Paul Tough in the New York Times has a long article "Who Gets to Graduate" on the high college dropout rate of working class kids, focusing on some black girl from a mediocre Dallas area high school who gets into desirable U. of Texas at Austin, the state flagship school, despite being down around the 10th percentile among freshmen:
Her senior-year G.P.A. was 3.50, placing her 39th out of 559 students in her graduating class. She got a 22 on the ACT, the equivalent of about a 1,030 on the SAT — not stellar, but above average.
The 25th percentile at UT Austin on the ACT is 25 and the 75th percentile is 31. I believe 30 is at the 95th percentile among takers of the ACT, so maybe 97th among the overall population. There are a lot of smart kids at UT Austin.
She got in, barely, under George W. Bush's plan to admit the top X percent of Texas high schools' graduating classes, even though 3.5 isn't very good these days.
She got in, barely, under George W. Bush's plan to admit the top X percent of Texas high schools' graduating classes, even though 3.5 isn't very good these days.
Not surprisingly, like many freshmen, she struggled. Traditionally, state flagship universities are harder to graduate from than more prestigious private colleges because they spend less per student and don't feel a commitment to parents to deliver a degree in return for a huge amount of tuition.
After Sputnik, America focused on finding and educating the highest potential students. And 12 years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. But then came other priorities like civil rights.
The solution touted in the article is for famous public universities to give low test score students much more handholding, such as improving the teacher to student ratio in a special chemistry class for low test score students by 10 to 1.
But, the article makes clear, it's absolutely essential that nobody on campuses notices that there are all these special courses for the not so bright because that would ruin their self-esteem and then the magic would vanish. Or something.
But, the article makes clear, it's absolutely essential that nobody on campuses notices that there are all these special courses for the not so bright because that would ruin their self-esteem and then the magic would vanish. Or something.
It's the perfect anti-falsification trick. Didn't work? That's because white students noticed! Karl Popper is spinning in his grave.
Anyway, I'm gearing up for the first iSteve fundraiser to launch in this year, finally, so I've tried to upgrade my Panhandling technology at top right of the blog. I think the links all work now, with lots of new options for sending me money. I'd like to do a soft opening among those of you who have been itching to send me money but have been rightfully frustrated by the various payment systems recurrently getting shot out from underneath me. So, if you wouldn't mind playing guinea pig, please give it a try. Thanks. That would be a huge help for seeing if all these news systems really work.
Over the years, I've gotten Paypal, Amazon, and WePay shot out from under me. But I'm not ecstatic about asking you to entrust obscure firms with money. So, I've added Google, Wells Fargo, and Chase.
Update: Okay, a reader has successfully sent me a donation via Google Wallet. So, that works and you won't be stuck trying something that doesn't work.
Over the years, I've gotten Paypal, Amazon, and WePay shot out from under me. But I'm not ecstatic about asking you to entrust obscure firms with money. So, I've added Google, Wells Fargo, and Chase.
Update: Okay, a reader has successfully sent me a donation via Google Wallet. So, that works and you won't be stuck trying something that doesn't work.
Can't abbreviate UT in Austin to UTA because that is specifically UT-Arlington.
ReplyDeleteIn Texas, not specifying a city creates the assumption that the flagship university is the subject.
hmm if 39th out 559 of isn't good enough, what happens to the rest of them? The future is a lot of Americans not smart enough to complete college, get a decent paying job, and just barely getting by.
ReplyDelete"Vanessa called home, looking for reassurance. Her mother had always been so supportive, but now she sounded doubtful about whether Vanessa was really qualified to succeed at an elite school like the University of Texas. “Maybe you just weren’t meant to be there,” she said. “Maybe we should have sent you to a junior college first.”"
ReplyDeleteMom offers sound advice.
"The 25th percentile at UTA on the ACT is 25 and the 75th percentile is 31."
ReplyDeleteHoly S***. I am a pretty bright guy (172 on LSAT). 30 years ago, I got a 32 on the ACT-not best in my high school (a decent, suburban midwest school), but pretty good score (admittedly, with no prep, and no conception of prep, at all).
At the University of Texas, a truly giant college, 1/4 of the kids are that bright or better?
You should do a post on the ACT-has there been ACT grade inflation? Does Texas have so many kids that 1/4 of UT students (I'm assuming maybe 7500 or so) got 132 on the ACT-I'd guess top 5% or even less?
I'm just very surprised at the number. I'm reasonably confident when I scored that, I was in the top 2-3% of the kids in my class. The UT statistic really humbles me.
anonymousse
Followup:
ReplyDeleteI just googled: MENSA requires an ACT of 129 (roughly =IQ 130 or so).
ACT of 132 = IQ of about 140.
Are 1/4 of UT students IQ=140+? That is astounding, if true.
anonymousse
Curious how the Party prefers to have the black girl go away to Austin, pile up huge debts, struggle through a couple of years and drop out, when her mom has the right idea. go to community college, live at home, learn something...of course that would not assist lefty academics feel good about their racial quotas.
ReplyDeleteI think you're being a bit too cynical, Steve. The article does present a fairly compelling argument that low-income students do graduate less often even holding their test scores constant. Why is it a bad idea to try to offer these kids some hand-holding? Is your concern that this is unfair to the higher-income kids? Gee, I don't see it that way, even though I am someone who has no use for preferences ("affirmative action"). This is based on income not race.
ReplyDeleteBut you're right to be skeptical about whether it will really prove that effective. But I am not sure that this "don't let them know they're getting special help" meme is intended to insulate the program from falsification. These people seem to be doing their best to get rigorous outcome data, so why not give them a chance? But when the data come out, look it over closely and see if performance is matching expectations.
Steve, have you thought of doing some short ebooks on the Kindle? your share of the price is about 66%, a friend of mine did a 50-page essay on the Star of Bethlehem, he prices it at $3.99, getting some decent sales with zero name recognition. I bet you could sell a bunch of long articles for 1.99 or 2.99.
ReplyDeleteHoly S***. I am a pretty bright guy (172 on LSAT). 30 years ago, I got a 32 on the ACT-not best in my high school (a decent, suburban midwest school), but pretty good score (admittedly, with no prep, and no conception of prep, at all).
ReplyDeleteAt the University of Texas, a truly giant college, 1/4 of the kids are that bright or better?
You should do a post on the ACT-has there been ACT grade inflation? Does Texas have so many kids that 1/4 of UT students (I'm assuming maybe 7500 or so) got 132 on the ACT-I'd guess top 5% or even less?
I'm just very surprised at the number. I'm reasonably confident when I scored that, I was in the top 2-3% of the kids in my class. The UT statistic really humbles me.
anonymousse
Yea you seem really humbled. That's the hallmark of humble people assuming that the reason they got beat was because of ACT grade inflation. Like Augustine said give me humility Lord, but not before I've exhausted every possible excuse for my score.
@anonymousse: MENSA no longer accepts ACT or SAT scores. In '89 they changed the ACT and Mensa stopped accepting it. In 1994 they changed the SAT and it was not longer valid for MENSA.
ReplyDeleteYou left the best part:
ReplyDeleteThere is a picture with the following caption:
Vanessa Brewer (in red shoes) in her chemistry class at the University of Texas.
There are six people in the front row of the picture. Vanessa is the only black.
