True. The piece that I don’t understand is why parents would want to put their kid in a situation that they’re clearly not capable of handling? If your kid works like a dog to get his/her 1200, it’s going to be a very miserable college experience to put her into college classes with kids capable of scoring 1450. We have a similar issue for our region’s magnet school where applicants have to have a certain level IQ score as one of the entry components. There’s apparently some sort of huge underground system that many parents use to game this requirement by going to certain testers who are known to certify certain results for a fee so the kid can get into this top school.
But why? Why would you do that to your kid? Why would you put them into an environment where no matter how hard they worked they were always going to fall a bit short of most of the other students, always going to feel “dumb”, always going to be at the bottom of the class?
There are so many other good colleges where a kid with a natural ability = 1200 SAT would thrive, why would you put them somewhere they’d be outgunned from the start?
One can’t assume there is a direct correlation between high test scores, intelligence, and ability to do well in a college environment. Many colleges are test optional, including some very high caliber ones like Bowdoin. They wouldn’t take students if they didn’t think they could succeed. Obviously, by being test optional, they don’t place a huge amount of value on test scores and consider other indicators of readiness for challenging academics.
I have one child who is a strong test taker. I have another who is fairly poor at standardized tests, whose scores don’t reflect the caliber of their effort and abilities. Both have always been this way from the earliest standardized test taking experiences in elementary school. Honestly, the poor test taker is a better student in the classroom. The skill set needed in college is very different from the skill set needed on standardized tests, IMO.
My weaker test taker went to a very highly academic college and did just fine.
Just commenting that high test scores aren’t the be all, end all. Cheating still sucks!
I can and do assume that SAT scores are at least reasonably correlated to intelligence. ASVAB is slightly more closely linked, but SAT has a pretty high correlation, believe it was in the range of .8 in most of the studies I’ve seen, which is significant.
Does that mean every kid who scores high on the SAT is going to do well in college? No. Because there are other factors that relate to college success. Does that mean that a kid who scores an 1100 can’t possibly succeed? No. Again, other factors come into play. But generally speaking if you put 1000 kids who scored 1450 in a class environment against 1000 kids scoring 1100, one group is going to have an easier time of it and it’s not the 1100 scorers.
Parents who help their kids cheat their way into an environment that is beyond their natural ability are not doing their kids any favors.
But then again, I’m guessing that’s why the Varsity Blues scandal didn’t involve places like Cal Tech, MIT or UChicago. It would be really cruel to dump an unprepared kid into one of those environments.
Cheating does suck and it sucks even more if someone’s not just indicated to their kid that they don’t think the kid is “enough” but then puts them into a position to be in over their head at the actual college.
^And that explains some of the reasoning behind holistic and part of why test optional, looking at more than just stats. Iit takes more than playing the stats game to be the right kid for a particular college.
But no, I don’t feel (no matter what studies) that scores reveal intelligence. They reveal how much any one kid is willing to play the game, how they value a sort of conformity to the expectation top colleges have, for top stats. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s not magic insight into “intelligence.”
I think these parents had ideas of what colleges or tiers would satisfy them and delight their kids, offer some sheen orbragging rights. . And they were willing to manufacture the record, one way or another. I don’t think it says, “I don’t believe in you.” In many respects, if they didn’t believe in them, they’d have left it all to pure chance.
I think it reflects that they wanted to tip the scales. Because they did believe their kids “could” flourish there, even if they only looked as far as the name/prestige or the social life.
Yes, SAT correlation with full scale IQ tests is >0.8, which is extraordinarily high. And IQ is the best single measure of “intelligence.”
What people get confused about is what a correlation means in this context (but obviously not @milee30 above in post 4743). An individual SAT is not the best measure of that particular individual’s intelligence. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most intuitive have to do with the ability to prepare, comfort with test format, ability to focus under timed conditions, and even general measures of diligence and conscientiousness. Any particular individual will exhibit varying degrees of these other “trait characteristics” that will influence the validity of her particular SAT score as a proxy for her true intelligence.
However, when considering groups of people, to the extent that these trait characteristics are not correlated with intelligence (that is, they do not vary systematically with the level of smarts), these individual variances “wash out.” Therefore, it is correct to say that a group of 1550 SAT scorers is on average more intelligent than a group of 1450 scorers. In fact, that’s a half a standard deviation and will be very noticeable.
But the reason that parents are willing to push their kids into environments that might not be suitable for their natural ability is mostly because it is pretty easy to “hide” at most elite schools. Few will try to push their average kid into Caltech or MIT, or into a specific subject like mathematics or physics, say, at Princeton or even USC. But into sociology or softer humanities subjects? Well, it is often said that the toughest thing about the Ivy League is getting in, and that while it may be difficult to get at A at, say, HYP (or USC), it is considerably more difficult to get a C.
A very popular school (college or magnet high school) may be significantly more selective than the minimum academic ability to succeed in its courses and graduate. So even a below average student there may be capable to succeeding there and graduating. For a prestigious college, getting the prestige name on one’s diploma may be worth it to the student; for a magnet high school, it may be motivated by trying to get away from what is seen as a low quality default high school.
Of course, some schools have significantly higher minimum rigor (e.g. very rigorous core curricula, like at Caltech), so they may avoid these kinds of prestige seekers. Also, the other end of the selectivity scale may include schools where its course rigor is higher than what some of its admitted students are capable of (trivial example is an open admission community college).
But then how is intelligence measured? You can have several tests that attempt to measure intelligence that are all highly correlated to each other, but they may not necessarily cover all of the aspects of intelligence that matter for a particular application (e.g. academic achievement in college), or they may cover aspects that are not relevant for that particular application.
^ We are not supposed to discuss this, per @skieurope , but there are literally 100 years of “construct validity” data supporting IQ as the best measure of intelligence (often referred to as the general reasoning ability, or “g”).
“Many colleges are test optional, including some very high caliber ones like Bowdoin.”
True but Bowdoin publishes their SAT and ACT averages, and despite being t/o, only 31% of applicants don’t submit. Their averages are 1490/33 and 25-75 distribution is 1420 to 1550. If you truly believe in test optional, why even publish these numbers? Bowdoin maybe t/o but their message of publishing that info is pretty clear - don’t bother apply if you’re below a 1200.
Actually, I think the message is “don’t submit” if scores are below their medians. Bowdoin’s most recent CDS shows 8% of entering students have reading scores in the 500-599 range; and 11% have math scores in that range. 16% have ACT composites in the 23-29 range. (and another 2% have scores below that). Given that the school is test optional, there is no way for them to know the scores of non-submitters, so these lower end scores are not necessarily counterbalanced by other factors. (Their CDS numbers include all students, because Bowdoin requires post-admission submission of scores).
Yes, I was thinking the same thing–for example, Lori Loughlin and Massimo Gianulli paid twice as much as Devin Sloane, had extra charges thrown at them, and pleaded not guilty. If they’re found guilty at trial, what will their sentences look like?
