1980 SAT got into Harvard. How awesome is this?

[DerrickA]

<p>^more evidence that IQ is not the best, or even close to the best predictor of intelligence. Ramaswami, even if you are as smart as you think, you or your son won’t get others to follow you by p1ssing them off. Hence social competence.</p>

[b4nnd20]

<p>WHYYYY are people insisting on dragging out this leadership-IQ correlation? Intelligence and personality are two different things. That’s why there’s a conflict in the first place.</p>

<p>Admissions is be based on 2 different, separate, unrelated criteria: intelligence and personality, with intelligence weighted more heavily in the ideal world. That is my opinion. I’m guessing frrph, epiphany, etc. want the opposite ratio.</p>

[DerrickA]

<p>I do not think that they want the opposite ratio, but are rather arguing in support of holistic admissions under the status quo. Or at least, I am.</p>

[frrrph]

<p>‘The Bell Curve’: too smooth to be true.(The Bell Curve: Laying Bare the Resurgence of Scientific Racism). Michael Nunley.
American Behavioral Scientist v39.n1 (Sept-Oct 1995): pp74(10). From InfoTrac OneFile.</p>

<p>

Their fraud begins in their introduction with a series of astonishing assertions. They list a number of propositions they claim form the very foundation of their book, but for which they tell us they are not going to provide any evidence. These include such notions as that there is such a thing as general cognitive ability; that IQ is the most accurate measure of it; and that IQ tests are not biased against any social, economic, ethnic, or racial groups.(2) They are excused from providing any evidence for these assertions because, as they put it, these statements are “beyond significant technical dispute” (p. 23). This struck me as odd because, you see, I’m an anthropologist with an interest in cross-cultural studies of cognition. And if I were trying to think of things that might be considered “beyond technical dispute” from cross-cultural studies in anthropology, they would be that human cognition is far too complex to be captured on a simple linear scale; that IQ measures only a very narrow band of all kinds of cognitive achievement; and that tests of cognitive achievement cannot avoid being culturally biased by the content, materials, and style of testing used.(3)

</p>

<p>Unless you want to claim, rama, that black, hispanic, native american and poor people are INNATELY LESS INTELLIGENT - the correlation between SAT and intelligence you keep pulling out of the air simply does not hold up. Holistic admissions policies are crucial precisely because of this: cultural and socioeconomic factors are KEY in succeeding in these biased tests. The alarmist idea you keep upholding where low-scoring admittees push out entitled, “truly” intelligent, high-scoring ones from elite institutions, leading to a horrible, inevitable dilution of intelligence has no basis in reality, in fact. You are factually, simply, wrong, and I will keep posting the factual evidence until you at least TRY and countradict its massive body with something tangible.</p>

[frrrph]

<p>

The original intent of the SAT was to measure the innate academic ability of potential college students. Lemann writes, “Inside ETS, it was a cherished assumption that the SAT was uncoachable…that mental tests were a measurement of a physical property of the brain, analogous to taking a blood sample.”</p>

<p>This idea that the SAT could judge academic potential independent of previous influence has been criticized since the test’s first days. Brigham raised the first flags, followed soon after by liberal educators W. Allison Davis and Robert J. Havirhurst, who argued in The Scientific Monthly in 1948 that mental testing was a fraud which measured socioeconomic advantages more than actual ability.</p>

<p>SAT scores today correlate closely with the family income of the test takers, according to the ETS’ own data. One major reason is the widespread use of expensive test preparation services, such as Kaplan and The Princeton Review. These courses-which range from $700 for a month of group instruction to hundreds of dollars per hour for intensive one-on-one coaching-have been demonstrated to raise SAT scores.</p>

<p>ETS downplays the impact of test preparation on SAT scores, but its own research found that short-term preparation programs (about 20 hours) improve total scores an average of about 25 points. Longer-term programs (about 40 hours) improve scores an average of 45 points.</p>

<p>Wealthier schools often integrate SAT preparation into the curriculum. The York Preparatory Academy, a small private school on Manhattan’s west side, pays Kaplan to teach its juniors and seniors test-taking strategies twice a week.</p>