Paul Tough, ha ha. In his book, he stated flat out that the US doesn't have a college problem - we have a college graduation problem. He then sung the merits of grit somehow being enough to propel basically any student to a college degree; not a mention that the content just might be too much for the feeble minded.
ReplyDeleteThen Tough went after Charles Murray. He erected a nice straw man to attack "oh, the bad man says too many people go to college"
Perhaps Tough and Kozol can hang out together.
I am not opposed to a certain amount of hand holding for first generation college students. Although it might be more like ass kicking. Like never cut a class.
ReplyDeleteYears ago ... when a high percentage of college students were first generation, attendance used to be taken.
But the real tacit knowledge that these students lack are too politically incorrect to think, much less record in any permanent form. Like look at the classes that the football players take, and balance your basic science classes with some humanities. Avoid 'wash out' classes. Avoid classes before 10 am. Never double major. You might be able to do anything but not everything -- when in doubt, do the minimum.
The sort of rules of thumb that the best student can ignore, but would serve the bottom 25% well.
As The Z Blog said, MENSA stopped accepting the ACT in 1989. Before that, a score of 29 or greater was required for membership. You can still join with a pre-'89 score, but you'd have to request an official copy of your results from your college. To compare the pre-1989 ACT to the post-1989 test, add two points to the pre-'89 score: 29 = 31.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the guy above Steve. You've got a big readership, why not blog a bit less and write a few ebooks?
ReplyDeleteOver the years, I've gotten Paypal, Amazon, and WePay shot out from under me.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to know how this happened -- especially given that PayPal still deals with VDare and John Derbyshire. I'm not about to open a Google Wallet account just so I can send one person money, so I'll probably just stick some cash in an envelope.
The real scandal should be how she finished in the top 7% of her class based on GPA but got an ACT score that puts her barely in the top 40% of test takers.
ReplyDeleteStudent demographics for Mesquite HS in Mesquite, Texas:
ReplyDeleteHispanic 48%
Black 26%
White 22%
Which means the school is three-fourths NAM.
"Who Gets to Graduate?"
ReplyDeleteI'm so sick of liberal mind-f*ck. Who gets to graduate. Yeah, like the administrators are just sitting around twirling their mustaches, secretly telling the professors to fail higher numbers of blacks in an institution where they brag about minority attendance, increasingly devote all of their efforts to promoting'diversity'and are already going out of their way to give special help to minority students.
The fact that black students are tending to perform more poorly in their classes, that couldn't have anything to do with it.
Might I recommend our strategy to maximize academic scholarships.
ReplyDeleteWith an ACT of 32, Honors/AP classes and Captain of the Football and Wrestling team, my son was receiving interest from elite east coast schools as well as top tier mid west schools(UofI at Chicago etc..)
Instead of applying to these schools competing against top students in the 34-36 ACT range, we applied to solid mid tier schools with top notch Pre-Med programs. Utilizing this strategy, he is now able to attend his school of choice at no cost to us.
FYI, you can only use Google wallet (app or website) if you are in the USA. I'll try the vdare method.
ReplyDeleteDid George W Bush achieve an unequivocal success at anything? Any policy? Any initiative? Anything?
ReplyDelete"Many are overwhelmed by expenses or take on too many loans. "
Scam loans are a recurring theme during the Bush administration.
Went to a flagship State U around the turn of the century. Regular attendance to private tutoring classes helps tremendously for the difficult STEM-y weed out courses.
ReplyDeleteNot talking personalized tutoring, but large classes held in strip mall leased space. The instructors knew the course, the prof, and previous tests forwards and backwards and actually taught the material that would be tested.
Those tutoring courses were absolutely flooded with Greeks and chicks who were overachieving relative to their native intelligence.
Not too many low-socioeconomic types though. Not sure if it's because they weren't plugged-in to the game or if it was an issue of money.
Class attendance was oftentimes worthless. All theory/lecture, no instruction on working actual problems, profs with unintelligible accents, etc.
Are 1/4 of UT students IQ=140+? That is astounding, if true.
ReplyDeleteIt's not true. It's much lower than that. You made a mistake somewhere, and it probably has something to do with the ACT. How do you score 129 or 132 on the ACT? Isn't the top score 36? And I don't think many UT students take the ACT anyway.
Student demographics for Mesquite HS in Mesquite, Texas:
ReplyDeleteHispanic 48%
Black 26%
White 22%
Which means the school is three-fourths NAM.
Actually, it's at least 96% NAM. Whites are a minority, too, remember?
The idea that this was Bush's special idea is silly. It was a legislative fix to a Supreme Court decision. Of course W has put two consistent votes against affirmative action of the Supreme Court but I'm sure sailer has done something equally successful in curtailing affirmative action.
ReplyDeleteThe second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.
ReplyDeleteWhen you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
Low income is a proxy for race. Blacks and Mexicans are graduated at lower rates (even when compared to others with the same SAT scores) because "affirmative action" puts them in institutions for which they are unqualified.
The real scandal should be how she finished in the top 7% of her class based on GPA but got an ACT score that puts her barely in the top 40% of test takers.
ReplyDeleteIn ghetto schools this is not a scandal but completely normal. If you look at the bell curve for blacks and whites this makes complete sense. Once you accept the fact that there is a 1 SD difference in intelligence between blacks and whites, everything else follows from that, but the establishment won't accept this (even though the gap has remained as constant as the acceleration of gravity) so we waste huge amounts of time and money trying to fix the unfixable.
"hmm if 39th out 559 of isn't good enough, what happens to the rest of them? The future is a lot of Americans not smart enough to complete college, get a decent paying job, and just barely getting by."
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good point. If 'Average is over', as Tyler Cowen would put it, maybe that's a sign we need to do something, since most people are average.
I'd like to start with executing Thomas Friedman on national TV (I'm thinking 100 unemployed computer programmers with butter knives), but I'm sure some of you have constructive suggestions.
"""""""""""""Once you accept the fact that there is a 1 SD difference in intelligence between blacks and whites, everything else follows from that, but the establishment won't accept this (even though the gap has remained as constant as the acceleration of gravity) so we waste huge amounts of time and money trying to fix the unfixable.""""""""""""""
ReplyDeleteWhat makes you think that the 1 SD will remain at a mere 1 SD with each successive generation? If those a la Rachel Jeantel continue to outbreed the talented tenth, suppose that in a few generations the difference will be a full 2 or perhaps a 2.5 SDS.
Where is it etched in stone that it will always remain at one full SD and that the gap can't grow worse between the two, especially if the lower end of the bell curve continues to outbreed the talented tenth?
"Curious how the Party prefers to have the black girl go away to Austin, pile up huge debts, struggle through a couple of years and drop out, when her mom has the right idea. go to community college, live at home, learn something...of course that would not assist lefty academics feel good about their racial quotas."
ReplyDeleteIt's a really good point. Notice the girl even said 'moms are usually right'...the gal actually had some common sense that got overwhelmed with starry-eyed dreams probably fed to her by some liberal loon...which just makes her 18 years old, really. I mean, young people are idealistic and inexperienced. They're young!
>>ben tillman said:
ReplyDelete""""""Low income is a proxy for race"""""""""
Hold it, hold it. IQ is a proxy for race. They don't have the inherent smarts to begin with, so no amount of income will change the fact that they, just plain, dumb.
