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<p>Is that the only valid conclusion? It makes sense to you the sons of garbage men are as intellectually capable as the sons of doctors?</p>
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<p>Yes. The College Board states, but doesn’t show, that students from all income ranges get SAT scores all up and down the standard scoring range. There are plenty of rich kids who get personal scores a good bit lower than quite a few poor kids. What’s regrettable, but not well reported in the article submitted with the original post of this thread, is that many of those high-scoring poor kids don’t get into college–not because they lack good SAT scores, but because they lack money. For college admission, it is more advantageous to be dumb but rich than to be smart but poor.</p>
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Knowing what I know about Wooton, my guess is that this group was not extremely wealthy, although probably they were not poor either. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ll bet these were Asian families. Intense test prep is not necessarily a province of the very wealthy; rather, it’s the province of those willing to make the time and financial sacrifices to get it. Whether it actually pays off vs. a control group is a lot harder to answer.</p>
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My kid is the daughter of an illiterate garbage man. 217 PSAT in freshman year. In her case, parents make a lot of money and she’s a high scorer. But no history of higher education or the things that go with that. I find this topic fascinating and am loving everything you all have to say.</p>
<p>There are plenty of very smart poor people and astonishly stupid rich people, but that doesn’t mean that, on average, family intelligence might not lead to more financial success, just as a family of tall people is likely to produce more basketball players than a family of short people. Human diversity makes all these generalizations amazingly hard, though.</p>
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<p>And is there any credible measure that is less inequity-prone than the SAT? One whose best predictor is something other than income, for example?</p>
<p>If every other measure shares the Social Darwinist features of SAT, or possesses them even more so, what is the point in complaining about the SAT? The real target of the attacks would appear to be selectivity or objective performance evaluation of any kind.</p>
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The really interesting score vs. income data are missing from this chart. How far out in income does the near-linearity of the plot continue?
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I have not seen the data, but my recollection is that *The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy * stated that the income correlation goes all the way out. I think parental education (which of course correlates to a large extent with income) is a pretty good predictor of SAT scores. (I think zoosermom’s kids must be the exception that proves the rule.) I for one am glad that we aren’t always slaves to our backgrounds.</p>
<p>Hunt notes,"Knowing what I know about Wooton, my guess is that this group was not extremely wealthy, although probably they were not poor either. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ll bet these were Asian families. Intense test prep is not necessarily a province of the very wealthy; rather, it’s the province of those willing to make the time and financial sacrifices to get it. Whether it actually pays off vs. a control group is a lot harder to answer. "</p>
<p>Response: I can’t say how rich they were;however, they were, as you surmised, Asian.</p>
<p>I love how people dog about how rich kids can afford tutors, programs and steroids to hyper-inflate their SAT score(s) and how the poor people do not have access to such “benefits.”</p>
<p>As if the poor child could afford Harvard, providing that he did ace his SATs and had tutors help him in Organic Chemistry.</p>
<p>^^ Yes, the poor kid would be able to afford Harvard since he/she would be attending for free.</p>
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<p>Your daughter doesn’t contradict my point. We’re talking averages, not individuals. Hunt’s example of the basketball players is especially apt.</p>
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<p>And, it appears, they do. The most competitive colleges seem to apply a fairly heavy discount to the SAT scores they expect from certain applicants such as URMs (and others with “hooks”). </p>
<p>But yes, high SAT scores are linked to affluence. Affluence, in turn, is linked across populations to intellectual ability and other kinds of talent (though drive and ambition must play a huge role too). Read Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. The fact that there is a strong correlation between family wealth and success in college admissions is unsurprising. The “man bites dog” story would be one that illustrates the opposite.</p>
<p>In this country, the most important factor that exaggerates the wealth effect would have to be the way we finance our public schools, which is generally through local property taxes. Develop a a uniform school financing system, along with a national standard curriculum, if we really want to level the environmental playing field. That would have a much larger benefit to far more people than SAT cram schools have.</p>
