Average IQ at Harvard?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
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i just took an iq test (yes, im that bored) and my score is definitely around 30 points lower than when i took it last. has harvard made me stupider?</p>

<p>(dont pounce, im only kidding. but it is kinda sad. no more facebook!)

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<p>Was it online? rofl...</p>

<p>Moreover, knowledge tends to change along a person's lifespan. The assumption of IQ is that IQ does not. Checking Facebook will not do anything to your IQ, even if it may restrain you from learning more about a particular subject.</p>

<p>Personally, I think that knowledge tests are more reliable indicators of college performance than IQ tests. A person must have a particular amount of knowledge in order to enter college, and if a person already knows a lot, well then, who cares about his IQ if he already demonstrates, say, college-level grasp of the material?</p>

<p>By the way, I'm a victim of the IQ testing craze. While my 10th grade PSAT score beat nearly everyone's 11th grade PSAT score in my school (I got 213, only one from my junior high qualified for National Merit, and cutoff is 216 => I went early entrance so I didn't take the PSAT in 11th), I still scored lower on the COGATs (in lower grades) than most of those from my junior high, which resulted in me being tracked to the normal track of the class. One thing with me is that I have Asperger's Syndrome, and so I think differently than most people do (and may have responded differently to similar prompts). </p>

<p>==</p>

<p>And who the hell decided that vocabulary is a part of IQ tests? Clearly, people of higher intelligence are more likely to have higher vocabularies, but knowledge of particular vocabulary words says virtually nothing about a person's IQ (unless the learning of new vocabulary words was a function of one's IQ - but this is clearly not the case, since a lot of other factors come in the learning of new vocabulary words - this may be the main category where allegations of cultural bias actually mean something).</p>

<p>Moreover, IQ tests assume that people of sufficiently high intelligence would draw the similar conclusion from a particular prompt. But this isn't always the case, especially when people think differently (however, most people are remarkably similar in thought - which explains why, for one thing, so many people are either Democrats or Republicans). But if we were to bring another intelligent species into the fray, a species that was capable of the intellectual achievements that humans are capable of - it's quite conceivable that they may think differently from the same prompts.</p>

<p>==</p>

<p>How well do psychologists do on their own tests, anyways? On reaction time tests, they are no more advantaged than others. But most IQ prompts are totally unrelated to reaction times. They are cases where the psychologist has the right answer, and the test-taker does not have the right answer.</p>

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You deliberately misquoted me.

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<p>No I did not. You said one will probably choose Harvard over MIT to impress friends. I dont agree. I think that choosing MIT will be as impressive if not more.</p>

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As an undergrad, you can switch majors freely. Not so as a PhD student. You can't just enter a PhD program in physics, found out that you don't like and simply "decide" to switch over to a PhD program in English.

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<p>Firstly, I doubt how many people majoring in physics at an undergrad level suddenly switch over to english.</p>

<p>Secondly, you confuse between choosing a career path and choosing a stream of study. As I said PhDs go into all sorts of jobs like consulting, quants, business start ups, etc. So saying a PhD knows exactly what he will be doing in life is a misinformation.</p>

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Wait, I thought you said that the MIT brand name is just as strong as Harvard's. So if that's true, then why would you choose Harvard?

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<p>Read my post. I said he chose Harvard over Stanford, not MIT. It is well know that Stanford has a lower international name recognition than Harvard.</p>

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And again, it's all relative. Just like I agree that you have some grad students going to Harvard for engineering just because of the Harvard brand name, you have undergrads choosing Harvard just because of the Harvard brand name. The point is, it's far more prevalent to do so as an undergrad, when you often times don't even know what you want to major in or what you want to do with your life.

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<p>Something I agree.</p>

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Yeah, well, first off, how does that help you, as a prospective engineering student, now?

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<p>I did not know we were discussing the decision making strategies of prospective students.</p>

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Secondly, even in a decade, I highly doubt that even people at Harvard expect to be able to match MIT in engineering.

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<p>Who said Harvard will match MIT in engineering? Hoping you did not purposefully misquote me, I want to clarify that I said with Harvard's recent emphasis on engineering, it maybe expected to become one of the top-ranked programs in the country in a decade.</p>

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Again, what it requires is research ability which is not the same thing as brilliance. To give you an example, one of the most well-known ways to get into a Harvard PhD program is to first work for a Harvard professor as a research associate. What that means is that you graduate from undergrad, and get a job at Harvard doing research, and then get the prof to write a rec for you to let you in. I would say that of all the possible paths to getting into Harvard for your PhD, this is probably the most well-worn one.