Remember that article some months ago that Steve posted that the wealthiest group of black children still don't perform better than the poorest income of white children?
Income isn't the main story. IQ is. And well, if one group averages a full SD behind, then, frankly, there simply isn't enough on the right side of the curve to compensate. Also, the right side of the curve tend to have fewer and fewer offspring.
Translation: The dumb and dumberer have more kids than the smart and with each successive generation there will be 2x, 3x, 4x etc more of them than there are at the right end of the bell curve.
And even with the few among the talented tenth, they still cant overcome the fact that they aren't as smart as whites across the board.
I mean, Jay Z/Beyonce's little blue ivy will never be as smart as Jimmy Joe Robertson's kid down in Morgantown, WV.
You should publish a chrestomathy like Mencken.
ReplyDeleteOr one in a series of anthologies like the Royko books. Use a POD service like Amazon's Createspace and mail review copies to friend and foe. Fund the project with Kickstarter.
DeleteIn other words, Vanessa's high school sucks. And this is further evidence of the importance of having a standardised test across all schools, which the SAT or ACT do.
ReplyDeleteAlso, take note of the photo of Yeager meeting his graduate students. Notice anything interesting there? Of course, it won't be surprising to us HBDers.
"The real scandal should be how she finished in the top 7% of her class based on GPA but got an ACT score that puts her barely in the top 40% of test takers."
ReplyDeleteIn ghetto schools this is not a scandal but completely normal.
This isn't a ghetto school. This is just normal Texas demographics.
The real scandal should be how she finished in the top 7% of her class based on GPA but got an ACT score that puts her barely in the top 40% of test takers.
ReplyDeleteGrade inflation. It's rampant. Employers know about it.
This is a really good point. If 'Average is over', as Tyler Cowen would put it, maybe that's a sign we need to do something, since most people are average.
If by average you mean that approximately 68% of people fall between plus or minus one SD, then yes.
Racial discrimination is very subtle, like disparate impact.
ReplyDeleteSteve, 100 aussie dollars will be arriving shortly.
ReplyDeleteI've purchased Steve's book on Kindle, and I'll definitely buy every book Steve ever publishes.
ReplyDelete""hmm if 39th out 559 of isn't good enough, what happens to the rest of them? The future is a lot of Americans not smart enough to complete college, get a decent paying job, and just barely getting by."
ReplyDeleteCory Booker, if he had a modicum of imagination, could have convinced Mark Zuckerberg to earmark his $100 million toward creating manufacturing jobs in Newark instead of blowing it on schools. With $100 million in the bank, plus his celebrity status, Booker could have gone to Elon Musk, Tim Cook, etc. and asked him them build a factories in Newark. That $100 million could have gone toward infrastructure, security, vocational programs, offsetting taxes, etc., to sweeten the pot.
Then, once he got to the Senate, he could have made the pitch for balanced trade.
But Cory Booker doesn't need to do anything useful like this. He is well liked because he is a friendly and smart black pol. The soft bigotry of no one giving a shit.
https://www.vdare.com/articles/why-does-jonah-goldberg-want-to-block-the-backlash-against-political-correctness
ReplyDeleteIncome isn't the main story. IQ is.
ReplyDeleteDid you not see the graphic in the Times article? I mean: This one.
The rich dumb dumbs have a significantly better graduation rate than the poor smart ones.
It would appear something besides IQ is at play. Conscientiousness levels, the students' choice of major, familial/financial support, mental health, racism, whatever.
Again, IQ is the ONE thing that we know a priori that does not explain this.
Two problems.
DeleteThe lowest of the low white appears to outperform the highest income black on standardized college entrance exams. I'd say that Affirmative Action and money do distort a purely meritocratic system. Money can buy a dipshit a margin of failure a margin of error. Of course. No one disputes this.
However a rich black with average scores should not be given a college place that belongs to an objectively brighter white. That's nation wrecking social engineering.
You are completely misreading the data.
DeleteA priori? Do you even know what this Latin means?
WePay is in the news. They shut down the crowdfunding account of some completely destitute woman who is in the midst of some horrible medical mishaps.
ReplyDeleteWhy? She is (was) a porn actress who's supporters offer some if her nudie pictures. Wepay and its partner discover it by monitoring her twitter account.
ReplyDeleteBen-
Of course. I accidentally inserted a '1' a few times. That should have been 29 or 32, not 129 or 132 on the ACT.
"To compare the pre-1989 ACT to the post-1989 test, add two points to the pre-'89 score: 29 = 31."
Thus, to get your pre-'89 equivalent, subtract 2 from your post -'89 score. 31 today thus =29 pre-'89.
"The 25th percentile at UT Austin on the ACT is 25 and the 75th percentile is 31."
If you combine these two quotes, you get 25% of UT students getting a the equivalent of a pre-1989 ACT score of 29.
According to the MENSA website itself, that would get you into MENSA.
If all of this is true, 25% of the students at UT qualify for MENSA.
anonymousse
"Who 'gets to" graduate?
ReplyDeleteWell, once in, you pretty much have to be an idiot or a slacker not to graduate. (And, yes, I was the later at one fine institution).
Sure, maybe you can't hack -- intellectually or discipline-wise -- electrical engineering. So you trade down, chemistry, biology, sociology, history. Just keep taking courses, getting your B's and C's. And you'll graduate. And there will be a job for you/record, than the average American.
"If by average you mean that approximately 68% of people fall between plus or minus one SD, then yes."
ReplyDeleteI meant average in the colloquial sense. If you're going to be pedantic I'd point out that's only true for normal or Gaussian distributions, which include IQ but don't necessarily include things like social skills.
a 22 is a pretty good score for an African American, putting them in the top 10%. She should be okay at UT.
ReplyDeleteThe difference by SES is probably because white kids with a 22 ACT are far less likely to be at schools where they are top performers, so they don't have culture shock when they get to college.
People on these threads have the tendency to take ACT/SAT correlations to IQ far too seriously as, apparently, did MENSA back in the day. While there's likely a general correlation between the two, it isn't perfect and I say this from experience. I scored a 150 on an administered IQ exam in elementary school and my ACT score would not have made the cutoff for MENSA.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27404016
ReplyDeleteEthno-leftism or patriotic socialism?
cappies are leading globo-Zionsm.
What happened with PayPal?
ReplyDeleteSteve, I tried the Chase quickpay, seemed to work fine.
ReplyDeleteCory Booker, if he had a modicum of imagination, could have convinced Mark Zuckerberg to earmark his $100 million toward creating manufacturing jobs in Newark instead of blowing it on schools. With $100 million in the bank, plus his celebrity status, Booker could have gone to Elon Musk, Tim Cook, etc. and asked him them build a factories in Newark. That $100 million could have gone toward infrastructure, security, vocational programs, offsetting taxes, etc., to sweeten the pot.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that would help most of the current residents of Newark either. Manufacturing and vocational training aren't easy endeavors. A lot of it is very technical these days. In the South some of the car and other manufacturing companies have developed vocational programs with high schools. These programs are selective and are not open to the masses.
I recently read a human interest story in the NY Times. I think it focused on the minimum wage, anyway one of the subjects was a Black woman in Knoxville. She tried to get a job at the car plant there but she couldn't pass the reading test.
