<p>How would better mathematical abilities particularly help the restauranteur and car-dealership-owner that I’m referring to? (Hint: They pay accountants to crank the numbers.)</p>
<p>The ability to have a vision and the ability to marshal resources towards achieving that vision has very little to do with SAT’s or similar standardized tests. Not to mention all the soft people-skills. How does performance on the SAT correlate to the ability to find, train, motivate, retain and reward the top salespeople? Or the ability to turn an angry client into a satisfied customer who tells all her friends to shop with you?</p>
<p>How would better mathematical abilities particularly help the restauranteur and car-dealership-owner that I’m referring to? (Hint: They pay accountants to crank the numbers.)</p>
<p>The ability to have a vision and the ability to marshal resources towards achieving that vision has very little to do with SAT’s or similar standardized tests. Not to mention all the soft people-skills. How does performance on the SAT correlate to the ability to find, train, motivate, retain and reward the top salespeople? Or the ability to turn an angry client into a satisfied customer who tells all her friends to shop with you?</p>
<p>I think all of you are exhibiting less than 800-level critical reasoning. I suspect that of course high SAT scores are roughly correlated with economic success over the long haul. We’ve all seen the study that shows that, for kids with the same SAT scores, it didn’t matter where they went to college as regards their lifetime earnings. A corollary of that was that SAT scores DID correlate with earnings. Strongly? I doubt it. But probably enough to notice.</p>
<p>Sure, everything Pizzagirl says is true. Mathy intelligence is just one component, and not necessarily a major one, of what makes people successful. But unless she can demonstrate why those other success qualities are distributed among the population in a way that is NEGATIVELY correlated with SAT-type intelligence, it stands to reason that people with high SATs, as a group, will outperform people with low SATs, as a group, even though lots of members of the low-SAT group will vastly outperform lots of members of the high-SAT group. People who have high SAT intelligence AND a great work ethic AND great people skills may outperform, by a little, those with work ethic, people skills, and low SATs. The latter, of course, will tend to outperform high-SAT slackers, but the high-SAT slackers will tend to outperform low-SAT slackers (assuming the high-SAT slacker guys can avoid going to jail for fraud and the like).</p>
<p>I don’t get what is so threatening about this idea. It’s not like anyone could possibly argue that SAT = individual fate. For any individual, knowing his or her SAT gives you essentially no ability to predict anything about how his life will go, in college or out of it. Lots of people with middling to low SATs will achieve great success – and of course if you look in Pizzagirl’s neighborhood, you’ll find lots of them, because Pizzagirl’s neighborhood probably correlates VERY highly with economic success, so her neighbors include only the many low-SAT winners, not the many low-SAT losers. (Not that she likely has any idea what SAT scores her neighbors actually had. I don’t know that about my neighbors.)</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a guarantee, but I will say that NOT doing well on the SAT’s has nothing to do with success in life.</p>
<p>My husband and his brother did not do well on their SAT’s, and both are very, very successful, one in business and one in law, both renowned in their fields.</p>
<p>I hate to say it, but scoring high on your SAT’s means that you can do well on standardized tests, and that’s it. Chances are this will set into place a series of events that will likely lead to future success (getting into a good college, graduating from that good college, having a resume that will get you an interview, etc), but beyond that, once you enter the “real world” your SAT’s will mean nothing. It’s all about your job performance from that point on.</p>
<p>SATs are a way colleges can balance out different grading scales from one high school to another.</p>
<p>Since all high schools grade different, a 4.0 at school A may be equal in difficulty to a 3.7 at another high school. It is impossible to compare the two without using a metric that has been standardized between the two.</p>
<p>But does the SAT attempt to be an intelligence test, or a success test, or a skill test? No.</p>
<p>I have to agree with what audiophile is postulating and I would guess there is some degree of correlation but it statistically occurs much father down the SAT score somewhere north of the average number. But in the absence of a clear definition of what “success” is all anyone can do is postualte. In the absence of criteria e.g. is it critical thinking skillls, mathematical ability, strong verbal ability for measurement, everything is simply assumptions. You can have strong verbal and critical thinking skills and a lack of mathematical ability or any combination of criteria and SAT scores totally ignore the artistic and creative who can be wildly “successful” against many definitions of success.</p>
<p>Let’s see. I was a NMF back in the day (but not a >1550) and DH couldn’t crack a 1000 (oh the horror.) Together we have a successful life in the way we envisioned: happy, healthy children, a nice home, the ability to take a vacation and DH can play golf every weekend. We both contribute to our communities and have great friends.</p>
