What you are studying may not have as much effect as you think. Twin studies show vocabulary size in adulthood is quite strongly heritable, ie parents who love reading have kids who love reading, and also have lots of books in the house, but the kids’ love of reading is in large part inherited rather than being caused by that environment.
What’s your point?
Since the availability of lots of books in the house, or even of more than a couple of books in the house, has been common for most humans on the planet for at most a few hundred years, it would be really surprising to me if “love of reading” is genetic. Have you cites?
Even if we accepted her premise ase true I genuinely have no clue what it would say about the SAT.
… and there it is.
Reading is fairly novel evolutionarily, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t influenced by various interests and abilities that aren’t. Storytelling is universal in humans, for example.
I didn’t think there’d be any studies on ‘love of reading’ (there are for vocabulary size), but this is kind of in the ballpark:
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.12910
Earlier in this thread various people were saying the SAT was unfair because it tests things like vocabulary, which are influenced by the number of books you have in the house growing up and whether you see your parents reading for pleasure.
Your study says that both are factors which would prove them right but at any rate…
The assertion I made that you were apparently responding to is that standardized tests have an inherent problem when it comes to things like vocab because even if you read a lot and do a good job grasping what you read, it’s extremely arbitrary whether the kinds of things you were exposed to are what shows up on the test.
I got through the test without errors. English isn’t my first language and I was tired after a long day.
I think it’s too easy.
I’ll read it more thoroughly later. But at a fast glance this section:
An important hypothesis regarding the relationship between reading ability and print exposure is that it reflects shared genetic influences. Further, on the grounds of temporal precedence, it might be assumed that reading mediates genetic influences on print exposure. While it is well established that differences among children in reading skills are largely due to genetic factors (Olson, Keenan, Byrne, & Samuelsson, 2014), with heritability across studies reported to be .73 (de Zeeuw, de Geus, & Boomsma, 2015), few studies have investigated the aetiology of individual differences in print exposure. Those that have report heritability estimates ranging from 0.10 (Harlaar, Dale, & Plomin, 2007) through 0.39 (Harlaar, Trzaskowski, Dale, & Plomin, 2014) to 0.65–0.67 (Harlaar et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2009), all with large E-components, suggestive of substantive measurement error.
appears to be saying that while reading skills are largely due to genetic factors (possibly having to do with differences in eyesight, dyslexia, and so on? they don’t discuss that) the amount that children actually read is not due to genetic influence. Maybe you missed that they’re not using “print exposure” to mean the amount of reading matter in the children’s environment, but instead using it to mean the amount which they actually read anything not required by the school?
The amount of time children read out-of-school hours has been variously termed reading amount, reading frequency, reading for pleasure, independent reading and print exposure. Measured here is the quantity of reading that parents state their children do of their own volition and not as prescribed by school. We use the term ‘print exposure’ here
Half right. 
I didn’t realise that was what you meant. The report I was looking at does say they are careful nowadays to avoid biased questions that would favour one group over another.
That’s a useful data point. I didn’t expect anyone here to have any difficulty with it, but if it’s simple even for a non-native speaker then it probably really is too easy.
No, I knew what ‘print exposure’ meant. That was the point of linking to it - it’s measuring love of reading. And it says that the amount children choose to read is influenced about 50% by genes and 50% by shared environment, whereas reading ability is not influenced by shared environment at all.
I’ve also been looking at the report @IvoryTowerDenizen linked to, arguing to eliminate the SAT from UC admissions. This part seems problematic to me:
How well do test scores predict student success at UC?: As this brief history teaches, the answer depends not only on the outcome measure chosen but on what other academic and socioeconomic information is included in the prediction model. The advent of holistic review in UC admissions has substantially added to the body of information considered in admissions decisions. After taking that information into account, how much do SAT/ACT scores uniquely add to the prediction of student success at UC?
An answer is provided in a 2008 study by Sam Agronow, former director of policy, planning, and analysis at Berkeley. In a regression model predicting first-year grades, Agronow entered all available data from the UC application. In addition to high school GPA and SAT scores, these included: students’ course totals in the UC-required “a-g” sequence, whether the student ranked in the top 4% of their class, scores on two SAT II Subject Tests, family income, parental education, language spoken in the home, participation in academic preparation programs, and the rank of the student’s high school on the state’s Academic Performance Index.