O going to High school in Texas, I remember the hub bub about this silly 10%/backdoor AA rule. I remember the Asian families that would rent an apartment in a "nearby" suburb that was not as "competitive" for the not that gifted children to crowd into the top 10%
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lukeford.net/blog/?p=55014
ReplyDeleteOffending The Jews Is A Bad Career Path
Like Fussell said, Universities have become places for dispensing the social status of having a university degree. No longer for educating the best and the brightest.
ReplyDelete“Traditionally, state flagship universities are harder to graduate from than more prestigious private colleges because they spend less per student and don't feel a commitment to parents to deliver a degree in return for a huge amount of tuition.”
ReplyDeleteI went to Berkeley in the late 80s/early 90s and noticed the same thing. I had a few friends at Stanford and we compared notes. Stanford was harder to get into, but remarkably easier once you were there. The same, I later learned, was true of the Ivies. All this still holds true today, when Cal is remarkably harder to get into, but HYPS harder still.
Has anyone ever studied the effect? That is, is there a premium to having survived a place like Cal as opposed to cushy Stanford? Do the “public Ivy” graduates have better outcomes because those schools cull the lazy and lucky, and because of the genuine hard work required to get a degree? Or does the IQ premium of HYPS trump all? Are four wasted years overcome later in life simply by having an IQ of (say) 140 rather than 130?
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/18/tommy-lee-jones-condemns-american-imperialism-in-new-film-the-homesman/
ReplyDeleteWhy only focus on the American West?
Wasn't it imperialism the moment whites invaded the eastern shore?
How was whites taking the eastern part any less imperialist than whites taking the western part?
And weren't Anglos continuing what the Spanish and Portuguese began centuries earlier?
And weren't Indians practicing imperialism against one another since time immemorial?
Imperialism was the way of the world before everything eventually got conquered and claimed.
I don't see how the American kind was any worse.
Blaming the West is like blaming the South. Neither would have happened if not for the rise of the East, esp New England. And New England both.
But today's east coast Libs like to play innocent and just blame the south and west for all the bad things.
But slave ships were financed by the east coast, and Atlantic slave trade was the most horrible aspect of slavery.
And western expansion was funded by the east too.
And Jews who arrived as immigrants in the east coast AFTER the civil war and the conquest of the west like to act all innocent. Never mind that soil on which they gained so much wealth and privilege had been conquered ans settled too. Jews benefit from the conquest but bitch about it.
The movie is intended further to guilt the gullible into accepting illegal infiltration from Mexico in the present day. The movie has nothing to do with an honest study of past imperialism.
DeleteBTW, one other reason why public universities, or at least the UCs, are so much harder than privates is that, according to the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the UCs are required to take a large number of community college transfers every year. Since these students typically start with two full years of credits (i.e., as Juniors), that means the UCs have to get rid of a lot of lower division (frosh/soph) students to make room. They have an incentive to make it really hard and flunk these kids out. Cal actually got easier the longer you were there and the higher you rose.
ReplyDeleteA great many Cal grads, then, did two years at (say) Diablo Valley College and then two at Cal but their diploma says “University of California, Berkeley” just like some kid who was there the full four. This is true of many students who could not have been admitted to a single UC (much less Cal) based on HS grades and scores.
So the system takes kids with brains (or at least the numbers) to be admitted to Cal, then flunks them out and replaces them with kids who never could have gotten in in the first place.
I wonder if any studies have been done to compare the quality/overall life outcomes of 1) students admitted as freshman who graduate; 2) students admitted as frosh who flunk out or transfer to a lower prestige school; and 3) community college transfers who graduate. Those in category three are, or were, sort of notorious in the Bay Area job market as being sub-par.
I scored a 150 on an administered IQ exam in elementary school and my ACT score would not have made the cutoff for MENSA.
ReplyDeleteAre you telling us that the IQ test was too easy?
I meant average in the colloquial sense. If you're going to be pedantic I'd point out that's only true for normal or Gaussian distributions, which include IQ but don't necessarily include things like social skills.
ReplyDeleteSocial skills are likely controlled by as many genes as IQ, and in any event, if controlled by more than 20 or so are going to be approximately Gaussian.
Indeed, it is likely that social skills are heavily influenced by IQ.
While I'm sure some of it has to do with native IQ and culture shock, I would think it also has to do with family dysfunction and/or finances. I was a 140-IQ white kid who grew up in a trailer back in the woods. First of all, I had no idea what the whole college thing was about. Although I took and passed AP courses in high school, I wasn't sure why I was supposed to take them. I didn't know how to search for the best fit for college. Long story short, I ended up working my way through a low-tier college. It was a grind -- working on campus or off, working at the student newspaper (which was infinitely more valuable than the classwork), and working on the regular classwork as well. It took me 5 academic years to complete everything, with a one-year break in the middle to work to make more money. Certainly built character, but it was tiring. I can see working class students having trouble in these sorts of ways.
ReplyDeleteDitto. I didn't even know the names of the tests they were giving, and never heard of prepping for them until years later. The backwaters of the post-Apollo age are not inconsiderable in extent.
Delete"""""The rich dumb dumbs have a significantly better graduation rate than the poor smart ones."""""""
ReplyDeleteRight, every plumbers daughter is MIT bound and has the right grades, IF ONLY.....yada yada. Just ask them.
""""It would appear something besides IQ is at play. """""
Race.
"""""Again, IQ is the ONE thing that we know a priori that does not explain this.""""""""
Lie. It DOES explain it in large part. And also race.
g-dub, the gift that keeps on giving.
ReplyDeleteCollege admissions is the wrong place to be correcting any inequalities that might be corrected. This needs to be corrected before high school graduation. One thing I see again and again in these articles are parents and students who claim that despite being in the top classes in their schools and having a decent GPA, the child wasn't challenged very much.
ReplyDeleteWhen discussing The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell talks about how, as a child going to school in Harlem in the 1940s how the teachers held the students to high standards, regardless of how unfortunate their social situation was at home. As a result, the black children in Harlem and other urban black schools actually tested among the top in their cities and Sowell talks about how he and a classmate rarely spell anything wrong. Part of the problem is that caring liberals who believe they are not racist started assuming black kids couldn't be held to the same standard as everyone else, so they aren't challenged as much before they graduation high school and a lot of opportunities are wasted to prepare them for higher-ranked colleges. See:
http://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html
The real scandal should be how she finished in the top 7% of her class based on GPA but got an ACT score that puts her barely in the top 40% of test takers.
ReplyDeleteDo the math. The number I've seen is that about 70% of students take the ACT or SAT. Presumably, they tend to be the smarter students. If she's in the 60th percentile of that 70%, that ranks her ahead of 72% of all students in a normal racial mix. But if her school is 75% NAM and she's the top NAM student, she would only need to rank ahead of about 2/3 of the white/Asian students to be in the top 10% at her school.
Give her a couple more points for being a girl, since girls tend to do better in the feminized classroom then they do on tests; and maybe a couple more points because teachers would love her and do anything they could to give her a boost; and top 7% is no surprise at all.
The solution touted in the article is for famous public universities to give low test score students much more handholding, such as improving the teacher to student ratio in a special chemistry class for low test score students by 10 to 1.
