<p>I still insist that the significance is limited by what he mean by intelligence. As I’ve said, I know top scorers (not poetgrl’s d I’m sure) who are shallow jerks. It’s one set of tasks.</p>
<p>There’s something unpleasant to me when one’s children (I don’t mean poetgrl whose point was different) sit at the top of the testing pyramid to suggest that this is the most important arbiter of intelligence, and in the terms of this thread, worth.</p>
<p>I like the idea of multiple intelligences. There are so many amazing, accomplished, and worthwhile people on our planet and very few of them distinguish themselves via high IQ or SAT scores. For those that do, congratulations. I wouldn’t take that achievement away at all. But to keep harping on DNA and touting ones familial DNA seems a taste issue to me.</p>
<p>I’m sorry. But too many posts have referred to this and reverted to this point.</p>
<p>When my D was little people salivated over her looks. In fact, she and her brother were asked to pose by photographers all the time and have appeared in ads in NY Times, among other places.</p>
<p>It would be unseemly for me to suggest that pretty people have greater success, although studies prove they do.</p>
<p>And both my kids would be revolted with me if I tried to assert this on a board.</p>
<p>In fact, my D left performing because she said there was too much emphasis on her looks. She is now in law school with the goal (unrealistic at this point) of a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting the death penalty in US.</p>
<p>I admire what she’s doing, but I wouldn’t make her public spirited dedication the arbiter of worth.</p>
<p>There are so many ways to entice worthy candidates to elite schools and provide for them.</p>
<p>And I refuse to agree that a top test scoring engineer has more intrinsic worth than a less top scoring Pulitzer Prize winning poet.</p>
<p>Both have worth as do many others, including the impoverished kid who can’t turn on the light at night to study because his/her siblings would awaken and it’s the only room in the apartment. If that kid has struggled and demonstrated success in an academic area I don’t think numbers should be parsed about test results.</p>
<p>When we have a society run by just one kind of mind we have disasters. It was the Harvard brain trust, all from similar backgrounds, that produced the quagmire of the Vietnam War. What if a Vietnamese person or a woman, both from very different backgrounds, had been involved in the decision making process, perhaps we’d have had a different outcome and fewer Napalmed children.</p>
<p>I am not suggesting that all high scorers on the SAT come from the same background but they do all have a similar way of thinking. </p>
<p>I did coach my son. He improved his verbal score to an almost perfect score when I told him he was being too finicky with the questions and seeing valid issues in the answers that the testers didn’t intend.</p>
<p>A good friend was a very high scorer on the SAT. As a high school senior she was asked to write questions. True story. They weren’t always the best questions.</p>
<p>It does take talent to finesse those questions. And intelligence. But so do many other kinds of thinking that the SAT doesn’t begin to measure.</p>