@JBStillFlying
Since there are so many psychological studies that turned out to be un-reproducible these days, it makes you wonder why so many scientists don’t “do the study properly”!
That being said, the impact of SES on children’s intelligence is so profound and happens even before a child is born - the living environment such as lead level, stress level, and the nutrition status, just list a few, these moms-to-be are in, all will directly influence the children’s learning ability or the lack of later on.
My question for the SMPY study, when they separated kids with high SAT scores into different SES group and looked at the result, with only 259 kids to begin with, could they still have enough kids in each group to draw meaningful conclusions?
The test isn’t designed to assess IQ.
It doesn’t even test most of the qualities that would go into college success.
You know why my daughter had better grades in college than her higher scoring classmates as well as her NMF brother? Because she is the most efficient and proactive person I have ever met, and she has always been that way.
As a kid she would start work on a school project or report the day it was assigned.
And as an adult when she’s looking for a job, she’ll send out a resume immediately after she sees the job announcement.
So in college: she did the reading on day 1. She got started on her papers at the beginning of the semester. If she had a question or problem, she went to the prof or TA at the first available time of their office hours. Would she benefit from a study group? She was the one forming all the study groups.
Where is there a test to measure pro-activity vs. procrastination?
That’s not the only quality important for college, but it actually is a very important one, because college kids tend to run into problems when they fall behind in assignments and then can’t catch up as the semester wears on. And that’s a bigger problem at schools like Chicago which have particularly intense reading loads–it doesn’t take very long to fall hopelessly behind.
She did, and her scores were consistent. Two SAT’s a year apart: 1200 each time. Two ACT’s – 27 composite each time, though the subscores varied. That’s what it was and what it was going to be.
Depends on your definition of “low”. I think that that the cutoff for being able to do well at a rigorous college is probably around a 22 ACT. But that’s just my guess. Obviously, Chicago is willing to accept students with scores as low as 20 ACT/ 1050 SAT. And I assume that, just as they accepted my daughter with a 27 ACT, they saw other qualities that made the student valuable to them, including qualities that would be predictive of future success. My daughter was actually voted “most likely to succeed” by her 8th-grade class, which doesn’t mean a darn thing except as more evidence of one of those EQ qualities that tend to accompany success.
They got those kids from the study from “talent searches” and that’s not even a universe inhabited by the lower SES group. That is not a random sample of all kids tested at age 13-- those are the offspring of high SES parents who know about and want to pay an application fee so that their kid can be tested and attend a pricey summer program for G&T kids.
And that “study” of course had no control groups. So yes they followed the progress of those financially well-off, high scoring kids whose parents were so committed to their education that they were putting them into CTY summer programs. (Something I never even heard of when my son was the age that he might have done something like that. I remember that the summer my daughter turned 14 I lined her up with a minimum wage job doing data entry. Because down here in the world of the unrich… “job” is what a lot of kids do with their summers).
I think any “coddling” is minimal, outside of parental support and encouragement, which of course is hugely important.
I don’t know what level of support that the original set of SMPY kids received through the program itself, but the current SET program doesn’t really offer much. Mostly it sends out an annual questionnaire to the child about recent accomplishments, college plans, etc. And this is generally not the type of thing that is mentioned to teachers.
This is a perfect description of the one family I know who had their son tested as part of that talent search. My guess with this particular family is that they also greatly enjoy the bragging rights. I have heard the story of their child’s high SAT score at age 13 many, many times.
By the way, he really is an extremely bright kid and I’m sure he will be successful IF his family allows him to go to a school that is a good fit for him.
@calmom : The only explanation I can think of is that your daughter did not practice enough before taking the exam. Without practicing, it doesn’t matter how many times a person takes the SAT/ACT exam, the results won’t improve. She had a job so she won’t have the time to practice. AOs understand this kind of situations.
