Does College Major = IQ?
I stumbled upon a rather provocative article the other day: “Your college major is a pretty good indication of how smart you are.” It started me thinking.
C/IS and CS are consistently close to the top, I feel good about myself.
I think there was already a thread started on this?
I resent being labeled stupid on the basis of my elementary education major. Correlation, NOT causation. I’m tired of being blown off in interdisciplinary courses after the round of introductions. I’ve got a brain, people! Sheesh. Undoubtedly there are majors which require greater intelligence, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is a moron. I probably rant about this too much and too often, so I’ll just stop there.
Why on Earth are they correlating this to SAT and GRE Math scores? Of course math-heavy majors are going to do well, LOL.
@runner019 If it’s not true (especially in your particular case) I wouldn’t let it bother me.
Ctesiphon If you look closely at the SAT and GRE averages of differing majors in the article the value that is used is the average of BOTH CR and Math. So if you double the numbers from the chart you would get the total CR+M scores for the respective majors. The average GRE total for an Education major is 984 and that of an Engineering major is 1188. For the SAT, Education majors had a 964 total while Engineers had a 1107 and at the top was Math majors at 1148.
So Engineers are not only doing better on the Math but on the Verbal as well. If you read the article, “top performing school systems, such as those in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea, “recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort”, while in the US, the “data show that US students who choose to major in education, essentially the bulk of people who become teachers, have for at least the last seven decades been selected from students at the lower end of the academic aptitude pool.”
runner019 states the typical response when the data is not flattering that it is just “Correlation, NOT causation” when the author stated as “An important caveat: The data presented looks only at group averages and does not speak to the aptitude of specific individuals. Obviously there are people with high academic aptitude in every major and there can be larger aptitude differences between entire schools”. The author and no one else stated Education majors were stupid, but only that in general Education majors are from the lower end of the academic pool.
However, one doesn’t need to be able to do Calculus to teach a 2nd grader how to count or add. You do need other types of skills that are not measured by the standardized tests such as patience, empathy, cool headedness, understanding etc that are also important qualities of a teacher. So not performing well on the author’s measures of academic aptitude does not mean that one does not have other qualities that typical Education majors may have that typical Engineers may lack.
Uh, no. I have a higher IQ than my brother, who is a CS major. I’m majoring in Music.
I expected engineers/physical scientists to do better on M than on CR or W on the SAT (or V and Q on the GRE), but the discrepancy in CR or W subscores between engineers/physical scientists may not be as great as with M.
So Catria is your point that one’s math ability pretty much determines your IQ?
No, just that a more careful look at the data is necessary… and even so, one must not fall prey to the ecological fallacy.
The point of the article was about college majors=IQ. Your point was that you “expected engineers/physical scientists to do better on M than on CR” and the average SAT scores provided in the article was the average of both Math and CR subscores combined. Given your statement that “the discrepancy in CR or W subscores between engineers/physical scientists may not be as great as with M”, then you expected the actual average SAT M to be higher than that presented in the article for engineers/physical scientists. If that is the case and college majors=IQ then doesn’t that indicate that one’s math ability pretty much determines IQ?
I’d want the breakdown between CR and M as well… the article said that it was CR+M combined, with no distinction made between the subscores.
Catria Here is a breakdown by CR M and Writing SAT scores for different majors.
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-sat-score-for-every-college-major-2014-10
At least that data helps us make sense of the article’s SAT-based claims…
Electrical engineering is a rite of passage when people ask you for your major, but it makes one judgmental of the other person sharing their major. And I hated being judged for college admissions based on my CR+W SAT scores. They were terrible ~500 range compared to my math stats.
@Catria You may find this answer some of your questions:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/SQ9Gpp-yuXI/AAAAAAAAHnc/nIEJ3uK0TkQ/s1600-h/gre.bmp
If math gives an edge to STEM majors, then verbal reasoning should benefit the English or history major. Guess who are at the top on LSAT scores:
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~emillner/Economics/lsat.htm
In the old SAT, if the math portion were to show a similar score distribution as the verbal portion, the discrepancy would be even greater. (Far more students hit the ceiling in the math than in the verbal portion). Ever wonder why they have it that way?
There is simply no substitute for intelligence, or the “g” factor, as they are calling it. Jonathan Wai is correct.
This is purely anecdotal, but among the top 10 students in my class, here are the intended majors:
Electrical Engineering
Biology (pre-med)
Astrophysics or engineering
Math/Computer Science or Math/Econ (me)
Computer Science
Mechanical Engineering
Computer Science/Math
Chemistry (pre-med)
Chemistry (pre-med)
Chemistry or Biology (pre-med)
There’s a big gender gap with girls gravitating to pre-med and guys to CS/math/engineering.
@Ctesiphon
It’s math AND verbal…
If you can put in the time you can get pretty much any degree you want. Sure high IQ people can get by fairly easy. But so can someone taking 12 credit hours every semester and spending many hours a week in front of their textbooks. I think it’s more hard work and commitment than anything else. I know quite a few people that almost failed high school… just confused with what they wanted to do with their life or what is important. Then in their 20s they get turned on to engineering or pharmacy. They went to community college to make up for their past mistakes, a 4 year public, then a top 25 masters program.
I respect a high IQ just as much as I respect the hardworking kid that makes up for it with a clear direction and commitment.
What does seem to correlate is ‘higher IQ = higher lifetime earnings’. I went over a few of these studies in a Psyc class a few years back. Seems the smarter you are the more likely you know how to ‘work your major’