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

[JohnT]

Not too sure what the debate is here because a simple Google search will find cites which say that higher SAT scores by the student correspond to higher incomes later in the students life:

This Table Proves Just How Much SAT Scores Predict Future Success

As well as cites which state that higher family income corresponds to students having higher SAT scores:

How Admissions Tests Discriminate Against Low-Income And Minority Student...

It’s not surprising that a child who has a family fortune of, say, $5,000,000 both (a) can concentrate fully on their SAT’s and (b) can be assured of a job paying 6-figures (work in the family biz), while a child who’s family has a $50k net worth (a) might be resource-constrained in the amount of time they have to prepare, and (b) may be conceptually-constrained in the idea that they are even worth a 6-figure job.

What I mean by that last is that success breeds success - Shea Serrano, a native San Antonian who became the first Latino writer to have three NY Times #1 best sellers, said that growing up on the Southside of San Antonio, the idea of a young Hispanic boy working for an American book publisher meant that you were working the warehouse. He notes that when he was raised, there was nobody who told him that instead of hauling the books, he could be the one writing them.

Your social milieu… much of which is stratified by wealth… has more to do with your future baseline success than your SAT scores, but your social milieu also impacts your SAT scores more than is given credit. A southsider in San Antonio thinking he has a future of hauling books will have a different attitude towards the test than a northsider wanting a future of writing them, and that, too, will reflect in the scores.

[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.

[DemonTree]

@JohnT

Not too sure what the debate is here because a simple Google search will find cites which say that higher SAT scores by the student correspond to higher incomes later in the students life:

@JohnT

As well as cites which state that higher family income corresponds to students having higher SAT scores:

So compare then separately. How do people with similar family income but different SAT scores do, and what about people with different SAT scores but similar family income?

[JohnT]

Or, logically, if we remove the variable of SAT scores, you find that higher family income as a student correlates very strongly to higher individual incomes as an adult.

So I just think you could just argue that SAT scores makes no income correlation whatsoever, or that other factors matter far more

Not too sure how you would do such a study as you require a large enough sample of Americans who were both honestly disclose their SAT scores and income over the period of years you wish to study. Good luck with that!

[puzzlegal]

@DemonTree

@puzzlegal

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?

Are you serious? That’s a word that most Americans never hear, never read, and never use. It’s very much the dialect of the wealthy.

@DemonTree

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

No. Texas, and perhaps California, have a state curriculum that the public schools follow. But in most states every town or city sets its own curriculum. For that matter, individual teachers have some choice in their curriculum. I’ve been tutoring in a nearly city high school, and I’ve worked in two different algebra classrooms, and while they ultimately covered a lot of the same material, i was surprised at how different the classes were.

[Babale]

@puzzlegal

@DemonTree

Surely most kids will have heard of that by the time they are taking the SAT?

Are you serious? That’s a word that most Americans never hear, never read, and never use. It’s very much the dialect of the wealthy.

Yeah, this. Vocab (in school and on the SAT) was full of words like “velocipede”.

[DemonTree]

@puzzlegal

Are you serious? That’s a word that most Americans never hear, never read, and never use. It’s very much the dialect of the wealthy.

Maybe it’s more common in the UK? Or maybe I just don’t know what’s common knowledge, because once I learnt to read you couldn’t stop me if you tried. No one ever had to force me to read a book, not even Shakespeare.

@puzzlegal

No. Texas, and perhaps California, have a state curriculum that the public schools follow. But in most states every town or city sets its own curriculum. For that matter, individual teachers have some choice in their curriculum. I’ve been tutoring in a nearly city high school, and I’ve worked in two different algebra classrooms, and while they ultimately covered a lot of the same material, i was surprised at how different the classes were.

Okay, but then why would it differ according to the wealth of the area rather than being random?

Americans think school funding is such a big deal, but when I was at school all schools in the area got the same funding, and there were no particular racial disparities; but there were still good schools and bad schools. No one ever seems to explain that.

And I may have had a couple of drinks, but I haven’t forgotten that I asked you for evidence, and you didn’t reply to that part. Are you planning to?

@Babale

Yeah, this. Vocab (in school and on the SAT) was full of words like “velocipede”.

So? Isn’t that just an old-timey word for the bicycle? They have to have some words that not everyone knows, or it would be pointless.

[crowmanyclouds]

Geeze people, Regatta is that album by the Police!

[Miller]

I’m pretty sure I only know the word “regatta” thanks to the classic of the western canon, One Crazy Summer, starring John Cusack.

[Babale]

@DemonTree

@Babale

Yeah, this. Vocab (in school and on the SAT) was full of words like “velocipede”.

So? Isn’t that just an old-timey word for the bicycle? They have to have some words that not everyone knows, or it would be pointless.

Sure, but the SAT measures whether you know old-timey, stuffy, rich-people-words (AKA how British people speak normally? at least, if our undoubtedly inaccurate movies are to be believed!) not how intelligent you are.

