How is that even possible? If you don’t know what the bigger words mean, you’re not going to score high on verbal. If you haven’t been taught these math concepts, you’re not going to do well at it. It’s not like you can give the test to a smart person who’s never had any access to education and expect them to do well. Even just being familiar with the order/concept/set up of the test is going to help you do better.
My answer was written in the context of Valgard’s opinion, “SAT scores don’t necessarily measure how smart you are, they measure how educated you are.”
An analogy… the FAA flight exams also requires working knowledge of English to complete. However, that test isn’t about measuring your level of English education.
Yes of course, you need to have some working knowledge of English vocab (difference between “effect” and “affect”) and math (a triangle has sum interior angles of 180 degrees) to even complete the test. However, the test isn’t designed to measure education level. It measures (or attempts to) put a score on cognitive reasoning. It’s an IQ test in disguise. This aspect is sometimes a point of pride for ETS because they say cognitive reasoning can identify bright students that happen to be in bad schools (victims of poor education in other words.)
That’s pretty much what I was going to say. I did very well on the math portion of the SAT – because I had been taught that math in school. Only somewhat related to how smart I am intrinsically.
So for me the issue is not so much that coaching can produce better scores (although, as has been said, the evidence is that it does), but rather that differences in quality of education has a huge effect. Clearly, that is important for college admissions, but it can’t be considered a test of a person’s natural intelligence.
When I read your posts, I hear pidgin English in my head.
All joking aside, you don’t seem to have the necessary depth of knowledge on the issue to discuss it intelligently. You’d need a couple of semesters of European history, a semester of psychology, and some reading in African and World History before you could really understand what anyone tried to explain to you.
This doesn’t seem to be true, both from cites that I have read and from my own experience. The wikipedia article on the SAT has this cite that says there is substantial correlation between scores and income level. The Economix blog on the NYT website also has a post about this. This could be because of the private SAT preparation courses available to higher income students and better schools, but I have not read anything that has ‘proven’ this.
I have taken an SAT course before, which improved my scores by several hundred points (for the 2400 test). I think the majority or large minority of the material has a lot to do with education. Much of the reading and writing sections test you on formal english grammar, for example. I’m not sure if you think the subject tests do not test for level of education, but I had to learn many new things for the math subject test that were not taught in my non-US school system, such as conics.
SAT preparation courses have not been shown to increase scores very much:
“It found that SAT coaching resulted in about 30 points in score improvement on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, and less than one point out of a possible 36 on the ACT”
Scores are higher for wealthier students, and higher income correlates with higher IQ. However the scores of black students from high-income families, on average, underperform scores of white students from poor families.
Thank you for that link.
That’s an interesting article. But it has nothing to do with your last paragraph.
did you significantly improve your students’ performance on the analogy section as well? Or did you benefit from the fact that in 2002 the ETS eliminated that section, possibly because no amount of coaching, education and general empowering uplift could get certain groups of people to do well on it?
Og is dead?
It was posted in reply to this:
Originally Posted by **Animastryfe **:
“This could be because of the private SAT preparation courses available to higher income students and better schools, but I have not read anything that has ‘proven’ this.”
OK. So yours statement, with no relation to the article you linked, is the “proof.”
Maybe it is the dumb fracks, who can’t compete, who are the ones to move right along?
Indeed, there’s an implicit assumption in the OP that migrating humans choose to do so. One old Eurocentric racist argument was “the adventurous souls moved out and became us, the dullards stayed behind.”
But human populations move for other reasons – possibly more frequently because they’re forced to than because they choose to. The top two other reasons would be ecological devastation – they overgraze their lands, deplete their topsoil and aquifer, and so on – and war: they are forced onto less desirable land by stronger peoples. The Khoi-San people in Africa, for example, were displaced by more numerous farming societies and driven onto marginal lands.
Selection pressure in these events might be very different than one supposes – small size is an advantage when living in very poor foraging areas, for example.
If the OP isn’t simply sly racism, it’s a hodgepodge of poorly-thought-out ideas strung together…a starting point for lots of research, as opposed to an argument.
What do those tests say about American Indians? Cuz they traveled even further. I think your theory is bunk.
See a problem, run like the wind!! That’s how my kind have rolled for at least a few hundred years. Maybe it says more about temperement than intelligence.