<p>“Everything we do is geared to getting our students into college,” says York’s director of college preparation Jamie Stewart, who has more than 30 years of experience in admissions counseling. She proudly pointed to the private school’s 100 percent placement rate into college for its senior class, bolstered not only by SAT preparation, but by intensive guidance counseling and by courses which teach students how to write their admissions essays.</p>

<p>SAT scores are raised not only by expensive preparation services, but also by the amount of money a school district invests in a student’s elementary, junior high and high school education. </p>

<p>[…]</p>

<p>Bracey’s argument is bolstered by a 1996 Harvard Educational Review article by Brian Powell and Lala Carr Steelman, which found that SAT scores increase by 15 points for every $1,000 a school spends above the national average. </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Will continue quote and citation in next message.</p>

[b4nnd20]

<p>OK the SAT sucks…what is your proposal for a tool to measure or indicate intelligence? Even under the holistic system, that is important.</p>

[frrrph]

<p>

For new immigrants, Swenson concludes, “the SAT is not a good indicator of their success. Our students might get low scores, but they work so hard-probably at least twice as long on everything as a native English speaker. And that kind of determination often translates into success at college, even if their test scores are low.”

<a href=“http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/race_class/edu-matt2.htm[/url]”>http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/race_class/edu-matt2.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The SAT score increases with 30-50 points for every $10,000 income bracket. This chart breaks the score ranges down between both ethnicity and income bracket:</p>

<p>Less than $10,000/year income bracket - 864
$50,000 - $60,000/year income bracket - 1012
More than $100,000/year income bracket - 1123 </p>

<p>Asian, Asian Amer. or Pacific Islander - 1083
White - 1063
Amer. Indian or Alaskan Native - 962
Other Hispanic or Latino - 921
Puerto Rican - 909
Mexican or Mexican American - 905
African American or Black - 857</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.fairtest.org/examarts[/url]”>http://www.fairtest.org/examarts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>So tell us, rama, where do these incredible discrepancies come from? Black people just aren’t as smart as white people? Then how do you explain black children adopted into white middle- and upperclass families magically “gaining” up to 21 IQ points, in addition to scoring higher on standardized tests?</p>

<p>Do you need more? 'Cause I got a lot more lined up.</p>

[frrrph]

<p><a href=“http://www.maec.org/natstats.html[/url]”>http://www.maec.org/natstats.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>And then, well what do you know, here we have this:</p>

<p>

The SAT, according to figures compiled by Ford and Campos of ETS, ranges in accuracy from 8 to 15% in the prediction of freshman grade point average3 (11). This means that, on the average, for 88% of the applicants (though it is impossible to know which ones) an SAT score will predict their grade rank no more accurately than a pair of dice.

</p>

<p>

As dismal as these self-reported results are, the actual results are lower still. ETS has been known to take liberties with correlation coefficients for use in defending the SAT. Slack and Porter, in a 1980 Harvard Educational Review article, showed that Ford and Campos consistently misreported validity calculations in an apparent effort to make the SAT look better. Ford and Campos found average predictive accuracies of 16% for SAT-Verbal, 12% for SAT-Math, and 25% for high school record (11). But when Slack and Porter redid the arithmetic they found actual values of 14%, 10%, and 27% respectively (165). The errors were quite systematic, and always in favor of the SAT. Previous grades are thus about twice as good as the SAT at predicting academic achievement.

</p>

<p>

If the SAT is an extremely weak predictor of academic potential it is a moderate predictor of family income. Average scores are proportional to family income: students from families with higher incomes tend to receive higher scores8. Estimates of the correlation between SAT score and family income vary from .23 to .40 (Crouse & Trusheim and Doermann, respectively). This ranking by income prevails not just when large groups are averaged together but also among applicants within the same institution.</p>

<p>A table from Crouse & Trusheim’s book The Case Against the SAT (reprinted below) indicates that SAT scores differentiate people not only by income but also by their parents’ role in the economic system. The average scores of the children of professionals are higher than the children of white collar workers, which in turn, are higher than the children of blue collar workers. High school rank, which is a better measure of academic achievement than SAT scores, shows no such correlation.

