Harrison Bergeron
It won’t be long before some parent of an “nonbrilliant” (I dare not use the word ‘dumb’) student sues the parent of a smart student for making their kid “feel bad” by comparison. We must all curb our talent and brilliance at once!
Change the topic of this diatribe to any one of a number of other topics that interest the illuminati and you can successfully run for congress.
What I find interesting is that when one of the mediocre does something exceptional (say Tony Hawk or Hulk Hogan or the guys from Duck Dynasty), the non-mediocre have no problem taking a good portion of the mediocre’s income via taxation, or more generally via legalized theft, so that the non-mediocre can continue to perpetuate the myth that only those with high IQs can succeed.
And yes, I understand that you’re doing it for our own good. It’s strong medicine but we need it.
Huh? The world is filled with successful people of unexceptional intelligence. You can start with major league baseball for one.
Menefrega- what point are you trying to make?
While I absolutely agree that intelligence (and I do mean IQ) can be evidenced – even when not measured – by many concrete signs, I also agree with Olive on the dumbing-down of the culture. Someone else posted something about the evolution of the SAT, and while I hadn’t recently reviewed that history myself, what I do know is that Analogies were removed because some racial groups (or their advocates) objected to them. And apparently, of all the previous question types on the SAT, analogies measured IQ best. From my own standpoint (in my own work), analogies are important because categorical understanding and writing derived from that are essential in college performance. So it was stupid, i.m.o., to remove those. It’s difficult to think critically if you cannot categorize and see relationships.
Again, people might be surprised at how many brilliant minds exist among the creative pursuits (the performing arts, including acting, being among those pursuits), although those minds have not been measured via an IQ test or an SAT. But I do agree with Olive on the political/social trends to make all feel as if they’re equal members of a mediocre society. The worst modern sin is to be even indirectly complicit in allowing anyone to “feel bad.”
Let me follow up by making it very clear that I do not believe that IQ can be attributed to race. That was not the meaning of my post, and apologies ahead if I seemed to imply that. I’m merely saying that it was my understanding that some advocacy groups had objected to analogies based on their supposedly “disadvantaging” racial minorities, while at the same time analogies have been identified elsewhere as indicators of IQ. I also do not think the so-called advocates were doing racial minorities any favors.
What is that IQ theory based on?
It’s a good question, JustOneDad, but I cannot answer it because I forget where I read the discussion of it.
This sounds interesting. So they could average out to 230 AI if they choose but try not to?
For athletes, schools are pretty open about how many standard deviations from the mean they can go in recruiting (2) so to argue about athletes is odd. Many athletes bring value to the schools far beyond any other students except for maybe development cases. Anyway, The SAT fails in the incremental analysis of IQ. After a score of 2000, it really comes down to who made this or that error. Some kids do many retakes, some kids take prep courses, others don’t, and some schools are better at preparing students than others. Kids that score over 2000 will have correctly answered questions of equally high difficulty. So after 2000, kids of similar intelligence are hitting the boundaries of their education. Not every genius scores a 1600/2400 and not every student that scores a 1600/2400 is a genius. That is because test taking skills, preparation, organization and education quality are also being tested alongside intelligence.
This discussion of athletes is specific to ivy league athletes. They are expected to meet an AI that meets the average of the campus while everyone else is admitted on a holistic basis.
*What is that IQ theory based on? *
I think you will appreciate this article:
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/1198gottfred.html
@shawbridge click on “Correlation of IQ-Scores” under SIDEBARS to the left. The graph shows how much IQ scores correlate to life outcome. I personally find it depressing, but such is life.
I think much of the questions asked were answered by the Slate article I posted earlier. For those who prefer to hear it right from the horse’s mouth. Here is one of the world’s leading authorities on the topic telling it as it is on TED. My apology to those who have heard it before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_Cr1a6rj4
This is certainly not the case for Harvard or Yale. For Harvard over a 46 year period the SAT scores have been stable. The following is from a 2008 post by @DunniniLA:
@Canuckguy What, exactly, is it you find depressing there?
As a follow-up to epiphany’s comment about eliminating the analogies section from the SAT: I have never seen this stated anywhere, but my suspicion is that the analogies were removed because many of the correct answers had been memorized by overseas groups of test-takers who had that “assignment” from a test-prep center, and later the prep center shared the answers with others.