I’ve seen you make similar claims, but I’ve not seen this backed up by reputable sources. The experiences that I had when teaching were just the opposite. And I’ve never come across anything coming from such educational research centers as Peabody, Stanford or Columbia that support such notions.
Since these are the top three research centers in the country in the field, what have they had to say about your claims? I assume that you want to get at the truth of the matter.
Bridgett, my apologies for my ignorance. Why did they stop Juneteenth? Some of the newcomers can just blow you away with their genius. Esperanza Spalding, anyone?
While true as a (very) rough simplification, I just wanted to point out that the actual picture is much more complicated, with [ol]
[li]the KhoiSan not being one homogeneous people with one mode of living - the Khoi herders weren’t necessarily marginalized at all, being the result of pastoral technology diffusion to previous H-Gs in areas where the techniques of Bantu farming wasn’t viable, like the SW Cape, Karoo and Kalahari. This did considerably stress the existing society, as evidenced by rock art markers, but it seems to have been an internal social conflict, around 2000 BCE, well before the Bantu migrations reached the Southern area of the continent.[/li][li]There being considerable interchange between the groups in terms of trade, with San often specializing in forage products like furs and honey (and mead) in exchange for farming/manufactured products like grain & metal, either with the Khoi or the Bantu. Also, there was some social flux, with an individual moving from pastoralist to HG or back as his fortunes changed, or some San working in client positions to earn stock from Khoi masters.[/li][li]There also being considerable genetic interchange between the groups, often with San women “marrying up”. [/li][/ol]The same sort of relationships are also seen in East Africa between farmers, pastoralists and HGs.
Is it that hard to just look something up? I’ve posted data for every quantitative claim I’ve made, over and over. Your “top three educational research centers” are well aware of all this data. They just don’t come right out and say it. Every one of those institutions struggles with the same problem: they can only find a very small number of black students able to perform at higher levels and neither their recruitment efforts nor their retention and nurturing efforts are able to get a very high number of black students through the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) with anything close to the scores of Asians and whites.
If you haven’t “come across” anything it’s because you haven’t even bothered to begin looking at any sort of scores for anything.
The debate here is not whether scores are lower–it’s whether that is a result of genetics or environment.
See here for some comments in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education around the specific problem of higher-income blacks underperforming low-income whites on the SAT, for example:
Explaining the Black-White SAT Gap
*"There are a number of reasons that are being advanced to explain the continuing and growing black-white SAT scoring gap. Sharp differences in family incomes are a major factor. Always there has been a direct correlation between family income and SAT scores. For both blacks and whites, as income goes up, so do test scores. In 2005, 28 percent of all black SAT test takers were from families with annual incomes below $20,000. Only 5 percent of white test takers were from families with incomes below $20,000. At the other extreme, 7 percent of all black test takers were from families with incomes of more than $100,000. The comparable figure for white test takers is 27 percent.
But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board’s 2005 data on the SAT:
• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000."*
Parental education:
See Figure 5 here for a chart showing the effects of parental education:
“Figures 5 and 6 show, respectively, how math and verbal SAT scores for blacks and whites vary with parental levels of education. In both cases, black children of parents with graduate degrees score lower than white children whose parents have a high-school diploma or less.”
I assume you do not want to get to the truth of the matter, since you are willing to use your own pre-suppositions instead of looking at data points. But this is a common approach on this board, especially for people ingrained with the idea that we can’t possibly have such disparate performances if we equalize opportunity. such individuals simply label those who post actual facts the musings of racists.
How about reviewing the data points? It doesn’t take that much time. You can look through my posts for dozens of them, or do your own diligences. You’ll find, among other things, that students within the same college programs still perform disparately based on race when it’s time for the LSAT or MCAT. Then if you take all of those students and give them the same law and medical schools, the black students are still going to significantly underscore the whites and asians on their law and medicine licensing exams, despite having had identical preparation in law and medical school.
And where data is collected in the rest of the world, you’ll still find the same pattern. Over and over and over again. In every culture, every nation, you are going to find that generally the East Asians are going to outperform everyone else in STEM fields, and those of sub-saharan African descent are going to be in the bottom tier.
The fact that relative scores for the groups vary so much in a short space of time seems to indicate a social rather than genetic cause.
As your own article says:
I know - it’s a bitch when people read cites and find they don’t support your argument at all.