Warning! Most People are of Average Intelligence!

The Atlantic

This Year's SAT Scores Are Out, and They're Grim

Fewer than half of the 2013 graduating seniors who took the test got "college-ready" scores.

  

Julia Ryan Sep 26 2013, 7:15 AM ET

 

Of the 1.66 million high school students in the class of 2013 who took the SAT, only 43 percent were academically prepared for college-level work, according to this year’s SAT Report on College & Career Readiness. For the fifth year in a row, fewer than half of SAT-takers received scores that qualified them as “college-ready.”

The College Board considers a score of 1550 to be the “College and Career Readiness Benchmark.” Students who meet the benchmark are more likely to enroll in a four-year college, more likely to earn a GPA of a B- or higher their freshman year, and more likely to complete their degree.

Everybody calm down.

Let's recall what a 500 on a SAT test (Critical Reading, Math, Writing) means in terms of percentiles. If you scored a 500, you are at just about the 50% of self-identified "college-bound" high school seniors, meaning that you are dead average. (A score of 700 puts you at about the 95% percentile, or top 5%.) So, this college-ready benchmark of 1550 (500+500+500+a little statistical slop) suggests that only the top half of "college-bound" seniors should actually be heading to college. If you scored below 500 on any of the SAT subtests, you should think seriously about taking out those college loans, because chances are you will never complete college. In my view, the horror is that students who are in the lower half of the intelligence distribution are being encouraged to go to college -- despite the fact that they will not learn any more in college than they did in high school.

This chart is from a blogpost with the wonderful title, Least Surprising Correlation of All Time!

The graph shows parents' highest level of education attained correlated with their kids' SAT scores. The parents who didn't finish high school had kids who scored in the 420-440 range on the SAT subtests. The parents with graduate degrees (Ph.D., MA, MS, MD, J.D.) had kids who scored in the 550-570 range. This shouldn't be surprising because intelligence is substantially heritable.

In case you weren't aware of this -- the SAT is an IQ test, i.e. SAT scores are strongly correlated with IQ scores (see below). The correlation between SAT scores and IQ scores is over .80, which means that the SAT is substantially a test of intelligence.



So where does that leave us? You need a certain amount of intelligence to succeed in college. The majority of high school students do not meet that threshold of intelligence. So they shouldn't go to college. What's wrong with post-high school training in welding, robotics programming, nursing, or information technology?

 

If you really want to learn something, please read this article by intelligence researcher Linda Gottfredson, Ph.D.: Pretending that Intelligence Doesn't Matter.