It is not that easy to come up with good analogies and foils. So College Board (CB) had a limited number of good analogy questions, and used to recycle them.
It would be relatively easy to detect that the analogies section had been compromised, if that happened: CB used to break down percentiles in the reading comprehension section into separate percentiles for analogies, sentence completion, and reading passages. (I don’t think they did this on external reports in general, but they did send this breakdown to the students, at least part of the time.) Internally, they probably analyzed all of the results. If they found that the percentiles on the analogies were not well correlated with the scores in the other reading comprehension sections, then it would look as though something unexpected was happening. Of course, you might have the same effect if some highly motivated students just memorized long lists of vocabulary words with nuanced meanings, but had difficulty actually reading English.
@JustOneDad I find it depressing that Mother Nature is not an egalitarian. My teachers were lying to me. I don’t like it.
@Canuckguy Thank you for your post above re IQ testing. This confirms my casual observations over many years. But of course although it is predictive of performance/achievement/“success”, IQ/intelligence only statistically “explains” a fraction of those outcomes. And I suspect that if the study focused on the “off-diagonal” cases we would learn a lot about society, namely if we looked at high-achieving people with “average” intelligence and low-achieving people with “high intelligence.”
The last slide in that TED talk implied that many of the low-SES (socioeconomic status) kids did not go as far in life as they might go because they didn’t apply to the most competitive colleges. What it did not show is how successful those kids were nonetheless – whether they went to college at all, whether they graduated, what their lifetime achievements were even if they attended a community college and, say, a “directional” university.
Nor did the talk speak about the cases of the geniuses who crapped out in life, never achieved a lot, etc. Of course, things like “luck” and also “social connections” (fundamentally: family) factor in here, and I would include in “luck” things like where one lives, health and disability; and I would include under “social connections” thinks like race and ethnicity and gender and discrimination that often disconnects success from ability (intelligence) because of prejudice and social conventions.
@Canuckguy I’m trying to decide if it’s teachers jobs to hand out the filtered data or the raw data. Filtered, I guess, although some people appreciate the occasional one that gives it to them straight.
QuantMech, with regard to your reply 214. I agree with you that constructing analogies is labor-intensive, but people are paid to do that kind of thing. If Collegeboard, ACT, or anyone else doesn’t want to bother, that’s laziness on their part, and then the reliability of the test as a measurement will be compromised if there are limited versions of it which are supposedly easy to memorize.
FWIW, one of the standard curricula I use in my work does something very clever for its test construction, which is not regurgitation of the facts and lists students are asked to memorize in the lessons, but application of those via analogies. It is the most difficult part of the assessment and does test whether students actually understood the material enough to apply it and transfer it. It’s why none of my students in my short course have achieved a 100% score yet, because modern study habits, learned (or not learned) in classrooms are so poor and application is so rarely taught, or taught well. I could spend the entire short course reteaching what they should have been taught.
IOW, the analogy section in the curriculum I mention would not be something easily gamed or predicted, at all. You would actually have to understand the concepts behind the words in more than a linear way. Imagine. :-S
As discussed in another thread, the paper mentions the actual numbers listed in the chart were copied from the book The Belle Curve. The book got the numbers from looking at life outcomes of persons in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth who took the Army Vocational test a few decades ago, and attempted to estimate IQ based on scores on this army test. Other studies have found that Army vocational test results in this old NLSY sample group have tremendously stronger predictive power of life outcomes than IQ. For example, the study at http://home.uchicago.edu/~tkautz/Heckman_Kautz_2012_Hard%20Evidence.pdf compares the predictive power of 9th grade GPA, IQ, and Army Vocational Test scores to various measures of life outcomes. While none of the measures were strong predictors of life outcomes, the army test was by far the most predictive of life outcomes among these 3 measures. 9th grade GPA was next in predictive power., and IQ was least predictive. I’m not familiar with the use of the Army Vocational test during this period. If it was primarily given to persons interested in joining the military, rather than the overall population, then the sample group biases may have more to do with the greater predictive power than the test itself. Some specific numbers are below:
Predictive Validity in Female Earnings at Age 35.
IQ – 1%
9th grade GPA – 5%
Army test – 9%
Predictive Validity in Male Earnings at Age 35
IQ – 7%
9th grade GPA – 9%
Army test – 17%