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<p>I know a lot of present Harvard grad students and not a single one of them followed such a path. Do you have any proof of this claim or did you just make it up?</p>

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I said that if you're one of the worst students, you're probably going to choose an easier subject. And that's not physics, math, or engineering.

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<p>Again, what a strange hypothesis. Firstly, I doubt if anyone in Harvard suffers from an inferiority complex that I am bad and so let me not study maths. I think students choose what they choose because they feel they will be happy studying it and not because they think they are made for it. You always have students in maths, physics, engineering who do not do well and are at the bottom rungs yet they chose it because they wanted to study it.</p>

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Like I said, you're not being admitted to a PhD program for your 'brilliance'.

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<p>Same holds for undergrad admissions mind you.</p>

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You're being admitted to help the faculty advance its research. Nothing more, nothing less. I know some people who got admitted to every PhD program they applied to except one - Harvard. And that includes programs that are ranked far lower than Harvard. The reason is simple. Their research interests aligned very well with one particular prof at Harvard, but not with the profs at the other schools.

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<p>No. Want to know how a typical PhD process works at Harvard? Listen carefully. Any individual professor has no role in the process. The decision to admit a candidate is taken by an admission committee of senior professors. After being admitted, each student has one year to find a faculty (sometimes two years in case of physics). Given the plethora of research opportunities available, each student chooses a faculty which matches HIS interests. He is not bound to any professor. That is why saying that unless you find a matching prof at harvard you cant get in is FALSE. You get in solely as a brilliant student. What you will be doing finally is not a deciding factor (as long as you dont write something totally alien to the department).</p>

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Furthermore, just being admitted is only the beginning of the game. You next have to choose to go. Plenty of people get admitted to Harvard phD programs, and then choose to go elsewhere.

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<p>Of course you know such people just as I know several people who got admitted to MIT say and chose to go somewhere else. So what?</p>

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In fact, I know several particular departments that would consider themselves very lucky if they got a 50% yield. The Harvard physics and math department, for example, are almost certainly not going to hit 50% yield this year for their PhD admittees - heck, may not even hit 33% (for some reason, a lot of Harvard admittees are apparently choosing to go to MIT this
year). Contrast that with undergrad, where about 80% of those who are admitted will choose to come.

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<p>That just makes my point even stronger that the carefully chosen harvard grad is most probably much more intelligent than an undergrad. Increasing the yield rate is never a focus at PhD level simply because Harvard cannot sacrifice quality for quantity.</p>

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But again, I would emphasize, we should not 'romanticize' what the PhD process is all about. They're not really there for their 'brilliance'.

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<p>No one is anywhere for brilliance. But when you have to make a decision whether an average undergrads is smarter than the grad, then you have to look for credentials and facts. You need a basis for determining who is brilliant and who is not. GPAs, test scores, research work, recommendations etc
are all designed to try to find out as best as one can who is intellectually superior. It will be crazy to expect the method to be fool proof. But the admission process does a pretty good job on an average. I dont think one should doubt the intellectual superiority of the 15 or so admitted physics phds (for example) vs the two thousand undergrads admitted (to be precise 2058 this year).</p>

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It's really a 'tit-for-tat' arrangement. You're cheap labor for the faculty, and in return you get a degree. So the question is, are they going to get that labor out of you?

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<p>How I wish you will refrain from bad mouthing PhD programs like this. It totally convinces me how little you know about actual research in Harvard. </p>

<p>Trsut me, no one at Harvard is playing a tit-for-tat game. No one is cheap labor. Students are doing PhD in a particular field because they are highly motivated. They are doing what they are doing after considering carefully different fields of research.</p>

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You're actually making the same mistake that microsoft is. See above. PhD admissions are NOT academically based. They are RESEARCH based.

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<p>Apart from you, no one is making a mistake here. PhD admissions require very high GPAs. You cant get into Harvard solely on the strength of spending some summer in the labs of a professor. Your grades need to demonstrate you can handle academic pressure. Of course, research work is the final decider. But without a high GPA you will be thrown out in the first round.</p>

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Secondly, Harvard has very heavy competition in every single PhD category.

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<p>Precisely. Thats why I have been talking about. It leads to better grad student quality.</p>

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I don't know of a single Harvard PhD program that can boast of an 80% yield rate, and certainly, Harvard can't boast of such a PhD yield rate across the board.

