Are we positively sure that GPA and test scores do not reflect intelligence in college?

Student Lounge College Life
21

As I wrote, she increased 180 points between her PSAT scores. So the scores are comparable.

Percentiles are no good for comparison. The higher (and lower) you go, the fewer kids there are, and therefore the larger the increase in points that is required to increase by each percentile. In the middle, between the 50th percentile and the 52nd, there is only a score increase of 10, while at the tail, between the 98th and the top, there is a score increase of 100. So about 2% achieve a PSAT of 940 in 10th grade, while you need to add up all the kids who scored 1320-1520 to reach 2%, since 1320 in in the 98th percentile.

Yet according to your reasoning, an increase in one’s PSAT score from 940 to 950 is comparable to an increase from 1320 to a perfect PSAT score. This is in direct contradiction to actual reality, since increases in score become more difficult, as your scores increase.

But I don’t even need my kid’s example. Look at difference in benchmarks for between PSAT scores for 10th and 11th graders. It’s about 50 points. So I guess that kids, on average, increase their innate intelligence in one year.

Furthermore, college AOs at selective colleges discriminate between kids who get SATs of 1400 and those who get 1510, even though it is an increase of only 2 percentiles, and, by your logic, an SAT of 1450 and an SAT of 1510 are identical since they both are in the same percentile.

22

How many students take the SAT or ACT in 7th grade?

23

Quite a lot do but it’s already biased toward kids whose parents are prodding them toward an academic track. It’s not a random sample.

24

I’m not sure anyone ever claimed the PSAT is a pure IQ test. Properly interpreted, it is a good predictor of whether someone is on track to handle college coursework. These tests need to be normed to grade level, so it only makes sense to compare 10th graders to other 10th graders and 11th graders to other 11th graders. To the extent the PSAT/SAT/ACT are good proxies for IQ, it’s by looking at how people perform relative to others in their same grade.

25

“The best indicator of success in college tends to be GPA, not because it measures “intelligence”, but because high school GPA measures the same thing college GPA does, the ability to do well in classes, and college success is usually measured by college GPA.”

Different systems look for different things. In contrast to the US, with its extensive continuous assessment, the UK only cares about formal exam results (GPA is irrelevant to your application) and in college there your final degree result will often come down to your score on just a couple of days of exams at the end of the year.

You can’t say that on average students in the UK are more or less intelligent because they don’t care much about class grades in school. However, top universities there actually select specifically for what they consider to be academic talent (which is mostly defined as ability to do well on those tough exams - where an A grade requires only 70%) rather than “holistic” factors like ECs.

The US idea that an A is 93% make it very hard to give truly difficult long tail tests in most high school or college classes (a few teachers may recurve the results but that’s the exception rather than the rule and I’ve never seen it in high school). Mostly what a 4.0 GPA means (especially in high school) is that you are diligent at keeping on top of your work, and have a high boredom threshold for busy work, not that you are super intelligent.

I know my ADD kid is going to have a poor GPA in high school despite being highly gifted (in terms of IQ) because he just isn’t organized/doesn’t care enough to keep on top of his homework. He may score well on an ACT or SAT test but again I don’t see that as a very long tail test - you need to score essentially perfectly with no silly mistakes to get a really high score. In contrast the WAIS tests have a virtually unlimited ceiling and the high end is not affected so much by silly mistakes. He would very likely do much better in a UK school system where it is the high stakes long tail testing that determines your future.

26

According to the College Board, PSAT and SAT are achievement tests of academic skills. (For those who missed it, “aptitude” was dropped from the acronym many years ago; now it stands for nothing.)

PSAT is supposed to estimate what the student would have gotten on the SAT if they had taken it that same day. So, it is directly comparable, according to College Board, even though they have different ceilings. College Board expects score increase (“growth”) over time as the student accumulates skills and knowledge. This is set forth in the PSAT Understanding Scores document.

Intuitively, it’s easy to imagine a general tendency for most (but not necessarily all) 1600 SAT scorers to be inherently smarter/more intelligent than most (but not necessarily all) 1000 scorers. But the narrower the point difference, the less reliable that guess becomes. (LOL last fall, there was one PSAT form where a single math question was 50 pts.)

Something similar can be said for academic preparedness. There’s a reason College Board’s validity study only looks at 200-point chunks of the scoring scale. NB, the validity study was published summer 2019, the only such study on the New SAT. There is no study on the New SAT and intelligence.

27

Looks like the UK university admission process which looks only or mainly at the standardized final exam scores in high school is using the best predictor for the UK university grading process which emphasizes the final exams.

In the US, grades in university courses include evaluation of various factors (essays, projects, etc.), so that high school grades which include evaluation of various factors are better predictors than SAT/ACT (though SAT subject and AP tests are better predictors than the SAT/ACT for their subjects due to being subject matter aligned). Grading inconsistency across US high schools is probably one of the main reasons why US universities still use the SAT/ACT (although another main reason is its importance in USNWR rankings), though SAT subject tests would actually be better for using a standardized measure of what students learned in each given high school course.

28

This sentence jumped out at me:

What this means is that the relationship between SATs and later achievements is fairly weak, which, in turn, means that SAT is a pretty weak indicator of achievement late in life. Of course, you also need to add the confounding factor of wealthier kids being trained for SATs, even at that age (especially when their parents know that they’re being tested). So your predictive power is only what you would expect from the SATs being an indicator of the knowledge that a kid has accumulated - a kid who is well educated at 13 is more likely to go into academia than a kid who is not. Hardly an earth-shattering discovery.

