"even if it was true" ok it is true. I'm not making it up.
i see what you're saying, they did study, but that was only because they hadnt taken geometry and it was on the test. It wasn't extensive studying on taking the ACT or something. thank you freakflag, that is what i meant.

What is wrong with the SAT, ACT, and PSAT? The fact that you can improve your score by studying, or that you can do equally well without studying, should make no difference! It's a test of how well you will do in a college like environment. Just like in college, you have some who will just 'do well.' Then you have others who study endlessly and will do equally well. So what does it matter that innate ability will improve your score? The fact that seventh graders scored that well on the test simply means they're ready for college!

Yes, evidently, innate ability is an important factor in doing well in the exam. It turns out that culture is also an important factor. If you find the word "regatta" on the test (this is a real example), you can see how culture and socio-economic status might have an impact. Preparation can also be an important factor, particularly for people that have problems with tests. That is to say that there are some people who have great difficulty responding to the format, regardless of their innate ability. These people particularly benefit from studying the logic and structure of the various types of questions. But in some sense, an ability to do well on an SAT is only a measure of your "innate" ability to do well on an SAT, which, it turns out, has few ramifications for your future performance in the university or in the real world. Which is not to say you shouldn't feel proud if you got a good score. But it turns out that frequently people with lower SAT scores outperform people with higher SAT scores once they reach the university.

If anyone is surprised by this, they might also be surprised to find that IQ tests are pretty much for shit too. Psychology identifies at least 9 different types of intelligence, most of which are not measured in an IQ test. Or the SAT for that matter.

In Spain they take entrance exams that measure how much you learned and retained in school and your ability to apply it. This seems to me a better indicator of future success.

*sigh*

Yeah, I learned afterward that the SAT is supposed to be designed to test innate ability, and studying shouldn't really help, of course that certainly doesn't stop people from studying anyway. I think I could have got a better score if I studied, well actually I think I could have got a better score if I knew there was an essay involved (that caught me off guard), so I would have done better on the old 1600 scale.

I've heard that the Verbal section of the SATs is pretty highly correlated with IQ. The thing is that IQ isn't the best correlation to academic success anyway. Stuff like, high working memory capacity is a better indication of future academic success than is IQ.

I think the SAT is a good try, even if it is flawed. It's logistically impossible for colleges to get an accurate portrayal of all their applicants, and very difficult to then compare their relative candidacy. A standardized test like the SAT at least provides somewhat of an approximation of a student's ability. I'm going on anecdotal evidence, but most of the people I consider to be intelligent did well on the SATs while most of those I don't did not. I also think this site attracts a particularly intelligent demographic, and I think this is corroborated by all the high scores being reported here.

That said, my one major beef with the SATs is that I think they severely penalize people who's first language is not English, and this is the same of many standardized tests. Some of the people who I studied the MCAT with are immigrants, and I can't imagine trying to do the verbal section in my second language, French.

"It's a test of how well you will do in a college like environment. "

Yeah, but as it turns out, it isn't...

Also, the new writing section is absolute BS. Only in a very specialized field will you ever have under an hour to write about a random topic and never get a chance to revise. It is an absolutely horrific test of writing skill.

I agree with Chrispminis, that is that the SAT and other similar tests provide a pretty good picture of a student's academic ability, but that it is by no means perfect.

However I highly doubt that "frequently" " People with lower SAT scores outperform people with higher SAT scores once they reach the university." This is clearly an exaggeration. It is fair to say that if you took 100 people who scored in the 95th percentile and 100 who scored in the 85th percentile, the ones who scored in the 95th percentile will generally outperform those who scored in the 85th percentile. However there are always students who slip through the system, as there is no way to discover the academic potential of a student to a 100% degree of accuracy, standardized tests included.

http://www.fairtest.org/facts/satvalidity.html

Fairtest seems really biased. See below:
http://www.fairtest.org/act-biased-inaccurate-and-misused

"Race, class and gender biases give White, affluent, and male test-takers an unfair edge."
"Whites still outscore all other groups. If the ACT were not biased, Asian Americans, who take more academic courses than any other group, would likely score even higher. Moreover, boys score slightly higher than girls across all races, despite boys' lower grades in high school and college when matched for identical courses."

This site seems to be racial profiling ethinc groups, as well as gender. Is fairtest trying to say that asians are smarter and guys are intellectually inferior to girls? These quotes were taken from the second paragraph explaing ACT biased...

I took the PSAT, SAT, and ACT and it seemed to me that the SATs were far more "culturally biased" than the ACT. The SAT tended to ask more about specific words, rules, processes, etc. (e.g. The old man was a renowned story-teller, some even considered him a ____ a) valedictorian b) sociopath c) raconteur). It seems to me that students who grow up in more affluent/educated homes would be more likely to have come across the correct word. The ACT tends to ask more about reasoning processes, where all the information is given. This is why I believe the SAT is being phased out in favor of the ACT.

This racial bias that is so frowned upon is absurd. Of course Asian Americans will score better, they, as a culture, are much more focused on academia then African Americans and Caucasians. Not that that is always the case, but I would say that in pretty much all of the gifted programs I attended I, a Caucasian, was a minority. This picture of the homogenous country, where race makes no difference in your career and education is ridiculous. It does! That you see this in the ACT is no surprise, as it simply reflects the true discrepancies in academic performance. The issue of "correct" admissions is retarded, how can we decided whether it was "correct?" Do you look back and say that that student would "most likely," have done better if he "had" been accepted? Why should we be angry that the test is advantageous to richer kids? Is it not so that college is advantageous to richer kids as well? These issues speak to a larger issue with education, not an inherent problem with testing.

