this says more (good stuff) about Dartmouth than it does about the standardized tests. If scoring higher on something that is close to an IQ test doesn't predict higher academic performance, what does that say about the coursework?
... is it close to an IQ test? Like, people study very specifically for these standardized tests, and success is also related to how much prep work you put in. I think that may also align with how people study for exams once they're enrolled students, how much work they put into projects/papers/etc.
True. Having the will to prepare for one test (such as the SAT) might indicate a will to prepare for other tests, such as those considered for academic performance ratings.
Then you just normalize the scores based on socioeconomic indicators like is done in the article. Of course, this highly advantages well groomed students from bad demographics, and horribly disadvantages neglected students from good demographics. That's why China worked hard to ban test prep.
I think we're missing each other. Propensity to study may be a different attribute than IQ, which is a predictor for both standardized test scores and academic success. Normalizing for socioeconomic factors does not in itself disambiguate these possibilities. Someone with low motivation to study is not necessarily 'neglected'.
I've seen years ago a highly cited paper showing relatively high correlations between SAT scores and IQs, but critically its data was from the late 1970s, when norms around test prep, and access to prep resources, were meaningfully different.
Propensity to study is highly correlated with socioeconomic factors. Kids from good homes are provided the support and encouragement needed to get it done.
I think the real reason China banned many forms of test prep is because it's a zero sum game. Rich students are already advantaged by going to better schools, but too much test prep ends up forcing every student to study 14 hours a day to compete, with no actual advantage beyond that, so everyone poor and rich alike suffers from excessive test prep.
Fair enough. However I think the consequences of that is a China like situation. Education is increasingly competitive, and early achievements sort you into a caste for the rest of your life. Of course, race based discrimination will become even more problematic as lower class Asian Americans are fast tracked into the China style rat race to get into a good school.
... but b/c this is a highly competitive school, those "small" differences matter. Looking at figure 1, where they divide by scores into 16 equal buckets, we can tell that the median was over 1500, so the space between say 1510 and 1600 has to express as much of the variation as the whole range to the left. Similarly looking at figure 5, the impact to your admission chances of moving from 1550 to 1600 is larger than the impact of moving from 1200 to 1400. In that context, 60 points is pretty significant.
The fact that SAT scores are directly proportional to how much time, effort and money you have spent in preparation should tell you that it is very different from a general IQ test.
Given that that test has a limited number of questions and the nature of the test it seems that anyone who is good at remembering lines could benefit from coaching. In fact they've come out with versions of that test which are different from the standard test because the standard test is too well known.
My perception is that there is a psychologist who administers the test and another psychologist who administers test prep, but a lot of people hang onto the idea that Alyssa Milano must have really gotten a perfect score on Raven since everyone successful must be really smart, the system is fair, etc.
No, AFAIK you can very much improve at general IQ tests with practice. But all IQ measurements and normalisation are taken on subjects who (hopefully) haven't practiced, so the correlation between the SAT and IQ measurements should not include the practice factor on the IQ side.
You can improve with practice to the point where the procedures for most IQ tests forbid using a measure if the subject has taken that test in the past N months.
I didn't spend a dime on ACT prep. I barely spent any time on it. I scored 33/36. It's perfectly possible to score well on these tests even if you don't spend money/effort on preparing.