</p>

<p><a href=“http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/sat.shtml[/url]”>http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/sat.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[epiphany]

<p>QUOTE:
“The IITs go strictly by test scores: yes they lose out on diversity and wholeness and they capture but one dimension but you can bet that everyone going in deserves to be in, though in a narrow sense.”</p>

<p>And you can bet that everyone going in deserves to be in, for U.S. colleges as well. It’s just that they don’t share your view of who is “deserving.” So what is really comes down to, is, for you, the battle over subjective judgments: Your subjective judgment vs. those of admissions committees of U.S. colleges; your subjective judgment about Indian institutional admissions vs. U.S. institutional admissions; your subjective judgment about the Ivy League vs. Loren Pope’s (subjective) viewpoints.</p>

<p>…All this from the man who abhors subjectivity. </p>

<p>I rest my case.</p>

<p>b4, I’ve said precious little about intelligence generically, and as it applies to college admissions. So I don’t know why you’re linking me with others who are debating this topic. I may jump into that fray later, but haven’t so far. My beef is with ramaswami’s superiority complex with regard to those who cite concrete evidence as more applicable to college admissions than “abstract reasoning.” (He cannot understand how a truly intelligent person could have both an excellent abstract grasp & concrete interpretation at the same time – which in fact anybody of superior intelligence <em>would</em> be able to understand, with no struggle.)</p>

[b4nnd20]

<p>I know you didn’t comment on anything relevant, that’s why I asked you to Or do you think intelligence can’t be measured and therefore should be scrapped entirely in terms of admissions?</p>

[ramaswami]

<p>frrph, I am not citing my experience. One man’s experience does not a science make.I do not have a grudge against the Ivies. After all my S had good acceptances to many of them. The citations used so far are not from highly regarded journals. Read J of Personality or the journals in testing and measurement. Unfortunately, as a practising clinical psychologist I cannot easily access journals, no good Univ. library close by and do not have subscription to Internet psyc journals. But I do periodic searches and distinctly remember to have come across the data I cited. I admit that I may come across as less than credible by asking you to rely on me. Some of you, with access, can check it out. But not with the journals you cited. Adopted black children gain just as adopted kids of schizophrenics show lower rates of disease; 20% of loading on g comes from environent. 80% of IQ is heritable. Both IQ and SAT are correlated with wealth, SES (socio econ status) but that feeds into 20% of the variance. Some say 30, even 40% of variance.Still genetics account for a huge dose. So, please be prepared and open to the idea that some races, yes maybe, maybe blacks are inferior in intelligence. They do score poorly on the Reiter and matrices scales (non verbal tests of intelligence). Yes, the American constitution was revolutionary for its time and a trend setter but since then others have exceeded that constitution and the various amendments. As far as America churning out brilliant minds, perhaps a great many of them are immigrants. Yes, America used to and has had a long tradiition. City College used to be a bastion of meritocracy. What has been may not be what will be. So, I am sounding a note of caution. I fear that selective American colleges are not wise in their admissions. I do not have the answers but many of you are very very concrete, asking for and providing specific citations. As few of you will know, one or two papers mean nothing, you need a vast literature review to make sense of the field and I have done it from time to time. Do not take my word. Go talk to an academic psychologist who works in the area of IQ and measurement methodology. Go talk to a professor or two who teahces leadership. But we should engage in personal attacks on one’s brain ,etc. Let us not be uncouth.</p>

[DerrickA]

<p>"So, please be prepared and open to the idea that some races, yes maybe, maybe blacks are inferior in intelligence. "</p>

<p>You probably shouldn’t even toe the line.</p>

[ramaswami]

<p>derrick, F. Scott Fitzgerald perhaps gave the best definition of intelligence when he said it was the capacity to hold two opposing ideas in one’s head at the same time and still function.</p>

<p>All of you who oppose me should harbor the thought I may be correct, I should harbor the thought I am totally wrong. I should perhaps harbor the thought that all races are equally endowed in intelligence and that it is shaped more by environment and that it is but one small asset. </p>

<p>All of you should harbor the thought that yes blacks are inferior, that it is genetically determined, and that it is the only thing that matters.</p>

<p>We must always, eternally toy with that which is the polar opposite of our cherished beliefs.</p>

