aced it, because I'd asked my parents some of the questions I didn't understand the first time. I 'confessed'(?) to the test giver in the second district that I'd already had these exact same questions 3 months earlier, which they noted. I'd already 'qualified' after the first test, so again, I don't think there was any significantly different outcome (I 'qualified' after the second test in the new district as well).

IQ scores do change over time, largely as a function of curiosity and conscientiousness. You could be a genius toddler but if you fail to learn, your IQ continually diminish relative to your peers

IQ has a map/territory problem as well. The theory is that you have some underlying IQ, and the test is a tool to determine what your IQ is. It is well established that practice can improve your score on an IQ test. However, that does not imply an improvement in your underlying IQ.

Close. Improving your score on an IQ test does improve your IQ. Your IQ is literally that score. What it does not improve is g, your underlying general intelligence.

You could change your life/career plans based on the results. Whether to go to college or not, whether to pick a job that pays well immediately or one with more potential for long-term advancement, that sounds like the kind of decision where knowing your IQ would help.

No. Whatever your IQ you should aim high and let nature put you in your place.

you cannot pre-emptly put yourself in your place, that’s the best route for depression and depression sucks whether you have a high, normal or low IQ

So much for being rational.

I lost points on the SAT for mixing up 2 pi r and pi r^2 - left out the 2 for the former. (That's the one that stands out as a duh, I knew better, one - I forget what else I missed.) There were also a LOT of analogies. I've read that those have been removed, I dunno how the math section is, but both of those were much more "knowing things" than innate intelligence. Grades tend to require both "knowing things" and longer-term discipline; I could see where that would be advantageous.

Grades have a disadvantage of A's being way too common, though - no resolution at the top of the scale.

SAT/ACT are basically poor IQ tests, because study for them results in heavily loading onto memory aspect of IQ but unloading on some others somewhat.

Ideally, you would want an IQ test and the 'Big Five' personality traits. The latter though can be annoying to get.

I have seen some firms get very good results by basically using a disguised IQ test, there are some firms that basically compose the tests, give them to 1000s of people and perform the factor analysis to extract IQ from the test, then contract the the test out for hiring departments. Some of those tests are pretty creative in that most people wouldn't know they were taking an IQ test.

Before people state strong assumptions one way or the other, have there ever been any studies that measured the relationship between test scores and IQ? If so, what did they say?

It’s an IQ test. Not a culture fair one, like Raven’s Progressive Matrices, but it’s as much an IQ test as coarse, quick and dirty one like Wonderlic is.

> Scholastic assessment or g? The relationship between the scholastic assessment test and general cognitive ability

> There is little evidence showing the relationship between the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and g (general intelligence). 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. We provide equations for converting SAT scores to estimated IQs; such conversion could be useful for estimating premorbid IQ or conducting individual difference research with college students.

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

Yes. If you look you will find published literature on the subject. The plots plotting SAT/ACT and IQ will have an obvious trend but be very noisy. Hence why they are poor IQ tests, you can have a decent guess at someone's IQ based on their test results but it's not ideal.

The whole point of IQ tests at the very beginning was to predict how well you can do academically. Technically every test is an IQ test.

"That said I prefer IQ over grades." The evil in this is: Your IQ doesn't change. So, have the the children take an IQ test at age 10, then just setup their college admissions right there. Deny kids that don't have the right IQ. No need to bother with GPAs or "trying".

I mean, it's the logic I used to decide not to pursue a career in professional basketball as someone of below average height. Do you think encouraging short people to pursue a career in basketball is productive in any way?

If you're 10 years old and have a below average IQ, don't bother aiming for a PHD at MIT in atrophysics.

Very much disagree. Lazy genius is useless. Hard working, low IQ gets stuff done. Obviously hard working genius is ideal. But without the ability to focus on longer term goals, which grades is an indicator of more so than test scores, your high IQ means nothing.

I would argue it very, very much matters what you're trying to do. If you're harvesting apples, then sure. Hard working beats IQ. Hell, IQ is a handicap, not a plus.

