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1460 SAT and rejected at Cornell has been trending on Twitter the last few days.
https://twitter.com/maiab/status/1736766407348814091?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
A lot of the takes were about him being rejected because he is white. The thing I find interesting is the condensing of the top 1-5% of scores into a smaller score range over time. My guess since the score differences look smaller it lets schools select more for other characteristics rather than pure mental horsepower. Getting a perfect score today or something that looks similar 1550 plus will not differentiate people as much.
Elon Musks apparently had a 1400 SAT. Bill Gates a 1590. Obviously they are both smart but I feel fairly confident Bill Gates is significantly higher pure IQ. With the way normal distributions operate I feel confident saying there is a big intelligence difference between the two but on the current system Musks would probably get 1580 and Gates 1600.
Digging thru SAT history there have been a few key years where the test had significant changes.
1993/1995 - some test changes but the big thing was a recentering to get scores back to about 1000 from 900. Before this update a median score at HYPS would have been 1370-1400 area. Bill Gates 1590 would have really stood out and guaranteed alone admittance to Harvard.
2005 - attempts to move the test closer to high school curriculum and eliminated analogies and quant comparisons. My guess is this made the test less of a pure intelligence test and closed gaps between highest performers and mid range.
2016 - more I guess dumbing down and trying to make the test more like what they did in high school. Multiple choice questions went from 5 options to 4 options and wrong answers no longer carried a penalty. This would make educated guessing far better.
Here is the current percentile for different scores.
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings
1500 is now solidly top 2%. 1450 is top 4%.
Here is the data from 2003
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-historical-percentiles-for-2005-2004-2003
1490-1600 was solidly differentiating between the top 1%.
I believe the new scoring significantly hurts the outliers at standing out from the test. And likely hurts the highest performing white, Asian, and Jewish males at getting into the most selective schools since the difference between a 1530 and 1600 SAT score just doesn’t seem that big statistically. It feels to me that studying for the new exam and learning test taking skills are more important today. Perhaps, you think this isn’t a big deal that the raw mental abilities of the top 1.2% and .3% of the population isn’t important and allowing schools to select more on other criteria is more important. My opinion for the very top programs finding the Bill Gates level intelligence matters. Men also have different intelligence bell curves (more people on the extremes) therefore on net I believe it hurts males.
I am also curious how someone who is really good at math could stand out in today’s environment. The SAT and a few good AP math scores wouldn’t seem to be enough. Do you need to have the opportunity to compete in high-end math tournaments?
Personally, the new testing I believe would have significantly effected my life. Coming from a lower class white family being able to crush the SAT gave me a way to stand out for a relatively cheap costs.
I am seeing a median SAT score of 1520 at Harvard and a median of 1440 at UMICH. My guess is back in the day that gap was much higher.
Too many students tie their sense of worth to what college they get admitted to. As others have said, a 1460 SAT score, especially nowadays, isn't something you'd expect SHOULD get you into an Ivy League or even the next-tier down colleges. It's impressive, but not good enough. There are plenty of good schools the next tier down that still have extremely high brand recognition and provide a good education.
There's certainly something to be said about the networking access you get and brand recognition if you go to a school like Harvard, but a lot of these students go from being the top or smartest kid in their town/school to being mediocre or below average. This is a huge blow to their ego and while it certainly is a humbling and valuable lesson a lot of these students end up switching from a difficult STEM track to something more manageable such as liberal arts. I think this is a net loss to humanity, while I can acknowledge there is some value to the liberal arts the world needs more doctors/scientists/engineers instead of another person writing papers nobody cares about. 82 percent of papers in humanities don't get a single citation 5 years after they are published. (I was unable to find a source with more recent data, but my gut feeling is that the work coming out of the humanities now is even worse on average than they were 20 years ago).