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<p>Let's take the program you have been bashing the most. It itself had an yield rate of 80% for international students in 2006. </p>

<p>And the figure has been steadily climbing. It should be even higher this year.</p>

<p><a href="http://seas.harvard.edu/admissions/grad/learn/graddata.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://seas.harvard.edu/admissions/grad/learn/graddata.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>SEAS had a 5% acceptance rate at PhD level this year.</p>

<p>Now THAT is for one of the weakest harvard programs. I am sure the numbers are even better for the higher ranked programs.</p>

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The Harvard physics and math department, for example, are almost certainly not going to hit 50% yield this year for their PhD admittees - heck, may not even hit 33% (for some reason, a lot of Harvard admittees are apparently choosing to go to MIT this year).

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<p>Harvard Physics had an yield rate of slightly above 69% this year. Only 3 declined Harvard to go to MIT while 4 from MIT decided to switch over to Harvard. Of the people who declined, 87% chose to goto school other than MIT. </p>

<p>I just procured the data today. So all the claims you made were false. Next time when you speak with numbers, just make sure they are valid.</p>

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<p>Somebody's resurrecting dead threads,,,</p>

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<p>The statement that microsoft quoted is also wrong about the math departments. Harvard has for years been one of the top 2-3 programs for pure math (applied is a separate department), with MIT better for applied math, combinatorics, CS-related stuff. Most people in a position to choose between Harvard and MIT for pure math PhD would opt for Harvard (or Berkeley, or Princeton). Things fluctuate somewhat as superstar faculty move around and many students choose their location to work with a particular individual.</p>

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<p>Harvard's Average IQ is 130-read it from a reliable source</p>

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<p>SAT used to correlate highly with traditional IQ tests.The New SAT however has little correlation with IQ.The reason for this is obvious:The new SAT includes grammar which says nothing about the intelligence of a given test taker.</p>

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<p>What does it matter? :p. I had a 198 IQ when I took it 2 years ago. Still waiting for Harvard RD :P.</p>

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<p>Sources, please?</p>

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<p>please, IQ is not something you can possess. It is only a measure of how well people perform on a standardized test, not intelligence.</p>

<p>Besides, there are all different kinds of intelligence.</p>

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<p>Some mis-information in this thread:</p>

<p>IQ is real and represents natural ability. Across all kinds of IQ tests, a general factor emergers that is correlated with the results on every test. It is this factor that IQ is supposed to represent. </p>

<p>If this is difficult to understand and accept, consider that one thing that is highly correlated with IQ is complex reaction time. This measures, for example, the amount of time it takes a person to extract the meaning of a word from it’s context when a person is exposed to the word in everyday life. People are exposed to words all the time, with varying sized windows of opportunity to extract the meaning of the word, and so vocabulary is highly correlated with this G factor that controls how well a person scores on every kind of IQ test. I believe however, complex reaction time is difficult to test directly because one can easily test simple reaction time by mistake by giving the person a mental task they are already familiar with.</p>

<p>In general it just means the amount of time it takes your brain to process information. </p>

<p>HOWEVER-</p>

<p>There are two distinct ways people can apply their intelligence, that does not change what score they test at but directly affects their every day behavior. This has less to do with some kind of permanent limitation or disposition, and more to do with patterns of behavior - patterns of behavior so strong that people rarely cross over from one side to the other. The different types of applications I am talking about are responsible for any variation in the distribution for a given level of intelligence between math and verbal ability.</p>

<p>A person who begins life with normal experiences learns to trust the source of their comfort - parents and other people. With safety taken care of, their immediate goals are to elicit favorable responses from other human beings. As such, they handle information in a manner that allows them to better do so - unfortunately at some expense of accuracy in their beliefs and ability to understand their surroundings. More explicitly, they generalize from their experiences using metaphors to some degree. </p>

<p>Metaphors allow people to relate just about anything, and thus are well suited to having a toolset usable to persuade and move other people. However when you use a metaphor, you do not know where the line is between the similarities and differences in the two related ideas. </p>

<p>Example: Honor is like sportsmanship in baseball. Question: If a knight plans to fight with honor, should he take off his helmet on the battlefield and shake hands with his opponent?</p>

<p>On the other hand we have people who experience isolation earlier on or perhaps even traumatic events that display the impotence of man. In contrast to the above situation, the person’s safety is in question and or the person has no choice but to focus on adapting and understanding the natural world to get what they want. Such people learn to generalize from their experiences almost entirely using concepts. That is, they observe the natural world and note that there are similarities between somewhat different situations. From this they create a concept - an idea such that some parts of the idea are set in stone and define what the idea is (the similarity they deduced) and some parts are left variable (the differences they observed in the similar situations. </p>

<p>Example: Such a person witnesses the behavior of both a knight and a judge. They look nothing alike. Something is similar about their behavior however. Both of these people have power relative to the people around them, but instead of doing whatever they want they concern themselves with adherence to some set of rules in order to serve some greater purpose with their power. Hence, honor. </p>

