<p>Among American universities, Caltech comes in just ahead of Yale, and far above MIT, Harvard and other competitors. </p>
<p>Europeans dominate the rankings, for obvious reasons. Among just the European test, Caltech and Yale are the only two American universities to break the top 120.</p>
<ul>
<li>Universities with less than 10 individual student test-takers in the Traveler IQ Challenge are not shown.</li>
</ul>
<p>Rank # ---- College ---- Average IQ on World Geography ---- # of Players </p>
<p>Many places away, but only 4.6 points, and MANY more participants. Doesn't sound too meaningful a comparison to me. That being said, I took NO geography in college and only one history class in 4 years. Maybe Caltech has an actual requirement in this area?</p>
<p>Another dubious, meaningless and ridiculous ranking posted by a troll. Do not even bother posting. I am surprised he has not posted this in every thread in CC.</p>
<p>I'm not trolling. I hope nobody takes this the wrong way. It's just kind of interesting to see how the Europeans are dominating this game, with Caltech being the only kids really measuring up.</p>
<p>Also, while the data is not entirely reliable, given the number of participants, OVERALL trends are certainly discernable. For example, the most selective colleges and universities are dominant in the rankings, particularly those with a strong political science or international relations component, even though they don't necessarily have any more or fewer players than students from other universities and colleges. A difference of a few points may not seem like much, especially in terms of just comparing one person to another, but in terms of a bell curve comparison of hundreds of test takers, it is not insigificant.</p>
<p>What's also interesting is how popular the game is. Over 1,000 kids at Harvard have taken the test!</p>
<p>Well done to mix the two definitions of significant, troll.
Just because, assuming your data is legit, it is statistically significant - unlikely to vary by random chance alone - does not mean it is significant in the sense of telling anything that anyone cares about.</p>
<p>DMRenel, keep in mind that there are hundreds of scientists who study global knowledge of geography for a living -- I would say that it is significant that this simple test of college students concurs with papers that they have spent years of their lives collecting data for.</p>
<p>As if to underscore the challenges students face in this country regarding geography, the original poster missed the fact that Monterey is in California and thus the Monterey Institute of International Studies is #1 in the US ahead of Caltech :-)</p>
<p>LOL, good point -- but I just assumed that it was in the major city of 4,000,000 people in northern Mexico (Monterrey), just that it had been spelled wrong. </p>
<p>It's not really a college, though, so my point stands anyways :)</p>
<p>Best to ignore anything PosterX posts, he seems to need a daily affirmation of how great Yale is and must spend hours trolling the internet looking for obscure and meaningless data.</p>
<p>Lol! By now you should realize that every time you post your nonsense everyone responds with the troll epithet. Just get over it and find something constructive to post about....</p>
<p>actually the other thing to consider is the game isn't that random in it's locations. The more you play, the easier it becomes and the closer you get to the locations. So this is what the european kids do. My guess is the american kids would score better on identifying porn actresses...</p>
<p>While it's not a rigorous study by any means (for one thing, Caltech seems to have an abnormally large percentage of its student body participate in this relative to other universities - it's possibly an in-house thing), it is a means of hypothesis generation for those interested in the world knowledge of college students. And it's probable that this data set isn't complete bullcrap, that it does predict student knowledge better than chance (as is the case of much social science research). Caltech is ranked surprisingly high on some WoW website (mapwow.com), and from what I've heard, there are a few Techers who do play unusually large amounts of WoW, even though the "mapwow" data set isn't particularly reliable in terms of absolute play hours spent.</p>
<p>There are some problems with this measure - the Facebook newsfeed tends to act as a force of positive feedback - so once one of your friends adds this application, a good number of your other friends may add it too, whereas people outside of that group are remarkably blind to it (this obviously does not present a representative group)</p>
<p>Of course, in the case of social science research, much of it is poisoned by knowledge prior to the test (especially once people are motivated to improve their scores on the "arbitrary" test). This is why IQ test makers and Rorschbach ink blot test makers try to hide knowledge of their tests and scoring rubrics from the public attention. Social science research is only reliable IFF people are completely blind to the test and when a random subsample of students from each school are selected to take the test - of course, this usually is not the case (although still, unreliable data sets still may predict better than chance, hence explaining the hypothesis generation possibility of social science research). </p>
<p>Most people may not care about this, but certainly one cannot dismiss the possibility of surprising connections coming out of hypotheses like this (even if only a small minority of hypotheses like this have any potential of further investigation).</p>
<p>==
But in general, while I don't trust this data set that much, I do commend the author for recognizing the potential of Facebook in conducting social science research. It's possible that some creative person may be able to find ways to control the problems of selection bias and representativeness that are problematic when it comes to facebook studies (which COULD be somewhat useful on a few measures).</p>
<p>
[quote]
For example, the most selective colleges and universities are dominant in the rankings, particularly those with a strong political science or international relations component, even though they don't necessarily have any more or fewer players than students from other universities and colleges.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>UCSF did pretty well, and it's primarily a med school (de facto Berkeley med school). Though as the West Coast's premier med school, it is quite selective. Apparently, too, it has a lot of post-docs from other parts of the world. Maybe they participated....</p>