Just as importantly, getting a PhD is not the ultimate indication of “intelligence”. While it is true that a PhD indicates the ability to go beyond what is taught and to create something new and unique, it is only one of the ways. SAT score are not related at all with the ability to write music, choreograph dances, or create works of art.

Moreover, only a fraction of the people with the capability for doing a to do a PhD, will, or even can do so, since there are a slue of characteristics which one needs, which have nothing to do with being “intelligent”. In fact, many of these would be considered pathological in “normal” circumstances. If your spouse would suddenly become obsessed with a relatively sub-sub-topic, and spent most of their time studying and analyzing it, you would have them see a therapist. Yet this is exactly what PhD research looks like.

@ucbalumnus Israel has a very similar method as the UK. Students do matriculation exams at the end their 11th and 12th grade (rarely, 10th grade). That and a standardized exam - in my time it was a psychometric test, I don’t know what it is now. They really don’t care about your GPA, or your high school prestige, since everybody does the same matriculation exams. It’s good that they didn’t use GPAs, since some of my grades sucked, AND I got expelled at the end of my 12th grade, and I was told to come back only for the matriculation exams (I did very well, and they needed my scores for their averages).

Of course, the rest of the requirements for the USA wouldn’t actually be relevant. I attended university, like most Israelis, after my regular military service, so whatever ECs I did or didn’t do wouldn’t have said much about me by the time I was 21…

29

I guess it depends on how your measure intelligence. IQ = IQ. A student that takes the ACT / SAT multiple times after varying degrees of prep and coaching and shows a meaningful increase in performance still has the same IQ (as they originally had). DId their intelligence change? I don’t think so. But they did show the ability to learn / improve (the material, the test format, the time constraints). The ability to learn is important.

GPA also shows the ability to learn over a long period of time. It also shows discipline or sustainability.

As @privatebanker points out, what actually matters most in life is the combination of IQ and EQ.

30

@rickle1 , EXACTLY! The tests are not accurate inidicators of intelligence, because as long as they can be prepped for, there is no level playing field. I tutor these tests. My kids’ scores go up. They do not become more intelligent in the months that I see them.

@evergreen5 , the PSAT is supposed to be a way for kids to see where they need to improve. It’s not an accurate predictor of anything. That’s why it’s a PRE SAT. And let’s remember, it’s actually serving the purpose of identifying NMS kids.

We should focus on the GPA part of this question.

31

I often wonder why all this emphasis on IQ. It’s performance that gets you places, not native intelligence. And social/political skills.

I do think it’s an example of hierarchical thinking- better scores must mean better individuals. I wonder who here has a kid with top scores and wants some sheen added to that. I’d guess no one whose kid has lower scores wants to hear they aren’t intelligent.

To me, it’s twisted thinking to insist std scores are ‘the be all and end all.’ Look around.

32

OP hasn’t been back but it’s worth noting that they have numerous threads dealing with the worth of higher ed and their place in it. It sounds like he has a parent who he feels is critical and controlling, so it may be a shock to him to find out that what they’ve built their worth on (GPA and test scores) is not the standard everyone else uses to gauge intelligence.

@OneWhoTalks, if your parents are pushing you to be pre-med then grades and GPA do matter because med school is very competitive. But there are other plenty of other worthwhile majors and if pre-med isn’t for you then there’s nothing wrong with choosing a different path. I find your recent question about whether pre-med and/or med school students are at a greater risk for depression and suicide concerning. Please talk to someone at your college’s health center.

33

I think you might be misinterpreting that statement. That was analysis explaining variance within Stanley’s cohort. Everyone in the cohort had to be within the top 0.5% on the SAT. You’re mixing up population-level R^2 and cohort R^2. That section was not referring to PhDs, but number of patents and peer-reviewed publications.

34

@austinmshauri OP will probably never be back again because he got banned (hard-to-resist joke: looks like OneWhoTalks will no longer be the “one who talks” on this website). Kind of a shame that he or she (don’t know OP’s gender) can no longer see the replies on his or her own thread.

35

I know OP is banned but this is a really interesting discussion since GPA and standardized test scores are important for graduate admissions as well as undergraduate. Schools clearly still look at them and for more prestigious graduate programs, especially in those STEM fields that have their own Subject GRE, are absolutely still used for academic gatekeeping.

An anecdotal example, my boyfriend is a PhD student in math; he had a very good GPA but did relatively poorly on the math subject GRE, not through lack of preparation but just because he needs to think about problems deeply which there is absolutely not time for on that test. This pretty much put him immediately out of the running for top programs, even though he does stellar work and got rave recommendations and a very prestigious honorable mention for a national fellowship. Those programs that didn’t require the scores were very active in recruiting him since he does have all the features of a promising PhD student in his area, except for that one test. So even though in his case the test score did not reflect his actual intelligence or aptitude, it was a major factor in the outcome.

36

Grad school is s differe ball of wax. One point: your research ideas and experiences need to align with the depts you apply to.

37

When people refer to “grad school”, there are also hardly any accurate generalizations across the range of programs. Different professional programs (e.g. MD, JD, MBA, MArch, DPT, …) and PhD programs in various subjects have varying admission practices (even before getting into differences between different programs) that almost any generalization without specifying the type of “grad school” is likely to be inaccurate for some.