Our own college experience is like your daughter’s — a person’s standing in class pretty much remains the same for four years — , and that is what we told our child. The first semester/quarter is the most critical one. People don’t “turn” geniuses or suddenly figure out how to do well at organic chem exams which a large number of the questions are not in the textbook. Cramming orgo has minimum effects. But SAT/ACT can be crammed easily. Obviously your daughter’s quality shows through the other parts of her applications. These days college applications work differently. The number of applications for most elite schools have doubled in ten years. Computers would have filtered out the majority of low scores candidates unless they are targeted URM. The application process is a negative process – once a flaw is found, the candidate is eliminated. Your daughter is lucky that she was born a few years early. Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-OLlJUXwKU and https://www.npr.org/2011/03/28/134916924/Amherst-Admissions-Process
I have had more than one AO explicitly say that this is untrue for most colleges. They claim they read every application. I don’t think any are simply thrown out with a computer scan. Now, an application with low GPA and Low scores would probably need to stand out immediately in order to merit a more detailed read. But I don’t think they are simply being thrown away.
@roethlisburger
The more interesting thing would be to see over the course of 45 years, how many successful scientists were produced without high SAT scores at age <13, ie, your data only show many of these talented youths become scientists but it is certain that most scientists don’t come from these kids. And I agree with @calmom these kids who did the test at such an early age would most likely come from families with lots of resources and information, thus their later success could have little or no relationship with their sat scores.
I need to correct what might be an earlier error. Earlier today I wrote:
I wrote this based upon what I remembered, but as I was at work at the time, didn’t have the chance to find the original source material. I started looking for this, and still can’t find it. What I might have been remembering is the chart shown on this page:
To generate this picture, they took all the kids that took the SAT Math section prior to age 13, separated them into groups, and tracked each group’s subsequent professional academic performance.Note that only the top group had an average score of 700, and the others were lower (they were not all 700+ as I wrote earlier).
However the pattern was what I described earlier, with higher scoring students having considerably more academic and professional success later in life. Also this dataset has considerably more than 259 kids (somewhere in thousands).
I took the tests when I was a kid and grew up in a home that would be worth about 100k today. I don’t agree with the assumption everyone who takes these tests is wealthy.
Well, that’s a number of assertions made with no evidence.
Remember these conclusions are based off of kids that were tested up to 45 years ago now, on the pre-1995 SAT, which was harder and considered to be much more g-loaded, and back when families did not waste their money on test prep.
Now, if you want to say those who qualify for SET today skew towards high income, I agree completely. I also think it is silly to use the same 700 cutoff for today’s SAT math or verbal as it is not remotely the same level of difficulty as pre-1995 (particularly for verbal).
@roethlisburger
I don’t believe true intelligence is related to wealth, but I do believe SAT scores are! Of course not all people with high scores are from families with means, thank goodness!
Well, true intelligence is related to wealth, because they are correlated.
And we should expect this to be the case, given that intelligence is correlated with a person’s ability to generate wealth, and that a child’s intelligence is correlated with the parents’ intelligence. Given this, we would expect a child’s SAT scores to increase as parental income increases.
This is also completely correct.
“That being said, the impact of SES on children’s intelligence is so profound and happens even before a child is born - the living environment such as lead level, stress level, and the nutrition status, just list a few, these moms-to-be are in, all will directly influence the children’s learning ability or the lack of later on.”
Sure - but at one point someone in that high SES kid’s ancestry didn’t have a high SES. And there are plenty of low SES families currently - some immigrant groups, for instance, whose kids will do just fine and are already achieving academic success. So it’s not just SES. One of the primary factors on learning will be single parenthood since that’s significantly correlated with poverty. A kid can grow up lead-free with mom following all the nutritional guidelines and still be at a significant disadvantage if he/she doesn’t have a two parent, stable household - or even just a stable home. Hillbilly Elegy provides a very real narrative of the challenges facing these children.
But what’s the point of practicing for something that ultimately is meaningless? My daughter was a dancer and quite willing to practice for hours on end to hone her skills at ballet… but why waste time on a stupid test? She did well on AP exams and didn’t have to practice for those, because they tested material she had learned over the course of a semester or year.
So that just goes along with my daughter’s pattern of being proactive & efficient. She also doesn’t waste time doing things that don’t add value to her life in some way. That’s not being averse to learning-- it’s just that she would probably spend her time learning something new than practicing for a silly exam.
I’d note that I don’t know whether my daughter’s scores would have improved with practice or not. My son taught GRE courses for a while for major test prep company, and most of what he taught were tricks and test strategies, not substantive material. A lot of very smart people don’t do well on standardized tests for a variety of different reasons-- for example, they overthink the test. I was always scored very well on standardized tests, but I know that was partly due to a guess-and-go strategy, rather than spending time to think through or evaluate problems or questions.