[b4nnd20]

<p>

So, please be prepared and open to the idea that some races, yes maybe, maybe blacks are inferior in intelligence

</p>

<p>this is where i completely leave your side. it’s too bad that you had to damage your credibility like this.</p>

<p>i agree, it’s important to think about opposing viewpoints…but i don’t think this even qualifies as a viewpoint. what is race, anyway? humans as a species share over 99% of all their genes with chimpanzees; we share even more with each other. the genetic (what you call “heritable”) significance of race is pretty much nil. skin color has nothing to do with intelligence, IQ, leadership, character, or anything else. unfortunately, it has a lot to do with how people treat you. ramaswami, your attitude is representative of a general negative and discriminatory social attitude that is terribly detrimental to SAT scores, among other, vastly more important things.</p>

[ramaswami]

<p>b4nnd20, I am saddened to lose your support. Nevertheless, intellectual honesty must always prevail and we must be open to all ideas, even unpalatable ones. That does not mean we must act on them. That does not mean we should not construct social structures to keep them in check. But entertain them we must, at least in debate. Yes, why not mention Hitler? If free speech ,even abhorrent speech, does not deserve a place we are all lost.</p>

[frrrph]

<p>

That does not mean we should not construct social structures to keep them in check.

</p>

<p>Such as holistic admissions policies? Or do you propose, if your racist ideas of black inferiority were true, that we settle for a perpetual black underclass completely marginalized from academia?</p>

<p>I rest my case. My sources came predominantly from scholarly journals, and if you’d bothered to even read them, from experienced researchers and very much respectable journals and reviews. Experienced anthropologists completely countering your claims, themselves citing additional research, statistics from the SAT agency itself, Harvard and Princeton journals, direct quotes from experts… If there is no way you will be able to even acknowledge all these sources, debating with you and your castles in the air is a completely hopeless enterprise.</p>

[DerrickA]

<p>Free speech should not abridge human decency.</p>

<p>There comes a point when free speech is harmful to all those involved, and it is expected that those who exercise free speech recognize these boundaries and check themselves to remain within the boundaries. For instance, you don’t go around telling people that their ancestors were slaves, or that their ancestors were victims of the holocaust, solely for the purpose of “invigorating debate”. </p>

<p>Ramaswami, thinking in the abstract is not the same as being inconclusive. It’s not that I immediately dismiss your points, and don’t want to believe some kind of evident truth. Simply put, I believe that I am more right in what I am saying, and you are more wrong. However, please do not even bother going into some sort of race argument. In this matter, I believe that I am completely right and you are completely wrong.</p>

<p>Harboring two viewpoints is not the same as refusing to come to a conclusion, it rather means that you are able to accommodate new truths.</p>

<p>I can accommodate new truths, but you have to present truths before I accommodate.</p>

[frrrph]

<p>

Nevertheless, intellectual honesty must always prevail and we must be open to all ideas, even unpalatable ones.

</p>

<p>I suppose your “intellectual honesty” does not extend to offering us concrete reasoning and facts, or anything beyond pretentiously worded platitudes such as the one above.</p>

[qswerier43]

<p>what all matters is IQ…hmmm…I would’ve loved to argue abt that a bit, but never mind, I’m just not interested to do so!</p>

<p>Post #1 really made me feel a little bit happy :D</p>

[ramaswami]

<p>frrph, the journals you cited would be laughed at in academia. Their rejection rate is 60 %, citation levels lower than 10%. All I said was akin to Larry Summers: what if women were innately deficient in science? I said, what if blacks were inferior in intelligence? If one cannot raise these questions then we no longer have a free society. Suppose one started a study and it lead to these conclusions should one then not publish it? I never called blacks idiots, that would be using free speech to abridge decency. I have no problem with holistic admissions. If the select colleges were totally above board they can publish the data on whom they admit. But I have reason to believe from their long history and from human nature that they exclude people based on prejudice. We now have internal admissions notes and comments from 30s and 40s and 50s. In 30 yrs we will uncover what they wrote about today’s candidates. Intelligence can be overrated, remember halberstam’s best and brightest who lead us to the Viet Nam debacle.</p>