ReplyDeleteThe reality is, if you do not have an IQ of at least 115, I suspect, you are not going to be able to handle integration in polar coordinates (or choose your favorite example here).
Steve, i believe that the data show that blacks who attend all black colleges such as Howard have dramatically higher graduation rates and acceptance rates at med school than ones that attend multi racial colleges
ReplyDeleteIf you did well on scholastic aptitude tests and in school it is because you were probably bright and a lot disciplined and motivated.
ReplyDeleteFirst, what do you think "bright" means? That's just another word for high IQ, for people who don't like to say that. As for "disciplined and motivated": no, the kids who like the achievement tests the most are the UNdisciplined and UNmotivated smart ones who hate school. The tests are straightforward, and all that matters is filling in the right circles. No one crabbing at you to show your work; no homework to slog through; no extra credit for class participation. Just a straight-up test of your mind.
The kids who excel in class more so than at tests are the ones who are a bit smarter than average -- probably somewhere around 110-120 IQ -- so they're able to stay far enough ahead of the teacher's pace to get straight A's; but they still have to work at it a bit so they don't get unbearably bored and insulted by the whole process.
a 22 is a pretty good score for an African American, putting them in the top 10%. She should be okay at UT.
ReplyDeletePretty good for an AA but NOT pretty good for a UT student. Unfortunately, when she goes to class, most of her classmates are far smarter and better prepared than she was. Her problem is that she is a one eyed girl from the land of the blind. Back home she was queen (and nobody dared "discourage" her by mentioned that she was blind in one eye and that in the wider world most people have two), but now she is in school with all these kids with 20/20 vision and she is stumbling around and doesn't know what hit her (not that knowing would help - she's still blind in one eye).
Who Gets to Graduate?
ReplyDeleteOdd title. I could understand 'Who Gets In?', or eg 'In the End Who Graduates?', but not "Who Gets to Graduate". Once you are admitted you have to take the required classes and get the minimum grades you need to graduate. So it's more like something you earn, not 'get', as in 'get the chance' (to attend).
If you were a straight-A student at MIT, got a Ph.D. from Princeton in theoretical physics, won the Nobel Prize for making a revolutionary discovery in Quantum Physics, you might have an IQ of 125 (Richard Feynman).
ReplyDeleteFeynman's score is poorly documented and suspect. Even if it were true, he had a notable penchant for needling stuffed shirts from a young age. If he considered the test unimportant, he simply may not have given it any effort.
Where is it etched in stone that it will always remain at one full SD and that the gap can't grow worse between the two, especially if the lower end of the bell curve continues to outbreed the talented tenth?
ReplyDeleteLibruls keep expecting the gap to disappear any day now, just as soon we spend the $ on this or that program or stop being racis' or something, so even saying that the gap will remain steady is a violation of the PC code, let alone saying that it will get even worse. According to the supposed Flynn effect, everyone is getting smarter, not dumber.
The 1 SD gap has been pretty constant since IQ measurement began. The same dysgenic patterns (e.g. single motherhood) that we see in blacks are increasingly seen in whites, so probably we are both headed toward idiocracy at around the same rate. At some point when there are not enough smart people left to maintain a technological society and the current benefit structure, they will have to cut those at the lowest end lose and they will starve or eat each other or something as they do in Africa now.
I was a 140-IQ white kid ...
ReplyDeleteThen you have nothing in common with the girl in the article who probably has around a 100 IQ. You were born with certain social disadvantages but with that kind of mental horsepower under your hood, you were fairly sure to overcome them one way or another - the cream rises to the top. If you had had a 100 IQ (and no affirmative action or extra help because you are white) they never would have let you anywhere near your flagship state university, and rightly so.
This is the big mistake that white people (especially but not only Jews and others with immigrant backgrounds) make. They see someone like the girl in the article and say "they are just like me (except a little browner)". Like me, they are the first in their family to attend college, come from a working class background, yada, yada. Sorry, no, they are not like you, unless someone bashed you in the head and shaved 30 or 40 points off your IQ score. That one little number (and not "racism") makes all the difference in the world.
"But, the article makes clear, it's absolutely essential that nobody on campuses notices that there are all these special courses for the not so bright because that would ruin their self-esteem and then the magic would vanish. Or something. "
ReplyDeleteI couldn't make it through the article. Long and obfuscatory. But is there a quote that said the above? What language do they put this in?
Not only grade inflation, but course title inflation. The title of the class could be Trigonometry but only first year Algebra is actually being taught.
ReplyDeleteI heard Mark Zuckerberg's Newark gift "failure" being discussed. Sure, it's a failure if you think the purpose was to alleviate NAM educational failure. But it was a smashing success if you look at the situation more cynically:
1. Cory Booker is now in the United States Senate, and may be the next great mulatto messiah hopeychanger, Obama 2.0.
2. Chris Christie easily won re-election as Governor, and but for Bridgegate, would still be the 2016 Republican front runner today.
3. Mark Zuckerberg's donation wiped out the bad PR from the movie that was out at about the same time, The Social Network, and now he's added his maniacal drive for open borders to that, and nobody in the media cares anymore about his being a backstabbing two faced rat fink. He's now worth $25 billion.
So, you see? Success. Everyone got off on a feel good orgy of pathological altruism.
re: "I scored a 150 on an administered IQ exam in elementary school and my ACT score would not have made the cutoff for MENSA." ANON
ReplyDeleteOnly one of the Standardized Tests for College and Graduate/Professional School remains highly correlated with IQ: The GRE. (If I am wrong about this please give a reference.)
Dan Kurt
Fruitkins say 'homo' is an offensive word.
ReplyDeleteSo, does that make them
'homo'-phobes?
Most people (98%) have an IQ under 130 ... if you were a straight-A student at MIT, got a Ph.D. from Princeton in theoretical physics, won the Nobel Prize for making a revolutionary discovery in Quantum Physics, you might have an IQ of 125 (Richard Feynman).
ReplyDeleteThe country ought to be teeming with Richard Feynman types then. This just illustrates something which many people here prefer to ignore - that a high score on an IQ test is a poor predictor of genius level accomplishment.
A problem with the blog format is that it disappears daily. I did a little research on this issue last week. By little I mean ten minutes or less. You'll have to look elsewhere for more dedicated researchers.
ReplyDeleteI found on the web somewhere that one's actual IQ and one's estimate of their IQ correlate at about 0.20. In other words self reported IQs are rubbish.
Most people know approximately how tall they are and how much they weigh. They probably lie about the numbers when they can but they know that they are lying. Many men who are really 5'11" claim to be six feet. Not much harm done.
It looks however like many people legitimately are mistaken about their own IQ. Much of that because they don't understand scale theory and probability density functions.
If an adult self reports his IQ on the Web it should be discounted at least 20 points. This is the same sort of correction you need to make when you read a woman's profile on a dating site. Count on it. When you meet her she will weigh 20 pounds more, is five years older, and her posted picture was taken in 1999.
There is something a little creepy about an adult who obsesses about his IQ. For college kids it's understandable. An IQ is in a sense a prediction as to how important you will be when you make your way in the world. But after thirty of forty you should have a record of actual accomplishment. Who cares if you were once promising?