"Is fairtest trying to say that asians are smarter and guys are intellectually inferior to girls?"
No, Bob, they're just reporting the statistics, because the tests have been accused of gender, cultural and socio-economic bias. Asians and girls perform better than Caucasian males in the classroom, but they score lower on the test. Therefore, the test is not a good indicator of performance, and you might also come to the conclusion that there is something about the logic underlying the test questions that makes it unfairly easier for white males. BTW, Asains do score higher on IQ tests on average than Caucasians, curiously this doesn't carry over to the SAT or ACT.

Hm... on the topic of biases in the SAT, I come from a disadvantaged (to say the very least) background, and dropped out of college after one and a half semesters. My SAT score? 1980, after being up all night, no less.

Fairtest has an agenda. You can never, *never*, trust anyone's stats when they have an agenda behind them.

mcbry, that was a good link. I'm not sure, but a r^2 of 0.22 seems pretty decent to me. I'm surprised at how well the SAT predicts compared to high school average. If this is true, then the SAT is about as good a predictor for grades as IQ.

"The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns[67] states that wherever it has been studied, children with high scores on tests of intelligence tend to learn more of what is taught in school than their lower-scoring peers. The correlation between IQ scores and grades is about .50. However, this means that they explain only 25% of the variance. Achieving good grades depends on many factors other than IQ, such as "persistence, interest in school, and willingness to study" (p. 81)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#School_performance

The fact that the SAT and high school averages cover only a fraction of the variation in college grades should come as no surprise. The other factors involved in college grades, such as personal factors like work ethic, ambition, and self control , as well as exogenous factors such as illness, heartbreak, tragedy and the factors exerted by the personal qualities of their friends are much more difficult to measure or accurately depict in a college application. I think that explaining 22% of the variation is pretty good considering all of the other factors that play into your GPA that can't be predicted, or have no reliable quantification as of yet.

Work ethic, ambition, and self control can be reasonably evaluated through the students transcripts and extracurricular activities. A valedictorian or salutatorian or even a cum laude who also had an active extracurricular life including some community service or other volunteer service shows a solid work ethic, ambition, and self control. The remaining exogenous factors are a little more difficult. Illness and tragedy while in school usually have a history the college can see but "heartbreak" (man up is what I say there) and friends (choose your friends wisely) are tougher.

Hahaha, I don't know how it was when you applied to college, but I know that everyone these days is heavily padding their transcripts and resumes, turning bullshit into gold. I would bet that at least 75% of the student executive positions in various clubs and organizations and whatnot do either nothing, or very little beyond token duties, yet they take on aggrandizing titles. At McGill, every student organization exec is made up of President, and about five Vice Presidents, haha. Students will volunteer for 30 days from mid-June to mid-July and write it up as two months of volunteer work, or they'll volunteer for an afternoon every three weeks for a year and write it up as a year's worth. Most of the extracurricular activities I undertook during my high school career were because my parents put them upon me and created external incentives for my participation. It had nothing to with ambition or initiative, it's just a strategy that most asian parents use because they know how to game the system.

I'm sure there are plenty of hard working and ambitious do gooders who really do care about their community and give back, and I know quite a few, but they get lost amongst the masses of inflated CVs. I don't think it's logistically viable for colleges to give each applicant the inspection they might deserve. I'm also sure there are some very good admissions officers out there, who x-ray through bullshit and work predictive wonders given that all they have is whats on paper, but I think most will just check marks, test scores, skim the PSE, and make a call.

Well, things were a bit different in the early 80s.

so what about those kids who go to college early? what are everyones' thoughts on that?

Interesting lot, they are.

A bunch of my friends are/have done that. In fact one even graduated hs at 15 (though she just went to a community college after that). I have another friend who is graduating this year as a junior and is going to be studying music (she's a fantastic harpist). Another friend of mine wants to graduate this year as a sophomore and go to alaska to study earth sciences. haha For the most part I don't think that they're mature enough to really get the full benefit of college (the network you form there is almost more important than your degree), but that's only for the ones who actually go off to college. Going to a community college is nbd.

If nbd appeared on my SAt, my score would go down.

pardon if I don't use proper MLA formatting and grammar while talking on the internet Mr. Smartass. :P

It wasn't a criticism, it's just another example of how vocabulary is cultural. I like that you use nomenclature I'm not familiar with. It forces me to learn. For those who are still lingering in the dark about nbd, it means: Network Blocking Device, as in the sentence: "Going to a community college is network blocking device".

That is all.

Really? Network Blocking Device? What does that even mean? I thought he meant "no big deal".

sharper than usual Chris. Can't get any past you today.

Nah! NBD is related to SBD. SBD = Silent But Deadly. NBD = Noisy But Deadly.

@jman"the network you form there is almost more important than your degree" I get what your saying, but i dont think this is true for everyone. I mean, look at the kids that would be entering college. Really intelligent kids who are like 14 and 15. to those kids, i think what you learn in college (in your classes) would be really important to them. like the knowlege would be more valuable than friendships. Just a thought. and they would still make connections, they wouldnt be like totally ignored for being younger. Again, i speak with expeirence like you, i have friends who have done this.