Although race and economics are obviously issues here, notice that I am posting in General Questions rather than Great Debates.
My questions are: Is the SAT an accurate guage of intelligence? Or practical knowledge? Or learning capacity? Are IQ tests?
Your personal opinion: will the SAT still be here X number of years from now?
OK, race is not an issue, SES is. Others will come along to chastise you.
SAT has never claimed to be an IQ test. It isn’t and can’t be used as one, regardless of what some websites say regarding predicting/determining your IQ from your SAT score.
That’s not to say that SAT scores and IQ scores are not spuriously related - that which “causes” high SAT scores also “causes” high IQ scores.
Search on this topic and you will find complete discussions on this.
SES is not the only issue though - don’t forget about gender. Between a male and female college student who score the same on the SAT - the female will statistically perform better at university.
Mensa will accept GRE (and assumedly SAT) scores as evidence of qualification so Mensa evidently considers them acceptably accurate indicators of the intellectual cohort they wish to become members.
Aside from issues re the PCness of the SAT et al as a fair index of “intelligence” in purest terms SAT tests are primarly accurate gauges of your ability to take SAT and like kind tests. Within limits it would be safe to say that SAT type tests do accurately gauge a certain baseline level of knowledge and scholastically oriented problem solving ability. The tricky part is what this means in real life academic and post-academic performance and in this area of prediction the picture becomes a lot murkier. The old (pick elite institution) college joke of the A students becoming teachers and the B students working for the C students has a grain of truth at it’s core.
Some liberal arts colleges have dispensed with the SAT altogether and look at a student overall life “resume” in determining acceptance.
If this ain’t GD, I don’t know what is.
OK have no fear. SAT’s will be obselito very soon. Well maybe in the next decade or two. I am born, raised, schooled, and grad schooled in the northeast. [ notice the wonderful grammer :)] and the SAT’s have been dropped from many Ivy league instituions because they are not a good indicator’s of a students capabilities. Why when I was in High School we had people who got straight A’s getting 810 on their SAT’s and people who got straight C’s getting 1400. Some people are not good test takers. And some very distinguished universities are not accepting SAT’s anymore because they are realizing that. Check out the entrance forms for all the Ivy leagues in the north east and you will be amazed how many say “SAT’s Optional”.
SAT’S ARE NOT AN IQ TEST EITHER. IF YOU SCORED LOW IT DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE A LOW IQ that is an unfortunate fictional rumor startedmany years ago and oddly passed on through at least one or two generations.
Don’t worry about the SAT’s and if you have not taken them yet ask for your state given right to take them with no time limit… more info upon request.
IANAM (moderator), but I don’t think it’s GD (yet), because this is still factual information presented directly toward the OP; it isn’t trying to sway opinions or open discussion toward the merit of these tests…
Anyway, I’ve answered these questions before and will again point in the general direction of the search function. Please pardon my not searching myself, but the server is quite slow now and I don’t want to burden it further.
Allow me to inject this bit of wisdom. One of the biggest problems regarding intelligence testing is the troublesome point that nobody has yet adequately defined “intelligence”. What we are left with is an operational definition linked to a test(e.g., WAIS).
In the field of educational measurement (where I work and apply my advanced degrees) we have to work around this somehow. We need actual indicators of student achievement. Nationally, there are very few such measures, fewer still with any reliability behind them, on the high school level. While there are plenty of primary/grammar school testing programs (OLSAT, CTBS, CAT, ITBS, my god the list can go on), the number of testing programs is quite small. We (and most educational institutions) use SAT because it is nationally normed and very steady. Up intil 1993, it had used the same norm group. Another “plus” to using the SAT is that it is interpretable, because it is well known outside of education (due, in part, to its age). Add in the fact that this is what colleges use and it makes great sense to use it as a measure of high school educational achievement. (later, we’ll get into the gobs of problems associated with SAT cohort selection and group representation - validity)
As most states in the US are building statewide mandated high school student accountability exams (e.g., exit exams) there will be better measures of HS student achievement, but it will not be generalizable outside of the state. The SAT will still be used as an indicator. (Until ETS stops using it - they are trying to phase in the ACT)
When I taught college math, we would award math scholarships. SAT/ACT acores were our primary method of determining who received these. We would literally list applicants and their scores and would then use other information like interviews/extra activites/other info to fine tune. We only had 20 or so full scholarships so it wasn’t that hard. We kept track of all this information about a student and tracked their college success, using it to find out what were meaningful predictors or not.
SAT/ACT scores worked absolutely wonderfully.
Note that high school GPA did not enter into it one bit. We found that HS GPA had virtually zero prediction value. Hard to believe at first! It was not uncommon to have a 4.0 score a 16 on the SAT (bad) while a 3.0 score in the 30’s. We were critised about not using HS GPA but stuck to our guns. The critisism diminished somewhat when the English department gained state-wide media coverage for giving a 4.0 GPA high school student a full ride academic scholarship who turned out to be mentally challenged (there was no way to tell from the transcript and the student wasn’t interviewed).
Now, SAT/ACT worked very well for us, but as an indicator of ‘intelligence’ I’m not so sure. I’ve known too many students not-so-bright that excel and many really sharp ones do not-so-well.
Blink
I can’t spel!!
According to their websites, every single Ivy still requires that applicants take either the SAT or ACT. How much weight they give the scores is another question, but they haven’t been dropped.
The problem with standardized tests is that they’re, well, standardized. So they’re easy to prepare for (Princeton Review, Kaplan, etc.).