Nondorf is quoted as saying, “We want students to understand the application does not define you — you define the application.” (link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/06/14/university-chicago-sat-act-optional/701153002/)
That’s exactly how my daughter got accepted to Chicago a dozen years ago – she made the application process her own and gave them something very different than they seemed to be asking for.
Maybe there are other colleges that would prefer to make decisions on quantitative metrics – who would not agree with Chicago’s statement that " you are more than your GPA or test score" (from https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/apply) — but then those schools miss out on a huge body of talented students.
Which is exactly why the SAT/ACT have little value, especially for a college that is seeking students for a “life of the mind” type environment.
And that’s why many students who have strong scores don’t do as well as anticipated at college, because their test-prep strategy won’t carry them through in an environment where a higher value is placed on depth and complexity of thought and expression.
That’s just not how college admission works. My daughter wasn’t a URM & I have no reason to assume that the students with an ACT of 20 or SAT 1050 who show up as bottom-range admits to Chicago are either. They may well be… but they could also be bringing something else of value to the table.
The problem is that there are a lot of kids who go through high schools that are all very similar, and they take the exact same array of courses, piling on the AP’s, and participate in the same range of EC’s that other high schoolers participate in. So yes, they come around to applying to college and they don’t have much going for them other than their stats.
I think the test scores are actually becoming less meaningful because of what I see as test inflation. If it was a rarity for college ad coms to see test scores of 1500+, then the kids with those scores would have an advantage. But now you have all these kids cramming and retaking to push up their scores… and the scores become less useful.
Everything has changed so much in the last 14 years. An article in The NY Times from 2007 listed u of c as a “safety” school because of the over 40% acceptance rate.
But the huge growth in applications to these schools are driving all of this change. And the costs are out of control and driving this hyper competition. For scholarships at wealthier schools or the u of c type of degree that might get you a job good enough to pay off your loans.
Here’s the article. Just a few short years ago.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/education/edlife/guidance29-sidebar.html
“…that your daughter did not practice enough before taking the exam.”
My D1 wasnlt the least interested in “practicing” for a higher score, either. And yet, she’s exactly the sort that thrives in a world of ideas, well able to hold her own. From a very young age, I knew she was “internally motivated,” not externally. (Driven by her interests, not the same carrot as others.) Like calmom’s daughter, quite proactive (and learned project and time management skills in 3rd grade) and driven in her major and her activities, open to new experiences of interest. I’m going to admit her math score was dismal. So what? Her lab sci grade in college was dismal. So what? It’s not who she is. It’s not the value she added to her college community and the ongoing conversation.
This is more important than first pass might seem. The problem is that there are a lot of kids who go through high schools that are all very similar, and they take the exact same array of courses, piling on the AP’s, and participate in the same range of EC’s that other high schoolers participate in. So yes, they come around to applying to college and they don’t have much going for them other than their stats.
My take isn’t that you need to stand out with something ridiculously unusual. Rather, that when the thinking is cultivated in such a narrow box, it tends to form to that box, that’s all many kids know. Their perspective is thus affected, hence, their ‘self’ assessment. For many, it becomes…stats, number of AP, those hs club titles, head of the recycling committee or whatever. Or some ECs they think are unique (because no one else in their hs does them.)That’s not expansive, at all. Curable, but NOT by routing a conversaton back to stats and predictive value.
See the trap?
And about low SES. Again, we have to realize Chi is not talking about under-prepared kids. The less than ‘stellar scores’ kids they’ll want are those who are activated beyond the box. It’s not every kid, it’s a sort of kid ready for more, who’s already been engaged in more. It’s kids who, for whatever reason, have had their energies activated, whether via particular teachers, parents who press for more education, mentoring programs that id bright kids who need a guide (in some areas, earlier than high school,) and sometimes by civic opps or influence from even religious groups. Again, so what if their scores are imperfect?
There is more education out there for kids and adults who are motivated than many realize. And as these college kids then graduate from colleges that cultivated their energies and minds, they in turn go on to influence others.
This progress is, by its nature, slow. One person, one group of kids, at a time. It’s time that shows how worthy it is to look beyond conventional measures- stats and old studies of who did what, way back then.