[JohnT]

@DemonTree

I was at school all schools in the area got the same funding, and there were no particular racial disparities; but there

I am very interested in the depth of your knowledge of local school budgets and policy issues at the age of 16. Please explain more. Have any data?

[DemonTree]

@Babale

AKA how British people speak normally?

Totally untrue!

Maybe a few rich people learn those words in their daily life, but most people learn them by reading a lot. Isn’t that how you got most of your vocabulary?

[puzzlegal]

@DemonTree

And I may have had a couple of drinks, but I haven’t forgotten that I asked you for evidence, and you didn’t reply to that part. Are you planning to?

No. I’m not going to give you evidence that potted tomato plants die if they never get watered, either. I already pointed out that the plants get large and have lots of leaf area and that I’ve seen them wilt on sunny days. I’m not going to look up a bunch of studies to prove the obvious.

[octopus]

Regatta? I had to look that up. This is one reason why I think colleges should go to a race/gender neutral policy while taking into account economic status. This would solve several problems while avoiding race/gender quotas.

[Babale]

@DemonTree

Maybe a few rich people learn those words in their daily life, but most people learn them by reading a lot. Isn’t that how you got most of your vocabulary?

Sure, but that’s my whole point. I was lucky enough that it was easy for me to read a lot. My parents strongly encouraged it. My mom was home to tell me that I’d watched enough cartoons on TV and that I had to either read a book or switch to an educational channel.

I plan to do the same thing for my kids. But I was lucky to be born into a family that instilled reading into me at a young age. Not everyone is lucky enough to have parents with the time to do that. If my mom had worked two jobs instead of staying home, would she have had time to instill those values in me?

[thorny_locust]

@DemonTree:
It no more occured to me not to learn to read, or not to keep reading once started, than it occured to me not to learn to talk, or not to keep talking once started. I was surrounded both by books and by other humans who read for pleasure and who assumed that of course I would too.

One day early on in grade school I came home with an assignment that confounded me greatly. We had been told to report back to our teacher how many books we had in our house. I asked my mother, “Do I need to count them all?!” and she showed me how to count the books on one shelf, measure the length of the shelf, measure the bookshelves in the house, and get an approximation: IIRC, about a thousand.

I had absolutely no idea, at the time, that there were people who had one or six or no books at all in their houses, and that some of them were my classmates. In my defense, I was somewhere around 8 years old at the time.

Yes, there were libraries. My parents took me to the library. The school took the class to the school library, IIRC, about once a month, and I think you could take one or two books. I don’t think the books they offered to us had anything about regattas in them.

And even with that home background – one of the ideas the back of my head managed to pick up in school was that if I was supposed to read something, I didn’t want to; because most of what they gave us I found massively boring. I still have trouble, some sixty years later, making myself read anything I’m supposed to be reading; though I read other things whenever I have a hand and an eye free, and sometimes when I shouldn’t have them free. How much do you suppose somebody’s going to read whose only experience with books was in those schools?

I expect these boards lean very heavily towards people who read for pleasure. Anybody who doesn’t isn’t, after all, going to read the boards very long. But there are plenty of people with lots of inherent brains who don’t read for pleasure; and are not going to pick up vocabulary that way.

[DeadTreasSecretaries]

I loved to read when I was a kid but there were very few SAT words in Matt Christopher books or Narnia.

I learned most of the SAT vocab in prep classes. Still have no idea when I’m supposed to use them. The corporate bullshit words I’ve had to learn happen to be different. I guess it proved I’m good at memorizing things?

[MrDibble]

@DeadTreasSecretaries

there were very few SAT words in […] Narnia.

I would think the overlap between C.S. Lewis’ lexicon and the common SAT one was non-trivial.

[puzzlegal]

Tolkien was better for SAT vocabulary than Lewis, but I’m inclined to agree with you.

[DemonTree]

@octopus

Regatta? I had to look that up.

In the UK it’s a popular outdoor clothing brand. I don’t know how many people know what it means, though.

Eta: I asked my partner, who is smart but not a great reader, and he said “it’s a clothing brand, isn’t it?” So probably Brits in general are no more familiar with it than Americans.

@MrDibble

@DeadTreasSecretaries

there were very few SAT words in […] Narnia.

I would think the overlap between C.S. Lewis’ lexicon and the common SAT one was non-trivial.

I agree, that is almost certainly not true. Modern children’s books may use a purposely limited vocabulary, but old ones like the Narnia series don’t. I know I learned an awful lot of words just from reading kids’ books, because like I said, I went through a period when I was a teenager of hearing words I knew from reading for the first time, and realising how horribly I had been mispronouncing them.

I would assume the SAT includes a range of words from the common to the esoteric, and your reading got you to the point where you only had the most obscure ones left to learn in prep classes.