If you're doing research, you have the other side of the spectrum, IQ beats everything, and hard work can actually prevent you from finding solutions.

Research is lots of hard work. There’s a minimum level of intelligence needed, but I’d rather have an acceptable intelligence+hard worker as a collaborator than a genius+slacker.

There aren’t many Archimedes out there and most research is the result of lots of labor.

How do you define "acceptable intelligence"? By their ability to better a lazy genius? I don't really see a non-tautological way to define "acceptable intelligence"

What I meant is that intelligence is required to complete the required education, design studies, carry them out, etc.

It’s some level but not genius.

This sort of idea ... I get it, but it runs stuck on what exactly "acceptable intelligence" is. That would be the sort of intelligence 99% or more of the population doesn't have.

Also at some level "I'd rather have" becomes pointless. Choices are usually 1 individual, or waiting 6 months to a year. I don't know if we're in a bubble but I've seen the same in biochemistry research and computer research: academics take everyone they possibly can, because master or above and they will get an unbeatable offer from a huge company very soon.

Good thing SAT scores also measure hard work, planning, and follow up. You can improve your scores significantly with the hard work of a few hours and checking out a sample test or prep book at your local library or school

SAT/ACT measure how good you are at following rules and how much time/money you have to go to tutors and study 1000 page textbooks outlining specific strategies to maximize your score.

Most of the evidence I see suggests that working through a test book at your local library goes a long way towards erasing most of the disadvantage associated with going into the test cold. Yes, there's some time involved but I'm pretty sure declining returns set in fairly quickly. There are clearly advantages associated with recognizing the type of questions that will often be on the test. But a lot beyond that is actually knowing the vocabulary and the various geometry, etc. material.

Now, if you basically don't know or have trouble understanding the material? I wonder to what degree some tutoring and even a fair bit of time are going to make up for years of poor school outcomes (for whatever reason). Some specific strategies are 1.) pretty straightforward--if you can quickly narrow options down, maybe guess and move on--and 2.) won't move the needle a lot.

Really? My SAT scores were average for admit to the college I attended. I never had a tutor, never looked at test strategy guides, and took the test only once, and my parents were lower middle class. The people I know who got 800s (perfect SAT scores in those days) did not game the system - 5 minutes talking to them would reveal that they were very, very smart individuals.

Want to do well on the SATs?

1. take all the math classes your high school offers

2. pay attention in those classes

3. read a lot of adult-level books (I read tons of scifi)

and you'll do fine without needing any gamesmanship.

BTW, I'd advise caution with gaming your way into a tough college, rather than doing the work. It will assume a solid foundation in math, and you'll still have to work hard. Having to struggle, then transfer out after a year, is not doing yourself a favor.

Me, I struggled and came pretty close to flunking out.

Do you have any sources for this? SAT scores aren't highly correlated with household income, there is something but it's far from everything.

In my opinion and experience of the results my peers got, these kinds of standardized tests were really pretty good. The tests and studying methods themselves didn't necessarily mimic what you would do in a real job or even a university degree and sure seemed stupid and annoying at the time when you had to do the damned things... But stepping back and thinking about it, for the most part the people who were intelligent and capable of a motivated and disciplined approach to academics and fields that typically require degrees did actually tend to score better than people who were lacking in those things.

Yes there was the occasional very intelligent person who wasn't disciplined or motivated for whatever reason who did poorly. They weren't or wouldn't have been happy or done well in college either though, for the most part. And there were a few uninspiring intellects who got extremely high marks withe the sheer grind, although I think that's an impressive attribute itself and probably very useful for a lot of fields. There certainly were not hordes of Einsteins and Newtons just slipping through the cracks because they didn't test well.

So I don't know. There is this "common wisdom" that tests are terrible, which is an attractive idea. I just don't know if that's really true. Maybe they're actually pretty good for a large proportion of people.

Anything you can prep for - grades included - is going to trend towards being largely influenced by "who has the most time and money."

I don't have any good ideas to get away from that.

> who has the most time and money

Or what matters most - who is willing to put in the effort.