Pat Boyle
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteIf you were a straight-A student at MIT, got a Ph.D. from Princeton in theoretical physics, won the Nobel Prize for making a revolutionary discovery in Quantum Physics, you might have an IQ of 125 (Richard Feynman).
If you were a straight-A student at Cal Tech, got a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, went on to win the Nobel Prize and put "the silicon in Silicon Valley", you might have an IQ of 124 or 129 (test taken twice) (William Shockley)."
People often talke about Feynman's low IQ score. I never see a source for it though. In the absence of any source for this story, I consider it to be just internet BS. I would bet that he had a quite high IQ score, and the same for Shockley. It used to be fashionable for people to claim that Einstein had poor grades in high-school. That was just bunk; in science and math he had excellent grades.
Back in the days when they took IQ tests, the statistics were no where near as good as they are today, so calibrating those tests may have been more hit and miss. Perhaps the tests that Fenynman and Shockley took were incorrectly designed.
Again, assuming that the story is true at all, which I doubt.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.vdare.com/articles/why-does-jonah-goldberg-want-to-block-the-backlash-against-political-correctness"
Thanks for Linking.
@SFG
ReplyDeletePerhaps a Running-Man like competition in a shuttered factory somewhere in the midwest. Le Moustache could haul his fois-gras stuffed carcass up and down conveyor belts and in and around rusting, derelict machinery as he is hunted by laid-off blue-collar workers.
Of course he would be given a fighting chance.........a fighting chance to become must-see TV.
"despite being down around the 10th percentile among freshmen": there will always be a 10th percentile, whomever you admit. Unless you cut your admission to nine students per year, I suppose, since the chance would then be seized to claim that no freshman at the U of XYZ is in the bottom decile.
ReplyDeleteTexas A&M, the state's oldest and largest public institution of higher learning, with more than $800 million annually in research, is a state flagship university as well.
ReplyDeleteEverywhere you go, Aggies think they're a part of the conversation.
Delete"But the real tacit knowledge that these students lack are too politically incorrect to think, much less record in any permanent form." How much that matters for this girl I have no idea, but as a general point on life it's pretty good.
ReplyDelete"Yea you seem really humbled. That's the hallmark of humble people assuming that the reason they got beat was because of ACT grade inflation."
ReplyDeleteOr it's a reasonable suspicion, given grade and test score inflation. When I was in high school a 31 was probably 98th percentile.
"People often talke about Feynman's low IQ score. I never see a source for it though. In the absence of any source for this story, I consider it to be just internet BS."
ReplyDeleteWiki gives his biographer as a source.
"In high school, his IQ was determined to be 125—high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer James Gleick."
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/physics/brau/H182/Term%20Papers/Ryan%20McPherson.html
Though I'll admit I can't be bothered to read the entire article, the fundamental way they try and mislead you at the beginning is pretty irritating, albeit typical. They start with this story of a low-income black girl of modest intelligence than throw in this chart about how, if you control for test scores, income makes a huge difference in whether or not someone graduates from college. The obvious implication is that poverty causes NAMs too fail out excessively relative to their intelligence.
ReplyDeleteBut of course, that's not what the chart really tells you. The majority of the people on that bottom quartile line are surely white. It starts at 800, meaning that nearly half of blacks aren't even smart enough to be on it. These missing blacks are surely heavily poor. Further, to fit in anywhere on the chart other than in that first sector you need a 1000. Getting a 1000 puts a black student about 1SD above the black median, i.e. 83 or so percent don't manage it. Who wants to bet that this top 1/6 comes primarily from the propped up black middle class that has been benefiting from AA for decades, rather than from the ghetto? Finally, the 1200+ sector? I remember a previous NYT article about low income strivers which mentioned that only 6% of those from the bottom quartile in income who score above a 1300 are black. 69% are white and 15% are Asian. Moving it down to 1200 probably increases the black share a bit, but not a ton. In short, it provides a black face for a white/Asian problem in order to help cover up black failure. How well we develop intellectual talent from poor blacks isn’t the issue—the issue is that this intellectual talent simply does not exist in the first place.
Did you not see the graphic in the Times article? I mean: This one.The rich dumb dumbs have a significantly better graduation rate than the poor smart ones.
ReplyDeleteA lot of that has to do with mind set. As the article points out, if a student who is the first of his or her family to attend college hits problems, the student may assume that is because the student is not smart enough. I had a poor freshman year in college, and knew I wasn't returning for my sophomore year. A fellow student informed me that most students who drop out of school their freshman year do not end up getting their degrees. As one of my grandfathers and both of my parents had graduate degrees, I blew this data off. I knew damned well that if I got my act together, I would finish school. I knew I had the capabilities- my Board scores said so- and from my family history I knew it could be done.
From the NYT article:
She was enrolled in U.L.N. and in Discovery Scholars, another of the programs David Laude oversaw, and her advisers arranged for her to get free help at the campus tutoring center. She spent six or more hours there each week, going over chemistry problems, and by March she was getting A’s and B’s on every test.
I got a C my first semester in PChem. My second semester, I made some changes. One change was to go over old exams that were in the Reserve Room of the library. I got a high B second semester with a 90 average- prof would give only so many A's out- and got 97th percentile on the standardized PChem final. So I have some sympathy with her.
Also bear in mind that 30-40 years ago, a 1030 SAT for a freshman going to State U was much closer to the freshman class average than it is today.
Hand holding aside, it looks as if the gal at UT Austin is able to handle the work just fine in the end. So what if she needed a little nudge/support here and there in her first year. The bottom line will be in the end result: will she make a decent chemist or not? So far it looks like she's well on her way to success. So much for the death sentence of a 22 ACT score.
ReplyDeleteBelieve it or not there's a hell of a lot more to being a competent worker bee than standardize test scores. Absent personality and connections, among other aspects of desirability, a long in the tooth 95th percentile ACTer will often end up washing bottles at the local lab in your neighborhood. See it all the time at MWRD in Chicago.
Somewhat related, Charles Murray tweeted this link to an article in The Nation on school segregation. The top-rated comment could have come from this blog's readership.
ReplyDeleteSteve Hsu on Feynman's low IQ score:
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/12/richard-feynmans-intelligence/#.U3k5RnZsKws
Steve, off topic. Why is it that the Dodgers owners are supposed to be blamed for Time Warner charging what the other providers believe is too high a price. Is there some kind of direct collusion (ie. not the mere sale of the broadcast rights) going on? Google is not being my friend.
ReplyDelete"Fruitkins say 'homo' is an offensive word."
ReplyDeleteI think it is "People of Homo".
""""""""""""If an adult self reports his IQ on the Web it should be discounted at least 20 points. This is the same sort of correction you need to make when you read a woman's profile on a dating site. Count on it. When you meet her she will weigh 20 pounds more, is five years older, and her posted picture was taken in 1999. """"""""""""""""""
ReplyDelete"If a woman tells you she's 20 and looks 18, chances are she's really closer to 12. If a woman looks 26 and tells you she's 26, she's actually 40."--Chris Rock
One thing I see again and again in these articles are parents and students who claim that despite being in the top classes in their schools and having a decent GPA, the child wasn't challenged very much.