Entering all these factors into the prediction model, Agronow found that they explained 21.7% of the variance in students’ first-year grades at Berkeley. When he eliminated SAT scores from the model, thus isolating their effect, the explained variance fell to 19.8%. SAT scores accounted for less than 2 percent of the variance in students’ first-year grades at Berkeley. Across all UC undergraduate campuses, SAT scores contributed an increment of 1.6 percentage points.
Test scores do add a statistically significant increment to the prediction of freshman grades at UC. But in the context of all the other applicant information now available, they are largely redundant, and their unique contribution is small.
This sounds reasonable at first. They don’t need SAT scores, because taking all the other information available in the application allows very nearly as good a prediction of college performance. But look what information they are using: high school GPA, students’ course totals in the UC-required “a-g” sequence, whether the student ranked in the top 4% of their class, scores on two SAT II Subject Tests, family income, parental education, language spoken in the home, participation in academic preparation programs, and the rank of the student’s high school on the state’s Academic Performance Index.
The ones I have bolded are information that won’t and shouldn’t be used as admissions criteria - at least, not in the sense that would give a positive correlation with college GPA. We know family income, parental education etc are correlated with college performance, but if anything the holistic admissions process will be weighting them in the opposite direction. So surely it is misleading to imply these criteria will do just as good a job in selecting students if the SAT is dropped, when they will not and should not use them in the manner required?
Heritable? Christ, not this Bell Curve shit again. Next you’re gonna start forcing us to watch Sam Harris on YouTube
Are you referring to this report, linked in this post #2377?
(Oh, how I long for the day when Dopers—well, at least the Dopers who still resist doing it—will actually start citing their intrathread references in a useful fashion, by post quoting or re-linking or even just mentioning the post number, rather than just waving their hand at “some stuff this other guy said back there somewhere”. So we don’t have to scrabble through a multithousand-post thread trying to figure out wtf they’re referring to.
I thought the new Discourse software might make such practices easier to implement, but APparently not, sigh. Though Discourse isn’t always helpful in the way it queries you about repeating a previous link, either.)
Anyways, this:
Where are you getting your information about specific admissions criteria used by UC? AFAICT, the report says concerning their “holistic admissions process”:
So I’m not really seeing what your objection is. Under their holistic review policy, the UC admissions process can select applicants based on “the totality of information in applicants’ files”, which is what that information is there for in the application file in the first place. And the report is claiming that the rest of the “totality of information” is just as good a predictor of performance as the standardized test scores, so the test scores are redundant.
In other words, AFAICT, the objection to using test scores as admissions criteria is that they constitute a sort of “double counting” of qualifications that have already been measured by other criteria.
That is, if you’re totting up an applicant’s “admissions score” as so much for course grades, so much for SAT scores, so much for athletic achievement, etc. etc., then using both SAT scores and other markers of academic achievement is essentially counting the same thing twice. The SAT scores are just artificially inflating the positive impact of your high achievements, or the negative impact of your mediocre achievements, rather than providing any additional information about your capabilities.
Yes, that is indeed the same report I linked to in my post. I linked directly to the pdf rather than the summary page; why is that a problem exactly?
My objection is that things like ‘parental education’ and ‘high school Academic Performance Index rank’ are not qualifications! They are demographic data which cannot be used as an admission criteria in the same way the SAT scores currently are. So to the extent those things matter in their model (probably quite a lot), they are not double counting.
It is strange that of all the creatures in the universe only humans don’t have inheritable traits.
Not surprising that you ignore that what asahi pointed out was the misuse of inheritance that many conservatives use for racist purposes.
He literally objected to the word ‘heritable’. 
It’s the left-wing equivalent of global warming denialism.
Not really, what you are going for is also bloody ignorant:
There is really no problem with inheritance, the anti-intellectuals trust that people like you will ignore the racism that is behind their misuse of science when inheritance of intelligence is the subject and a social construct like race is added to that.