You already have 6 hours a day in high school. Don't need more time than that. As for money, that's not needed either. Your high school math books will do. There's also the public library, the Kahn Academy, youtube, etc.

Having a more centered economic distribution amongst children is a good one. It is non-sensical and anti-meritocratic to have a large enough skew amongst child starting positions as to render meritocratic testing irrelevant.

It's possible our declining academic performance is simply another artifact of rising inequality.

Yes, let's solve the problem of skewed student assessment by solving inequality. Your solution is far less tractable than the problem!

Or is it? we generally know how to solve inequality - we don't know how to solve student assessment. Higher taxes and rising inflation/interest rates reduce inequality.

Compared to grades it is certainly a magnitude less dependent on how much time/money you have, how many tutors you have, and how good you are at reading textbooks.

Tutoring and extensive exam-specific prep can boost scores. They are not necessary for getting a high score.

Which is a good predictor for succeeding in college, including college success.

So if a student who has to work 30 hours a week to support his family scores worse than a student who has no job and visits a tutor to study an SAT prep book outlining bizarre strategies about deciding when to not answer a question to score higher, that means the latter student should be preferred for college admissions?

IQ tests show the ability to sit down and do pointless tasks which an authority figure has told you are meaningful and you must guess what that authority figure wants you to do.

Extremely valuable skills for white collar drones.

Completely meaningless as a measure of actual intelligence though.

IQ is the most reliable and most valid measure of general intelligence we have been able to come up with. It is good enough for many clinical purposes, eg assessing brain damage, and also just so happens to correlate very strongly with just about every "life outcome" you can think of. Does it measure everything imaginable about human intelligence? No. But it measures what we actually know about very well. To call it completely meaningless is absurd.

You should reread what I said.

Be specific.

The ability to do boring arbitrary tasks is much more strongly correlated with the measures that IQ proponents cite as proof it's a meaningful measure than with whatever they mean by intelligence.

We could get the same results by forcing people to complete white noise patterns and seeing how long it takes them to quit.

That's an interesting idea, and while I doubt that it is true it seems like something you could determine experimentally. Has anyone done that or are you just asserting it?

I’m not sure what IQ tests you mean but that doesn’t sound like any I’ve used.

The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following.

Take spatial in tests [0]. They aren’t about rule following so much as problem solving and lateral thinking.

Also iq tests are standardized and normalized. They have flaws, certainly, and are no way meaningless. It’s the best that we have until we get something better and there’s lots of correlations between iq and positive life outcomes. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_intelligence_(psycholo... [1] “ IQ correlates positively with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-and-...

>The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following.

General mental ability as defined by sitting down and doing an arbitrary boring task, viz. following a rule that you don't see much point in but someone important told you to do.

The ability to do well on those tasks correlates much more strongly with:

>family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty

than whatever intelligence is.

In short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone.

The task isn’t arbitrary. It’s designed to measure mental ability. And it’s not boring as it can be quite short. And the rules should be quite easy to understand as they involve things like “which shapes fit together.”

The test is not designed to be confusing or hard to understand.

I expect IQ is also correlated with being a white collar drone (pretty awesome) but it’s also correlated with whatever intelligence is, as imperfectly as we’ve defined it.

The tasks which can be reduced to finite integer sequences are absolutely arbitrary.

E.g. you're given a finite set of pictures and expected to guess what the next picture is from a few possibilities. The answer is that it's all of them since any finite sequence has an infinite number of generating functions. The only way to get it right is to try and read the mind of whoever wrote the test and guess what they meant. An invaluable skill to have in the white collar workforce when guessing what your boss actually wants from you. But white collar empathy is not intelligence.

From the IQ test listed here: https://www.mensa.org/public/mensa-iq-challenge literally all of them are reducible to questions about integer sequences.

> short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone.

But why so snarky?

I’m not a fan of ad hominem but the most reasonable guess to me is that someone did poorly on IQ tests and is working to justify why they are bad. Or they have a super high score and are trying to ultimately justify their argument with “well I scored 179 and even I think they are bad.”

I don’t think we’ll have closure.

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