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
Those classes are filled with the top of the bottom, so to speak. When your students vary by more than 1 SD and you are trying to teach them AP Lit, you have to weight the easy items on the tests and projects very heavily and the difficult items very lightly. So, yes, there are 30 easy questions and 10 hard ones on the test, but the 30 easy ones are 3 pt.s each and the hard ones are 1 pt. each, and voilà , hardworking students will average around a 90 on the test. If the teacher is forced to weight the items equally, it is easy to just load up on easy questions and reduce hard ones. A teacher would be stupid to design tests any other way. She, not the students, would be blamed for any poor or disparate performance among the students. A nice black kid is not going to scream racism, etc., if he gets an 94 A, and some other kid gets a 99 A because an A is an A.
Very OT:
ReplyDeleteI just read an article which, I think, moved me a little closer to understanding what the hell is happening in the Donbass region of the Ukraine. The article is in Russian, but if you're really interested in this stuff, you can use Google Translate.
According to that article the rebellion has so far had three stages during which it was led by three sets of people with two incomopatible sets of interests.
The first stage involved demonstrations in front of government buildings. This was when a locally-born radical Russian nationalist named Pavel Gubarev was proclaimed by the crowds the people's governor of the Donetsk oblast. However, he was quickly arrested by the Kiev authorities. By the way, local crowds proclaiming people governors stops sounding crazy once you learn that governors and mayors are appointed, not elected in the Ukraine. And the central government that's been appointing governors since late February was not elected itself. This is the "democacy" that the US State Department is supporting in that country. How is a large demonstration a less legitimate organ than that kind of a setup?
A few weeks after Gubarev was jailed a new wave of non-violent protests started in the Ukraine's easternmost regions. This time government buildings were seized. According to the article I linked to above this stage was run by the decabillionaire Rinat Akhmetov, the blonde Tatar Steve has written about. Akhmetov does not want the Donbass to join Russia. He doesn't want it to achieve independence either. He just wanted to scare the government in Kiev with the prospect of separatism, using it as a negotiating tool. If Kiev gave him some concessions, he would have told his puppets to go home, leaving the government buildings they had seized. According to that article Denis Pushilin is the Donetsk politician who represents Akhmetov's interests.
However, everything changed on April 12th. That day several hundred armed men seized the Donbass town of Slavyansk. The leader of these men calls himself Igor Strelkov. The Ukrainian secret service has said that this is a pseudonym. Everyone agrees that he's a retired Russian colonel who has seen a lot of war in Transnistria, the former Yugoslavia and Chechnya. According to the article and to everything I've been able to gather elsewhere, he has no connection to Akhmetov and is completely opposed to Akhmetov's goals.
It sounds like Nicholas Pavlovich Ignatiev is abroad again! I'm going to go away to the Estate and shoot grouse until the Crimean caper is concluded.
DeletePart 2:
ReplyDeleteA Russian online magazine has dug up Strelkov's old Internet postings. The man has a beautiful writing style. It takes major brains to write like that. The content informs us that he's a Russian nationalist. Not a fan of Putin, who, as Steve has correctly pointed out, is more of an imperial nationalist. Strelkov idolizes the White (i.e. anti-Red) movement in the Russain Civil War. He used to be a monarchist. During breaks from real wars he has participated in military reenactments. He has claimed that at one point he provided security for the ethnic Russian billionaire Malofeyev, who has been a benefactor of Russian nationalist and Russian Orthodox causes for a long time.
Malofeyev and his people, icluding Strelkov, worked with the Russian government during the Russian annexation of the Crimea. After this was over, several hundred armed men, led by Strelkov, travelevd from the Crimea into continental Ukraine and seized the town of Slavyansk. The author of the article I linked to above does not think that this was authorized by Putin. He doesn't say whether or not he thinks that this action was authorized by Malofeyev. He thinks that Strelkov is a true believer who's ready to die for his cause. It may well be that at this point he does not represent any oligarch or politician.
Some sort of a coup seems to have happened in the Donestk People's Republic. Streklov, who is exremely smart and has taken a lot of guns from the hapless Ukrainian military, seems to have pushed aside Akhmetov's people. He brought in an old personal friend of his named Alexander Borodai as the republic's prime minister. Borodai has a degree in philosophy from Moscow State University (the USSR's Harvard + Yale + Princeton with a merit-based admission policy) and is a son of a philosopher. He also used to work for the Russian nationalist oligarch Malofeyev. And yes, they all know Dugin.
Where's Putin in all this? It's possible that he approved of Akhmetov's phony, non-violent rebellion. It's very unlikely that he approves of Strelkov's shooting war or of Strelkov's ideology. A violent Russian nationalist revolt could potentially spread to Russia. Strelkov wants to recreate the sort of Russia that was lost during the Bolshvik Revolution. People like that consider Putin's immigration policy, among his other policies, treason. Why did Strelkov start his probably-doomed fight in the Ukraine? Becausee Putin controls Russia itself too tightly. At the same time Nuland's coup made the Ukraine even more lawless than it was before. That presented an opportunity. The easternmost regions of the Ukraine are essentially bits of Russia that don't belong to the Russian government. Russian nationalist ideology has potential appeal there. The economic situation, thanks to looter-oligarchs, is worse than in Russia, giving the insurgency more of a chance. And finally Putin's strong, efficient state isn't there to nip a nationalist rebellion in the bud.
Feynman himself said he didn't use his math skills so much when solving problems, but his visual-spacial ones. He'd visualize the problem in his head. Spacial problem solving isn't something IQ tests are very good at measuring, because it's an oddball form of reasoning that hasn't been studied anywhere nearly enough.
ReplyDeleteI know a person with a lousy memory but good visual-spacial skills, and who thinks trigonometry problems are easy, and who can rattle off correct answers one right after another because this person has the ability to visualize and manipulate the problems as images.
Feynman's score was undoubtedly dragged down by a lower level of verbal ability. He had an agile mind, but he was a des-and-dos speaker who had little interest in reading books other than those concerning math and physics.
Steve, OT but here is a piece on one of your favorite topics, billionaires in Silicon Valley wanting cheap programmers.
ReplyDeleteFour prominent scholars on Friday questioned why the high-tech industry gets a free pass to perpetuate the myth that there is a shortage of American workers in jobs related to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
My impression is that most of the famous physicists of the 20th Century were high culture aficionados, with Feynman the most famous exception with regular guy tastes.
ReplyDeleteOnly one of the Standardized Tests for College and Graduate/Professional School remains highly correlated with IQ: The GRE.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad about this since I scored considerably higher on the GRE than I did on the SAT or ACT.
Most people commenting on this post seem to have not really bothered to read the NYT article and the research it is based on, preferring to go with their pre-existing ideas, and hopes, about the inevitability of black failure. If you look at the research it is suggesting that students with lower SAT scores, and therefore lower IQ scores, can do just as well in STEM courses like chemistry, if they are given appropriate assistance and encouragement. This would suggest that the current graduation and score gaps, or perhaps the scale of the gaps, between black and white students are not the inevitable outcome of innate racial abilities. Of course in the long run these programs may not be successful, but that is an empirical question. The other question, of whether isteve readers would prefer Vanessa to fail, is an ethical one.
ReplyDeleteOnly one of the Standardized Tests for College and Graduate/Professional School remains highly correlated with IQ: The GRE. (If I am wrong about this please give a reference.)
ReplyDeleteI'm the guy who posted the post to which you responded.