Somewhat related is the Wonderlic test, which (among many other things) is given to many college football players who declare for the NFL draft. Their agents make the players practice beforehand, though, because it’s 50 questions (in 12 minutes, no less) and they know what to expect. Akili Smith (QB for the Bengals) scored a 17 the first time and a 37 the second time (apparently he had done a lot of practice in between). The Browns were interested in him, but wanted to nail down his intelligence, so they asked him do take it a third time, whereupon he scored a 27.
Plus there are other factors that must be considered, like lack of sleep, malnutrition, etc. Sometimes you take the test on a bad day.
Hmmm… interesting I never heard of this. Out of curiosity what football position, on average, scores highest on this “Wonderlic” intelligence test? Do they use for other sports as well?
Well as amarinth pointed out about the Ivy leagues acceptance of SAT scores, I honestly could not remember from when I was in School. But Yale forinstance, uses the SAT I AND II Subject division for placement the freshman year, if you OPT not to take the SAT you can take the ACT for Placement, if you are from a country where English is not the primary language you have to take the TOEFL.
The BY-LAWS of the major universities which happen to be ivy leagues did not change their perspective by-laws when SAT’s started to be instituted in schools. Legally they can accept ANYONE who did not take the SAT if they are a qualified individual meeting or exceeding the minimum qualifications set forth in the admissions policies… WHEW!!! I can breath now. Basically I went throught the whole process more than a decade ago, and I was concerned about the same things as the OP. I realized with a little digging and a whole lot of initiative no one can keep you out of those schools if you truely want to go there. And taking or not taking the SAT will certainly not keep you out…
My problem with IQ tests is a bit more fundamental and probably goes to the point of part of the OP: Do these tests measure intelligence? The answer is not really. What they measure is some forms of cognitive and/or problem solving abilities.
Eg the widely used Wechsler Scale evaluates a person’s vocabulary, short-term memory, arithmetical ability, world knowledge and other specific skills. The results from the subsets are combined to give a single measure of IQ. Hunt (American Scientist, Jul-Aug 1995) compares them to a decathlon event at a track and field contest where the scores from the various events are combined to give an overall result.
The decathlon analogy illustrates the fundamental flaws in these types of tests - they might be correlated with intelligence but they don’t measure it. Just as a decathlon only contains a small number of athletic sports, IQ tests only guage a small range of cognitive and problem solving abilities.
Furthermore, just as there are a lot of activities outside track and field that are sports, there are a lot of abilities that we would see as intelligence that are not considered by IQ tests.
Two extremes (let’s call them false positives and false negatives): some of the numerically gifted so-called idiot savants (such as those described by Oliver Sachs in his books or think of Dustin Hoffman in the film “Rainman”) could conceivably do very well on at least the numerical, mathematical or memory parts of IQ tests - would you consider them geniuses?
On the other hand, consider Mozart, Picasso or Alexander the Great. It is conceivable that they could perform poorly on an IQ test, more to the point, they would definitely underperform as the tests make no attempt to measure the things that they are really good at. Would you consider them unintelligent?
Sorry for the length of the post.
I do not think that the IQ tests are a very accurate test of intelligence. BTW Mensa doesn’t accept SAT scores for admittance, so that tells you something. Anyway, I scored 152 on an IQ test and I don’t think that they are good at measuring. Too many people score too highly(or they say they have!), and as shown, the average IQ score has risen from 100 to about 112. Intelligence is a raw power that is hard to measure.
I thought the average IQ was always 100 by definition. They look at the bell curve or whatever and use that to define whatever the average “score” is as 100 IQ points. I suppose they would have to periodically move things around to keep the average 100 though.
I’m not picking on andrew dupont because these two statements are common misconceptions about testing programs in general.
Actually, this is not a problem. In fact, it is the true benefit! Here, standardized does not mean that the test is the same or that it covers the same skills (though it does). Standardized, in the testing context means that the results are compared to a specific group (the standard) or specific critera. This ensures that all test takers are measured the exact same way. The standard group for the SAT test was a large sample of private school boys from the 1950’s. There is no problem with this being the reference group, if you will, as long as they are the reference group for EVERYBODY - hence standardized. This reference group (also called the norming group) was changed in 1993.
Well, the “So” part means that the two thoughts are related, and that the second is derived from the first. This is another fallacy. Being standardized (compared to a norm group) does not make the test easy to prepare for. Knowing the content would make it easier to prepare for, however.
There have been studies that show no relation between preparation classes and SAT scores above what just retaking the test would do. (Students tend to do better on SAT the second time regardless of prep class or not, and the degree of score increase is not related to prep class.) Of course, these studies were put out by ETS, the company that makes the test.
By staying that it was a problem taht they are standardized… I think he was trying to say that they was that the types of questions they ask and the answers to look for and that sort of thing are “standardized”: (read:consistent from test to test)… SO for that reason, by examining these aspects of previous tests (perhaps in a program such as kaplan) you may become aware of these and do better on the test.
I took the test twice… after my first time I wasn’t necessarily happy with the result so I got a book with 10 previous SAT exams and took 2 or 3 of them in full… I came to realize that there is a definite consistency in how they phrase the question and what they’re looking for (sometimes on those questions you just wanna know “what are they asking?”) and things of that nature… when i retook the test I went up around 200 points to a score I was certainly satisfied with… just as I was taking the test I was able to move through questions much faster
so in conclusion… one problem with the test could be considered being “standardized” though not in the same sense that the word is normally used to described the test (which is why i think he made the point), and AS A RESULT OF THIS, he was fair to say that it can be prepared for, and he may even use the word “so”!