Do You Agree With This Quote About IQ?

sewhappy
Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:51:07 +0000

^Doing very well, I mean 2400 / 36 would probably require so much that not many would have this type of time to prep. I do not believe that 2400 / 36 is possible without any prep.



Just not true. My older one got the proverbial 2400/36 and five 800s on subjects. And believe me, he is not a kid who preps. When he went to Presidential Scholars in DC he met kids with the same ridiculous scores. These were very, very engaged kids with a ton of activities. Son tutored for a national company for a few years while in college and he worked with a lot of kids who were prepping very, very hard just to achieve qualifying scores for mid-tier schools. My sense is that the prepping that goes on is mostly in that swatch of kids – really motivated and determined to get into their reach. Kids with the potential for the perfect scores know they are going to score high enough for whatever their reach is. The perfect score is just an artifact.



And, it is very true that there is a group that simply tests very well which has nothing to do with having superior intelligence.



Hmmm . . . well then what would you call it?



And these tests have zero to do with IQ so I don’t understand your original question.



Well, now, we really don’t have a true definition of IQ to begin with so a statement like that seems kind of meaningless to me. What we can do is get a crude read on a kid’s mathematical and verbal reasoning skill at a moment in time. Call that whatever you want. I like g-factor.

Actually, the SAT is mostly a reasoning test and comes pretty close to measuring reasoning ability, at least compared to a more content driven test like the ACT. You don’t need a lot of higher math background to do really well on the SAT. You don’t need to have read all of Tolstoy. You just need to reason your way through math and read comprehendingly through passages and remember some basic grammar.

I think many distrust the SAT because they do well in classes but not so well on the SAT. That’s because it measures reasoning and not so much skills within the classroom (taking notes, doing homework, turning stuff in on time).