Let me be real clear: this message board does NOT need conservatives

[DemonTree]

@puzzlegal

I mean, it measures all of those. For instance, a major component of doing well on the verbal SAT score is knowing a lot of the vocabulary words on the test. And having a large vocabulary is no-doubt correlated with verbal intelligence. But it’s more strongly correlated with how many hours you’ve spent reading, which is likely to be more for kids who live in houses full of books and who don’t need to spend a lot of hours working after school.

All that makes sense, it sounds very plausible, but is there evidence? Is vocabulary more strongly correlated with verbal intelligence, or with number of books in the house? Bearing in mind that it also makes sense parents who enjoy reading tend to have kids who enjoy reading, and also own lots of books. Are there studies that account for this factor? (And as an aside, do US schools have libraries? I read a hell of a lot of books from the school library - there were even ancient encyclopedias where they speculated that life was likely to be found on Mars and Venus.)

@puzzlegal

And the actual words tested tend to be the words that upper-class kids would have come in contact with – the poster child for that was “regatta”. There are plenty of words that are more common in other demographic groups, but those words weren’t the ones on the SAT.

Surely most kids will have heard of that by the time they are taking the SAT? When I went to secondary school it was a common experience for me to hear some word and realise it was one I had learned through reading, and had been horribly mispronouncing for years having never heard it spoken. But as far as I remember, that had mostly stopped by the age of 16 or so, so we must all have been exposed to those words at school.

@puzzlegal

Similarly, a component of the verbal SAT test is comfort with the grammar of “upper class English”. And again, no doubt people with higher inherent verbal intelligence are more facile at knowing which edge cases do and don’t follow the rules. But people in different demographic groups grew up speaking slightly different dialects, with different rules. It’s a hell of a lot easier to master the rules you learned in the cradle than the ones you only see in school and in books assigned by schools.

I’m sure this is true, but how much difference does it make, really? Has anyone tried to design a test that lower SES kids do better on?

@puzzlegal

And then there really is an element of raw “test-taking ability”. Some people are just comfortable in the standardized testing environment, and can navigate it quickly and with certainty. And other’s can’t. I happen to be extremely good at standardized tests. And yeah, it’s probably helped me in life. I leveraged that skill by picking a field where I earned my credentials by taking a series of really hard standardized tests. (that’s how US actuaries are credentialed.) But I’m not convinced that “test taking ability” is very predictive of anything other than the ability to score well on standardized tests.

I mentioned this several times already, but how predictive do you think ‘test-taking ability’ is of posting on the Straight Dope? If I posted a poll asking people whether they are better or worse at taking standardised tests than average, what do you think the result would be?

@puzzlegal

as a results, they’ve moved their questions to be more like what kids see in school. But are those questions more like what kids in wealthy suburban schools see than what kids in poor inner-city and rural schools see? Hell yes.

Why would they be any different? Don’t they all follow the same syllabus?

@puzzlegal

Thank you. I scored very well on the verbal SAT.

You’re lucky. I failed English at school, and find writing hard work and the result never satisfactory.