<p>Why do people claim this? At the highest level of college entrance, entrance is getting much, much, more difficult. Plus, the Flynn Effect states that what was 120 IQ a few years ago is today only average 100 IQ! Even average SATs are increasing, as are most AP distributions.</p>
<p>Because out of all the industrialized nations, America is alarmingly behind in math and science… So although we may not be getting dumber, we certainly aren’t getting smarter fast enough.</p>
<p>I doubt if IQ is going up. SAT scores are going up but only because of practice and numerous attempts. Plenty of 2250 SAT kids likely will have an IQ of around 100. They become good at memorizing, but they don’t understand half of what is being memorized.</p>
<p>We have a terrible high school system where most people are taught to memorize, but our colleges are the best in the world. We need to remove standardized testing or at least make it better. Most public schools are starting to aim classes just to pass state exams and SAT’s. They do this because most funding comes from these tests. Also it make people feel they’re stupid while they are just bad at taking tests. IB systems shows what a good education should be like. Instead of memorization most answers are free response and thinking. They require an essay and research. That’s good education. Teachers should be free to teach without government telling them what to do. AP tests are close but most tests are multiple choice. Ap does judge grades more on free response however.</p>
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Let me guess. You have done little to no research on this before you posted. It seems that you are completely unaware of the Flynn effect or the correlation between SAT score and IQ.</p>
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<p>If SAT scores are going up, it is only [url=<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171]slightly[/url”>http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171]slightly[/url</a>]. There is no need to harken to the days of the two-part SAT before the math and verbal sections were re-centered. </p>
<p>And you do know that the SAT is a reasoning test? There isn’t much memorization. </p>
<p>As adlfig0 did well to point out, a high SAT score will be correlated with a high IQ score. An SAT score of 2250 puts you in the [url=<a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2012.pdf]99th[/url”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2012.pdf]99th[/url</a>] percentile while an IQ score of 100 would put you squarely at mediocrity. Test prep will improve your score to be sure, but you can study and inflate your IQ score too.</p>
<p>Because you’re all stupid, mwahahahah :D</p>
<p>It is correct. SAT does have a correlation to IQ and this has been demonstrated in numerous studies. A person cannot judge a whole population of students based on less than 1% of the group that obtain very high scores. There are many factors that goes into showing that one Nation is more or less advance than another in their education system. The US face many challenges to close this gap in education, from poorly trained teachers to high immigration rate and an array of other parental and social economical factors in between.</p>
<p>lol I just watched this and researched this and I agree with it lol. We need a better school system here in america.</p>
<p><a href=“Programme for International Student Assessment - Wikipedia”>Programme for International Student Assessment - Wikipedia;
<p>If you look at the results from 2006 to 2009, America is becoming increasingly worse in all areas compared to other nations. The education system definitely needs to be changed.</p>
<p>“Plenty of 2250 SAT kids likely will have an IQ of around 100. They become good at memorizing, but they don’t understand half of what is being memorized.”</p>
<p>What exactly do you have to memorize for the SAT anyway? (Other than maybe vocab words, and I feel like native English speakers who have read challenging books for their English classes should have a vague idea of most of the words anyway - you don’t need to actually know the full definitions.)</p>
<p>“At the highest level of college entrance, entrance is getting much, much, more difficult.”</p>
<p>Yeah, but how is that relevant to the intelligence of Americans in general?</p>
<p>Forget about other nations, standardized testing, IQ scores, and formal education itself.</p>
<p>A dumb person is one doesn’t think through things. Some types of idiocy:
[ul][<em>]not figuring out how to use user-friendly software
[</em>]frequently making grammatical mistakes in a native language
[<em>]making logical fallacies and being persuaded by fallacies committed by others
[</em>]impulsively making self-destructive decisions
[li]miscommunication that leads to animosity instead of an attempt to communicate more clearly[/ul][/li]I respect honest mistakes that are the result of thorough analysis of incomplete information. I am very patient with ignorant people as long as they desire a better understanding of what they don’t understand and are willing and able to learn. Sadly, I rarely encounter people like that. Most people seem to be educated fools, which are worse than uneducated thinkers. I live in a disguised anti-intellectual culture. Geniuses are esteemed while the general population is content to let others do their thinking for them.</p>