<p>Generalizing from one’s experiences in such a manner gives a person a much more precise understanding of the relationship between different ideas. This results in a person of the latter type having everything they have ever learned combined into one network of understanding that they can draw from near-flawlessly for:</p>

<p>Creative purposes</p>

<p>Knowing when a thought or approach is disqualified from being accurate or succesful based on the rules of a superset of ideas</p>

<p>Creating comprehensive plans that take account for every possibility.</p>

<p>Example: The hull of a ship has holes in it that causes it to sink, contrary to what the ship is supposed to do. A chess player knocks his opponent’s pieces off the board in anger thus defeating the purpose of the game - as even if the angry player had begun to win his opponent could simply do the same thing and therefore noone could have won despite what the people thought when they sat down to play.</p>

<p>Hence: integrity. The integrity of a competition (like chess) depends on the honor of it’s participants. The two ideas fit together perfectly, because the relationship between them is fully defined when they are concepts and not metaphors. </p>

<p>Their original dispositioin is also useful from the standpoint of knowledge based on the fact that they are likely to disregard how people react to or understand a situation and instead look solely at the context which the idea arises from. </p>

<p>However as a result of their extreme knowledge and deductive abilities relative to other people, they do not fit in very well. Normal people’s (from the first group) behavior makes little or no sense from this perspective. A person is obviously attracted to someone else (by their body language and subtle reactions) but won’t admit it. A person insults another in a situation when the insulter would typically be insecure, but claims it is because of their dislike of the other person instead. A teacher or other adult is not able to explain an idea that seems to contradict what has been seen, and reacts by becoming angry or mis-using their authority (that they were given for a specific purpose) to punish you for asking. It is my belief that fallacies were originally created by such people (as those in this second group) trying to explain the difference in reasoning between themselves and others. </p>

<p>It’s easy to see why people in this situation often become misanthropic and perhaps “unsuccessful” in the superficial sense. </p>

<p>On the other hand, people in the first group with high iq’s fit in really well. They may never come to understand the world as the latter group does, and may feel tossed around by the tides of life. But, they use their natural ability to more quickly learn exactly what to say and do in order to garner respect or admiration from others.</p>

<p>There is no clear barrier that prevents one from crossing over to the other - it’s just usually they don’t care to. A rational minded person from the second group may cross over into having good people skills if they are cast into a particuarly warm and mature social enviornment or if they develop a comprehensive theory of humanity. A person from the first group may learn just about anything if directed to by others (either directly or because they need to better serve others).</p>

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<p>120-130 maybe :)</p>

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<p>I see this old thread has just been revived. Two new books that have come out since this thread was last active are both useful for better understanding of what IQ tests mean and what they don’t mean. </p>

<p>What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought </p>

<p>[What</a> Intelligence Tests Miss - Stanovich, Keith E. - Yale University Press](<a href=“http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852]What”>http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852) </p>

<p>[Amazon.com:</a> What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought: Keith E. Stanovich: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/030012385X]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/030012385X) </p>

<p>Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count </p>

<p>[Intelligence</a> and How to Get It (Main Page)](<a href=“http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/winter09/006505.htm]Intelligence”>Catalog | W. W. Norton & Company) </p>

<p>[Amazon.com:</a> Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count: Richard E. Nisbett: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-How-Get-Schools-Cultures/dp/0393065057/]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-How-Get-Schools-Cultures/dp/0393065057/)</p>

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<p>IQ is a meaningless number</p>

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<p>Over 9000, certainly.</p>

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<p>Sweet but just emphasizing again SAT is a very poor indicator of IQ. I got a 1680 in PSAT last year and now after some prep work, I am hitting above 2000s ye!1
And another thing, wont IQ tests be more accurate if they are a series of tests; say 3 tests determining how much you “improved”. I mean logic, critical thinking can be influenced greatly by the environment but the rate at which you learn/grasp, watever you call it is very innate.</p>

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<p>In my guide I discuss how this appears to be untrue: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/955109-silverturtles-guide-sat-admissions-success.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/955109-silverturtles-guide-sat-admissions-success.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>IQ is meaningless, example: Richard Feynman iq of 125 whilst he earned a noble prize.</p>

<p>125 mind you is above average, but is not very very smart. i think mensa requires an iq of > equal to 140 for membership. I think 140 is when your officially categorized as a legal genius.</p>

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<p>There is no such thing as a “legal genius.”</p>

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<p>If IQ were meaningless, there would be as many Nobel laureates with IQ’s over 100 as there are Nobel laureates with IQ’s below 100.</p>

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<p>131 to join mensa.</p>

<p>above 140 is considered genius as far as the general term goes.</p>