You can see this happen on a statistical level with students admitted via affirmative action. A decently smart black kid who's always wanted to be a scientist gets into Harvard, falls into the bottom 10% of students, and since he's human gets discouraged and switches majors to something else instead, where he has a much easier time because the coursework is not as difficult. The black community lost a future scientist or doctor to affirmative action. If that kid went to some state university instead, he may have graduated top of his class and proceeded to produce valuable work for humanity as a scientist or engineer.
Maclolm Gladwell makes a similar argument in his book David and Goliath. He points out how the top third of students, no matter the university, around 45-55% get a STEM degree, while the bottom third only 15-20% get a STEM degree. The top third of students at a place like Hartwick is equivalent in average SAT scores to the bottom third of students at a place like Harvard. It's the bottom third of Harvard students switching majors, even though they are likely as smart or smarter as the top third of students at Hartwick. In addition, Gladwell argues that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond, and points out how the top students at mid-tier universities publish papers at a higher rate than middle-tier students at elite universities. In terms of their SAT scores and academics, they are equivalent and Harvard should have a superior education, so you should expect the middle-tier Harvard students to perform better, but in reality, it's the opposite. Essentially, the relative position in their local environment mattered more than the absolute position nationwide. (Here is a link to an 8-minute video where he also talks about this idea)
That being said, for the individual, it's still probably better for their career to go to a school like Harvard and be a middle-tier or bottom-tier student than be a top student at some state university. It's a net loss for humanity on average, but a huge opportunity for the individual. If you can get past the ego loss and instead grow as a person just accepting that you're mediocre amongst the geniuses you'll gain a lot from an Ivy League environment.
Are we talking about regular papers published in journals, conferences and such and not some university internal reports?
Even my (engineering) masters thesis got 10 citations in Google scholar in the first 5 years and it's a common saying here that likely nobody beyond your professor will ever read your masters thesis. Just how pointless are those humanities papers if they get no citations at all?
Yes, published papers specifically. The exact method is explained in the method section of the source:
Also had excluded online data at the time:
Note that this is data from studies published in the early 2000s, i haven't found a more recent analysis, but I find that things that studies/analyses that can put leftist doctrine and ideology into question don't get produced out of the universities and are quite rare. This leads me to assume that analysis would prove the numbers are even worse, as I imagine the Humanities sectors would be incentivized to disprove this statistic to justify their existence in the universities, and the fact that I could not find a detailed analytic reputation from within the last 16 years implies the truth of the scenario.
The quality of the majority of papers being produced is extremely questionable and the methodology has been in question. Back in 2018 three professors deliberately created 20 fake studies with the most outlandish claims, of which "seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected." A similar stunt was performed in 1996, known as the Sokal Hoax. It is a fact that people can submit fake, bullshit papers into the humanities and have them published for the world to see. It's also a fact that nobody is reading these papers.
What was the content of these bullshit studies? Sokal submitted his paper proposing that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. According to the Atlantic article I linked above, one of the published papers from the more recent 2018 example argued that "western astrology" was sexist and imperialist, and that physics departments should study feminist astrology and practice interpretative dance. Another asked if “dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?" Even another argued that "men who masturbate while thinking about a woman without her consent are perpetrators of sexual violence." These were the ones that got published into supposedly reputable journals that publish works from professors from distinguished universities like UCLA, Penn State, etc. (There is a section at the bottom of the Atlantic article that provides some criticism/counterargument to what Sokal and the three professors are trying to prove about the state of Academia, for those interested, go look at the article).
The question then is why is this allowed to happen in the humanities? There is the common explanation that one must publish or perish in order to have a successful academic career, which drives people to publish whatever they can to succeed in the Academia rat race.
Jordan Peterson provided another explanation on the humanities papers fiasco.
It seems like Jordan Peterson is arguing the humanities in the universities have either set up or taken advantage of a system that allows financial gain for the professors in the humanities so there is no incentive to publish good studies. It's possible the money generated from this system can be used to justify the existence of these humanities departments to the university. But essentially Jordan Peterson is saying the humanities are a scam.
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