@CaliMex - Oh, I don’t necessarily disagree. It’s just that if you look at the numbers that we have on things like achievement test scores, SAT scores, etc., I think more average smart kids would “stick out” a little more at Exeter and Andover. At the opposite end, just looking at, say, percentage of NMSF, a surprising number of “elite” boarding schools post numbers no better than what you would expect at a moderately good public high school (no reason to name those boarding schools imo, but for anyone who is curious the data are not that hard to find).
If you’ve worked with gifted or profoundly gifted kids in any meaningful way, you know that there is a world of difference between, say, a 115 IQ kid and a 145 IQ one (two standard deviations’ difference). Even one standard deviation is very noticeable.
In this thread, we’ve been talking about lower limits for SSAT, but I think that given the interest that boarding schools have in fostering a sense of community, many of them actually limit how many “super high horsepower” kids they admit. I do think that the SSAT is a reasonable proxy for intelligence, but of course very imperfect. Moreover, there is always a lot of pushback about how certain kids get all the advantages, can pay for study courses, etc. and there is a small bit of truth to that for the youngest kids. But literally decades of research have shown that by the early teens, and certainly by the middle teens, most environmental factors fade away.