Interesting thought.
http://www.aei.org/publication/why-the-sat-isnt-a-student-affluence-test/
Ahh. sorry.
Opinion
Why the SAT Isn’t a ‘Student Affluence Test’
A lot of the apparent income effect on standardized tests is owed to parental IQ—a fact that needs addressing.
By
Charles Murray
March 24, 2015 7:11 p.m. ET
http://www.aei.org/publication/why-the-sat-isnt-a-student-affluence-test/
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
So he says that grit is an explanation for higher SAT scores, but the SAT doesn’t measure grit.
Hmm.
itwillow:
posting a complete article is against federal laws and the TOS. Can you edit it to a snippet/
the article was printed in today’s Wall Street Journal, does that make a difference in accessibility?
yes, it is a copyright infringement. WSJ owns the ‘rights’ and unless it clearly states that the article can be used for mass redistribution…its a violation of intellectual property to repost an article in its entirety. Posting snippets and a link to the whole article is perfectly legal, however.
Does that mean that all siblings should have identical scores? Boys and girls?
Does that mean that kids from the same parents should score equally if they were raised in Beverly Hills or in Vanuatu?
When will someone finally recognize that the SAT scores might correlate to the amount of efforts placed to utilize the available resources to their full extent?
No, ‘correlation’ does not mean, suggest, or imply any of that.
I would very much like to think that my kids’ SAT scores correlate with my IQ, but as my father used to say, “It skips a generation”.
I agree wholeheartedly with the article. What Charles Murray is basically saying is that:
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SAT scores are highly correlated with parental IQ, not affluence as our populist media likes to claim
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The fact that you inherited your parents’ IQ is pure luck(of nature), not because you earned it
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Those with high SAT scores do well academically and succeed because of their high IQ, not because of their SAT scores
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The problem with our education system is that we only nurture 1 type of talent, the kind that correlates well with high IQ and test scores, ignoring those who bring with them other talents not measurable by an IQ test or SAT test.
Point #4 is the most salient point. Unfortunately Mr. Murray did not go on to illustrate how we could identify and nurture talents not identifiable by an SAT test, which would make this article a much more convincing/productive discussion.
I believe that there are more than 1 way to succeed. Not everyone needs to go to college to succeed in life. We need to have a good system of apprenticeship in place for high school kids who are not college incline to get into professions that interest them. Our society needs talented hair dressers, chefs, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, welders, auto mechanics etc. much more than we do more lawyers, college educated Starbucks baristas, t-shirt folders or another vampire squid on wall street.
Is this the time someone will add the trite “correlation does not mean causation?” If this does not suggest nor imply that the logic is that the IQ of the parents “correlate” to the scores of all their children, what in the world does the “research” really suggest?
To be clear, I believe that most of the similar research on correlation to XYX such as income level, parental education, and level of measured intelligence happen to be built on shaky foundation (such as the moronic questionnaires used by TCB to poll clueless responders) and poorly controlled criteria. One could establish a correlation with higher SAT scores to … having been admitted to a prestigious K-12 all the while failing to control the attributes of the same students.
The reality is the child of uber-IQ person could underperform on the SAT just as a goat herder in Bhutan could excel with the right preparation.
It would be much better for those so-called research geniuses to find way to increase the capacity to score on such test (starting with developing better teaching methods) than continue to “correlate” the scores to various elements for the sake of filling peer-reviewed journals and waste more trees.
RE: kids of the same parents raised in different environments
A very small sample, interpret it as you will. . .One family, same parents. Oldest two kids were “unschooled,” and spent most of their childhood in a rural area of one of the (academically) lowest-performing states. They did little academic work except reading and math. They also had an unstable childhood, moving a number of times while they were school age. One kid was an athlete who spent most weekdays training during high school years.
The next two kids attended the same top suburban public high school in another state with plenty of APs, labs, foreign languages, activities, etc.all 4 years.
Each kid took the SAT only once during second semester of junior year. Among those 4 kids(3 boys/one girl) there was only an 80 point difference (on 2400 scale) between the highest and lowest SAT score.
Three of the four kids were NMFs, as were both parents. (Fwiw, the non-NMF did not have the lowest SAT score. The schooled kids did have the slightly higher scores, but also did a little more test prep.)
As a person with a very low income during a significant portion of the child’s life coupled with a very high SAT score on the part of the child, I am happy to embrace this. 
Atomom, I have no problems believing your sample. I could point towards 3 brothers attending same high school at the same time and having a delta of more than 200 points on each section. That and a set of twins with the same delta.
This discussion reminded me of this article, which was featured in another thread.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/04/news/economy/college-graduate-rich-poor/
Of course not. All siblings don’t inherit all the same traits. One kid may inherit father’s height & blue eyes, another may inherit mother’s curly hair & braininess.
If tall parents generally produce tall kids, then I don’t know why high IQ parents won’t generally produce high IQ kids.
Of course, if this is intended to be a nature vs. nurture argument, it is not exactly obvious what the answer is. College graduate parents are more likely to give advantages to their kids in both areas.
[QUOTE=""]
Does that mean that all siblings should have identical scores? Boys and girls?
[/QUOTE]
Of course not. All siblings don’t inherit all the same traits. One kid may inherit father’s height & blue eyes, another may inherit mother’s curly hair & braininess.
If tall parents generally produce tall kids, then I don’t know why high IQ parents won’t generally produce high IQ kids.<<<
Thus the correlation is simply a matter of coincidence? What would you call a correlation that happens for 1/2 or 1/3 of the kids? If Susie can’t break 1600 but little Moshe it close to 2400, what does it mean?
Average performance for large groups are meaningless when outliers are commonly present. The differences between a 1500 and a 1900 are not as meaningful as some think.
Xiggi, it seems you are willfully misunderstanding the word ‘correlation’. There is no requirement for r = 1 (perfect correlation), in order to state correctly that something is correlated. How on earth do you go from someone saying ‘generally produce tall kids’ to ‘simply a matter of coincidence’?
Addressing Murray’s purported correlation. Read the article.