<p>And to everyone who complains about the US being “behind”: maybe you should stop expecting your nation to be the best at everything. If you have a right to be upset about American students mostly scoring lower than Finnish, Japanese, and Australian students, then wouldn’t a Finn, Jap, or Aussie have just as much of a right to be upset about students from their nation mostly scoring lower than Americans?</p>
<p>The US is not heaven on earth where all the smartest people think of the greatest ideas before anyone else and start implementing these ideas in school while the rest of the world just stands on Americans’ shoulders. I hear plenty of jealousy, malcontent, and pessimism regarding the simple fact that the US is outperformed by other nations in certain areas. This transcends math and science performance on standardized tests; the America-first sentiment pervades the economy, the military, research & development, the Olympics, and everything else that can possibly be quantified and construed as a race between groups of people separated by national borders. It’s a rare treat to encounter someone who sees through the bigotry of nationalism and would applaud other nations for making their own advances instead of complaining that the US didn’t accomplish a higher degree of the same improvement.</p>
<p>That’s why when I say I live in an anti-intellectual culture, I’m not accusing the US as a whole of scoring lower on a test of a subset of the population. My sentiments are based on whether most of the people I interact with are able and willing to use their mental capacities to improve the way they live and communicate with others. That has nothing to do with how math is taught in South Korea.</p>
<p>Sorry to disagree with you. I am an American. I was not born here, and I know the US face many problems, but I have lived in countries in Europe and in South America and compared to those countries America is heaven on Earth.</p>
<p>I respect your experience and I believe you when you say it has been better for you in the US than anywhere else. That doesn’t validate the sentiment that because American students are American, they deserve a measurably “better” education than what students get in nations that aren’t America.</p>
<p>If someone could explain why I should care how students in the nation in which I live rank against foreign students, that would be great. I’m curious.</p>
<p>@Halogen, duh! Competition drives nearly every aspect of American life. THAT’S what’s wrong with the education system (in my opinion anyway). </p>
<p>I see nothing wrong in wanting to improve our education system to create better, more effective thinkers, but there is a difference between that and simply trying to outscore every other nation.</p>
<p>Now, my <em>biggest</em> issue is with these standardized tests. Ok, so suppose SAT correlates with IQ (I haven’t read anything on it, but I’m just going to take other users’ word for it), big whoop. Everyone deserves a good education. And not everyone is a good test taker. There have been studies showing that there is an actual biological factor when it comes to test taking ( I HAVE read a few articles on this) that can inhibit a student’s abilities when under tremendous pressure (you know, kind of like the type experienced when faced with high stakes standardized tests.) I’m not a big fan of the state issued tests either. Not only are they uncoordinated and unequal (which really screws over the military kids), but they take away so much from what real education is about. They lay out an agenda that allows little wiggle room for anything, so teachers end up teaching how to take a multiple choice test, and now, that is biting people in the butt. In VA, they’re revamping SOLs to be “technology enhanced”. Bye bye, multiple choice, and hello to type ins and “click all that apply” scenarios. So for the past couple of years, passing rates have plummeted because teachers don’t know what to teach once the system has been shaken up a bit, which is just sad. At my school, the administration has gone as far as taking kids out of electives for “remedial review”. There are so many things wrong with that picture. Education is suppose to open up the mind, not narrowly constrict it.</p>
<p>Honestly, work needs to be done at all levels of American education system, including teacher licensure, inter-state coordination, and national attitude toward education.
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<p>“Plenty of 2250 SAT kids likely will have an IQ of around 100. They become good at memorizing, but they don’t understand half of what is being memorized.”</p>
<p>I refute this. I am a “2250 SAT kid” (well, 2240 but 2260 super scored) and the only thing I memorized specifically for the SAT was some harder vocabulary. I have a 124 IQ. And if I were “good at memorizing”, I should think I would be able to remember where I last put my library card. No luck yet with that, though.</p>
<p>Halogen- I think you may find Immanuel Kant interesting. Try “What is Enlightenment?”, which presents an intriguing argument that people without the right of free speech are actually more free.</p>