<p>In terms of success in business, DH has risen far above where I ever will because of his street smarts, his relationship building, and his strengths in other “intelligence” areas other than academic. He works really hard and gets results; that gets recognized. Yay him! Me, I love my job but have no aspirations to climb the ladder.</p>
You would think, but in fact it’s remarkable that you can learn so little from it, except perhaps to predict parental income of those taking the test.</p>
<p>I don’t know why I get sucked into this every time. A few points-</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It’s a silly discussion because nobody is going to conduct such a study. </p></li>
<li><p>As everyone says, it depends on how you define success. </p></li>
<li><p>Let’s assume we mean monetary success. I will go out on a limb and say that it is possible that success on some standardized exams may, over the whole population, show a slight correlation with future earnings. I believe a study mentioned here shows about a 3% increase in income for a 100 point score difference.<br>
So what? That explains very little, and without seeing the controls on the study I would be very suspect. People with higher SAT scores tend to come from more affluent families. That has been shown in various studies. If you start out from a more affluent family, it is probably mjore likely you will have greater financial success. You would have to control for that. Regardless of whether you go to a more selective school, with the SAT worship in this country a higher SAT gives you access to all sorts of beneficial programs in college - honors, merit scholarships, etc. You would have to control for this. We’d have to take into account access to prep courses. And are we talking high, single sitting scores, or score choice? It may also have something to due with native intelligence, dedication, or work ethic, but I suspect it is a far worse predictor of these qualities than many other metrics.</p></li>
<li><p>If you are talking about the current version of the SAT reasoning test, I once again encourage people to pull the sample off the CollegeBoard website and take a look. This is not the same exam we took prior to the 1990s. It is extremely coachable, you can expect almost the same exact sorts of math problems on every test, and the use of calculators has made it much easier to try out numbers or answers. The CR exam no longer has much vocabulary, no antonyms or analogies. I tutored this test for a few years so I know it is coachable. And, for what it’s worth (probably not much, this is for the IQ fans out there, of which I am not one), the high IQ socities will no longer accept this exam as an indicator of IQ.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I don’t disagree with your post at all, JHS – I just think that the correlation is at a much broader / macro level than the micro distinctions of 1500-1549’ers vs 1550-1600’ers. Because really, are people who get 1600 “smarter” than people who get 1500’s in any real-life meaningful way? Or just better test-takers? (And I say this as someone who always kicked butt on standardized testing – because I’m a good test taker.)</p>
<p>Anyway, if I may be less than self-effacing, my business partner (who went to a lesser-ranked school than I did!) were collecting some feedback on the product we offer. Our audience consists of mostly directors, VP’s and some CEO’s at the companies where we offer a particular consulting product. The words that came up were things like strategic thinking, synthesis, communication, insight. Those are things that simply aren’t measured by choosing the right answer among A, B, C, and D provided on a piece of paper. These things are about posing new questions in the first place, and synthesizing and pulling together disparate pieces of info into a whole. Sorry, the SAT just doesn’t measure that.</p>
<p>The two richest guys in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet both got pretty good SAT scores, I think. Gates got something like 1590/1600. Buffet must have gotten good scores too since he got into Wharton School of UPenn. Steve Jobs probably did well too since he got into Reed College. I think that a person with good SAT scores and some street smartness can go pretty far.</p>
<p>Ok, so Google hires engineers on their SAT scores. So great, now you have a company of Certified Smart People. Let’s make them all 1500-and-overs. However, once they get there, are they compensated differently based on that? Are the even higher-SAT scorers necessarily the ones who rise to the top? Are promotions based on “John had an SAT score of 1550 and Bob only 1500, so let’s give John the promotion”?</p>
<p>I would also add that in your whole discussion of what makes people financially / economically successful, you’ve *completely neglected the arts <a href=“fine%20arts,%20music,%20theater,%20photography,%20etc.”>/i</a> in which SAT scores aren’t correlated with success in those fields at all. It seems as though you are viewing the world of work primarily from a science / engineering point of view – coincidentally, what you are and what your daughter aspires to be!</p>
<p>PizzaGirl: You need to keep calm down; the point to put up Google reference is to provide a data point in favor of SAT results being used for more than just college admissions.</p>
<p>Also to point out that there are lots of people and even companies who think it can fair well as a long term performance indicator.</p>