I did take the GRE later as well and that score did correlate with my IQ score under one of the online GRE/IQ equivalence sites.
The point I'm getting at is that posters on Steve's blog consistently ascribe a direct equivalence between SAT/ACT and other standardized tests with IQ that does not exist. Psychologists have found a correlation between standardized achievement tests and IQ tests but these are not as concrete as posters here claim and a standard IQ test and the SAT/ACT don't ask the same types of questions especially when the IQ test is geared heavily toward testing general intelligence rather than crystallized intelligence.
Put another way, a person with a 100 IQ likely can't prep their way up to, say, a 32 on the ACT but a person with a 115 IQ might. Because the tests are achievement-based, testers with high IQs can also score surprisingly "poorly."
Feynman himself said he didn't use his math skills so much when solving problems, but his visual-spacial ones.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. It's often reported that Ashkenazi visual/spatial aptitude lags NW Euro.
I attempted to donate via Vdare, no idea if it worked though. It appeared to process it, but no confirmation message, just a blank page.
ReplyDeleteOdd title. I could understand 'Who Gets In?', or eg 'In the End Who Graduates?', but not "Who Gets to Graduate". Once you are admitted you have to take the required classes and get the minimum grades you need to graduate. So it's more like something you earn, not 'get', as in 'get the chance' (to attend).
ReplyDeleteOf course, your analysis of the real world is correct, but the Times is constructing a parallel fantasy world. In that world, omnipotent Whites decide who "gets" to graduate.
Many people express shock that this girl was near the top of her class but had only a 22 on the ACT. In Mississippi, there are dozens of schools every year where not a single student scores 25 or higher on the ACT (and thus that school has no STAR Student, a Mississippi honor). Yet these schools still have a normal grade distribution. A school full of low-ability students will still have the regular number with A's and B's.
ReplyDeleteBy comparison, my son's school has about 225 in each class and about 135 of these are non-NAMs. For the past two years eight students have had a 35 or higher on the ACT and more than 25 have had 30 or higher. So a kid from my son's high school in the top seven percent (the UT requirement) will have a 32 or 33 on the ACT. There's a lot of brain clustering going on these days.
Finally, as to low IQ scores by Feynman and others, many people with high-IQs really do not test well, and some have a slow processing speed that skews their score. If there is a substantial discrepancy between achievement test scores and a single IQ test, then additional testing is warranted.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteFeynman's score was undoubtedly dragged down by a lower level of verbal ability. He had an agile mind, but he was a des-and-dos speaker who had little interest in reading books other than those concerning math and physics."
I think this is a likely explanation. I've seen interviews of Feynman, and he had a very strange, stilted way of speaking, as if he had never quite picked up all the rules of grammar and common idioms of English, and just made up the rest on his own. Probably, he just didn't care enough about it to learn it fully.
As you said though, he excelled at spatial reasoning, which is a highly valuable trait for a physicist.
Manton:
ReplyDeleteThe studies have been done about CC transfers to UC and, at least at Berkeley, the GPAs of the transfer students in their final two years at Cal are higher than the GPAs of the 'native' students admitted as Freshmen.
See this:
http://ciac.csusb.edu/docs/CIAC_%20PowerPoint_May17_Final.pdf
The average Berkley GPA of CC transfer students is 3.3. Hardly flunking and better than the final two years of the Freshman admits.
Feynman clearly had an odd verbal ability; he didn't start talking until he was three and was never well spoken in the conventional sense. That probably drove down his conventional IQ test scores.
ReplyDeleteBut at the same time he was in high school and supposedly scoring 125 on IQ tests, he won the New York University Math Championship. He was operating at an extremely high level in math, unlike the typical 125 IQ test taker.
Feynman clearly had an odd verbal ability; he didn't start talking until he was three and was never well spoken in the conventional sense. That probably drove down his conventional IQ test scores.
ReplyDeleteBut at the same time he was in high school and supposedly scoring 125 on IQ tests, he won the New York University Math Championship. He was operating at an extremely high level in math, unlike the typical 125 IQ test taker.
It takes all kinds. My Math SAT was 70 points above my Verbal SAT - also consistent with my GRE Math and Verbal scores. I knew a guy in high school who had a profile more like Feynman: high Math SAT, and a Verbal SAT 250 points lower.
I never personally met Feynman but I did spend an afternoon chatting with Shockley.
ReplyDeleteShockley struck me as scary smart. I think the IQ estimates for him of 125 are simple bunk. I used to hear the same sort of thing about Einstein when I was a kid.
Now that Einstein is fading as the iconic 'smartest man in the world', they are picking on Feynman.
I'm pretty smart and I am well acquainted with my personal life history. But when I read Feynman's life history I notice a big difference. He seemed to do things that normal people - even very smart normal people - just never do.
The idea that he had a 125 IQ again strikes me as pure bunk.
These IQ estimates aren't even good bunk. They are not as good as say the Piltdown Man Hoax. They are more at the level of the Cardiff Giant Hoax. Obvious frauds.
Pat Boyle
Who gets to work is the bigger question, and that is a question for almost everyone, thanks to immigration, affirmative action and off-shoring.
ReplyDeleteThe average Berkley GPA of CC transfer students is 3.3. Hardly flunking and better than the final two years of the Freshman admits.
ReplyDeleteDo you think perhaps its those pesky white students they passed over in favor of affirmative action admits?
Who gets to work is the bigger question, and that is a question for almost everyone, thanks to immigration, affirmative action and off-shoring.
ReplyDeleteIf this young lady, Vanessa, graduates, be that from UT or any university, she'll have all shapes and manners of corporate America and federal agencies throwing well-paid job offers at her.
If this young lady, Vanessa, graduates, be that from UT or any university, she'll have all shapes and manners of corporate America and federal agencies throwing well-paid job offers at her.
ReplyDeleteHeh. Yeah, I know of a diverse female who graduated in CS from CMU. She knows shit.
"The other question, of whether isteve readers would prefer Vanessa to fail, is an ethical one"
ReplyDeleteVery well put!
Interesting. It's often reported that Ashkenazi visual/spatial aptitude lags NW Euro.
ReplyDeleteYes, but that's on average. Just as there are sub-Saharan Africans with high IQ's, there are Ashkenazi Jews with high visual/spatial IQ's. But in both cases, there are proportionally fewer of them than there are Northwest Europeans or East Asians.
If you look at the research it is suggesting that students with lower SAT scores, and therefore lower IQ scores, can do just as well in STEM courses like chemistry, if they are given appropriate assistance and encouragement.
ReplyDeleteI have some research that suggests, that with appropriate assistance, pigs can fly.
Any graduate of a rigorous high school has seen this in some of their college classmates from less exacting prep backgrounds.
ReplyDeleteI had my freshman Eng Comp 101 prof hand my first paper back and say, "Catholic school, right?"
Well, yeah, that and voracious reading.
Feynman himself said he didn't use his math skills so much when solving problems, but his visual-spacial ones.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. It's often reported that Ashkenazi visual/spatial aptitude lags NW Euro.
That is horsesh*t. Any and all professional modern physicists had or have to be adept in mathematics.
Try using only visual/spatial skills to figure out what Feynman called quantum chromodynamics.
In one of the Feynman videos posted on Youtube, he boasts about being good at difficult integrations while he was still in high school.