[lbo-talk] Elite Institutions/SATs

[Liza Featherstone]

I realize this point isn't really of general interest, but earlier you
mentioned that the folks in the Honors Program at U-Michigan, which has an
SAT cutoff, seemed smarter than the general student population. I went to
Michigan, and was in the Honors Program the whole time, and this wasn't
really my experience. I did find that classes limited to Honors students
were *taught* at a higher level, and that those folks tended to be better
educated (many had been to better high schools, or had been on AP tracks)
and studied very hard. I was VERY glad to have access to those classes. But
many -- I'd venture to say most -- of the "smartest" people I met at
Michigan [by smart here I mean creative, capable of saying something
surprising or otherwise interesting, engaged with ideas outside the
classroom, in short people you want to stay up late getting high with]
weren't in this program. In fact, the program, vs. the many different kind
of intelligence in the larger student population, was kind of a test tube
display of how SAT/ACT scores do measure some things, but not others.

Liza


> From: "Luke Weiger" <lweiger at umich.edu>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 13:01:34 -0400
> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Elite Institutions/SATs
> 
> Brian/Joanna/Justin/Jacob:
> 
> I'm not going to vigorously defend the SATs or the theory of G.  I
> analogized the SAT with a crude measure of obesity (i.e. the Body Mass
> Index) because I think it's a crude measure of intelligence (and the verbal
> portion does in fact yield scores that are an excellent proxy for IQ, see
> http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95sep/ets/grtsort2.htm).  Brian's analogy
> between IQ tests and his AQ (athletic quotient) test is excellent, though
> perhaps it would be tighter if the athletic abilities tested correlated
> highly with one another (e.g. jumping and sprinting) in the same way that
> the intellectual abilities commonly tested by IQ tests correlate highly with
> one another.  One final note: I believe Michigan's current boy wonder
> philosophy prof scored in the 1100s on his SATs.
> 
> -- Luke
> 
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