<p>The statistical methodology of “The Bell Curve” is profoundly flawed and has been ripped apart by many professionals.</p>
<p>In my area and in my experience, the quality of pre-college education on offer varies substantially with socio-economic group. In fact, the differences in quality are so large that it is not necessary to look for any additional explanation of differences in achievement. A family that is strongly interested in academics can counter weaknesses in their local schools; but the basic, public, “free-to-everyone” experiences are just strikingly different from one socio-economic group to another. </p>
<p>In our state, the local public schools have not been funded directly by local property taxes for about 20 years. Statewide funding has not yet eliminated the inequalities in the schools.</p>
<p>As for the students at Wootton, with the lengthy SAT prep work–I feel sorry for them. The odds are that they would have done about as well with no prep at all. The SAT prep time amounts to hours of their lives that they cannot recoup. The SAT is not that hard, IF the school district is reasonably good. (Otherwise, back to paragraph 1.)</p>
<p>Quantmech notes,"As for the students at Wootton, with the lengthy SAT prep work–I feel sorry for them. The odds are that they would have done about as well with no prep at all. The SAT prep time amounts to hours of their lives that they cannot recoup. The SAT is just not that hard, IF the school district is reasonably good. (Otherwise, back to paragraph 1.) "</p>
<p>Response: You don’t know this for a fact.Both they and their parents thought it was well worth it. In fact, half of the group did very well on the PSAT to qualify for NMS,which was another benefit of such early tutoring and work on the SAT.</p>
<p>True, taxguy, I have no way of knowing about the impact of the Wootton prep, for a fact. My district has numerous students with quite high scores and no prep to speak of. Did any students in the Wootton group take the SAT in middle school for talent search purposes? Do you know–in generalities–how they scored then? If they took the SAT as middle-schoolers, I’d be willing to bet that their scores at that time projected forward to NMS qualification.</p>
<p>It is true that people from cultures outside the U.S. may benefit from understanding American cultural norms, as they are reflected in the SAT, so to that extent, “practice” is useful. Nevertheless, so much practice really seems like overkill; and it probably raises the anxiety level in the community, even among those who realize that the SAT is just plain not that hard.</p>
<p>My observation has been that test prep is enormously successful. The handful of students that I have watched carefully have pushed their perfomance up substantially through self prep. The most effective self prep seems to include multiple timed practice tests and careful review of answers post test.</p>
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<p>Ha. That’s funny. I’m sure these people (Stephen Jay Gould being the most famous) don’t have any ideological bias. </p>
<p>I could find plenty of “professionals” who have supposedly “ripped apart” evolution. You going to take their extremely biased word for it, as well?</p>
<p>What people fail to realize is that people who have scored well in middle school are motivated enough that some would be willing to do test prep before taking their high school one just to be thorough (even if their middle scores project to a perfect score in high school.) I did all the math problems in the SAT Math prep book even though the problems were a joke and I had gotten one of the top scores in the country on the AMC with no prep. The SAT math was so easy it was like eating cardboard. Why did I practice for it? I figured that I might be less prone to make a dumb mistake if I practiced, like for instance, forgetting to grid in a decimal point or something. And if it got me 20 extra points, it was worth it to do spend an evening or two on it.</p>
<p>@collegealum314: Great phrase, “like eating cardboard” !</p>
<p>@taxguy: Another thought, aimed at trying to guess how the Wootton students would have done without the extensive prep–did they take the PSAT as freshmen or sophomores? If so, how many had reached NMS level already, before junior year?</p>
<p>@DeirdreTours: Scoring well on the SAT is certainly a learnable skill. Some school systems that are actually quite good do leave a few gaps in their students’ background, and then prep is helpful. (I’m guessing that yours is one of those.) </p>
<p>But I sincerely think that there are a lot of people on this forum whose children do not need any SAT prep at all. I believe that tokenadult agrees with me. </p>
<p>collegealum314’s level of prep was already overkill for him, in my opinion, but here’s another guess: When collegealum314 took the SAT, it was CR and M only, I believe. So M was supposed to consume 1.5 hours. There were 10 tests in the book of Real SAT’s at that time, right? That would give a total time of 15 hours. I’m guessing that collegealum314 was able to do all of the math sections in 4 hours or less. Even if he used some other book, and took 10 hours in total, that’s still not so much, compared with full-bore (full-boring?) test prep.</p>