Posted on 03/06/2014 7:08:04 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The College Board announced Wednesday that it is overhauling the SAT, dropping the timed essay and focusing less on fancy vocabulary in order to level the playing field a bit for high school students from a wider range of families. The organization's own data show that wealthier Americans, from more educated families, tend to do far better on the best. As do white and Asian Americans, and those students who had the opportunity to take the PSAT in high school before taking the SAT. Almost certainly, these four findings have common origins in that the SAT benefits families who can provide their kids with a better education and more test prep. But here are four charts that show how the SAT advantages specific demographics.
The first chart shows that SAT scores are highly correlated with income. Students from families earning more than $200,000 a year average a combined score of 1,714, while students from families earning under $20,000 a year average a combined score of 1,326. The writing test has the widest score gap, perhaps explaining why College Board officials are dropping the essay.
The second chart shows that students from educated families do better. A student with a parent with a graduate degree, for example, on average scores 300 points higher on their SATs compared to a student with a parent with only a high school degree. No doubt this is the same dynamic reflected in the income graph, given that there are high returns to college education. But it also dispels the notion that students in America have good opportunities to advance regardless of the family they're born to.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
No one wants to admit that the ‘habit of success’ is learned and essential to young people.
The example has to be there.
Why didn’t they show us a chart of scores for children from two-parent families and one-parent families?
THERE’S the real story
Yes, the author is not very logical. There is little common sense in her assessment, AND there are sentence fragments as well. Tsk tsk.
Haven’t they seen the movie “Idiocracy”
It explains this rather well...
I scored above the 94 percentile in all categories on the sat and our family had very modest means.
My brother scored 99 in about 4 categories
Bingo
yes, outliers exist on both sides.
Sometimes a genius might be born of those with below average intelligence, and sometimes a moron will be born to those with above average intelligence.
This in no way disproves the fact that the vast majority of highly intelligent couples will produce above average intelligence children and that the vast majority of low intelligence couples will produce below average intelligence children.
Just as there is a chance Michael Jordan could have a child who can’t jump if his life depended on it.
I don’t think it is pure genetics. I have a sister and a brother. We were raised in poverty. My sister is solidly middle class, while my brother has not made much of himself. I made it to and through college, taught a few years and went back for and advanced degree (sponging off of my wife).
Anyone can succeed. You have to want to. Some families ( too many, in fact) don’t encourage the value of education.
just one more way that they can use to make the average voter’s intelligence drop.
The SAT favors smart people, whether rich or poor.
this
Another way (besides just pure luck) that two below average intelligence people could produce above average intelligence children is this:
A man with (overall) low intelligence is none the less good at math mates with a woman of (overall) low intelligence is none the less good at verbal skills. If their children were lucky, they might get his great math skills and her great verbal skills.
I see this in my own children, where some of my four children lucked out and got the best of both of our strengths, while others more closely mirror me or my wife.
I would expect that a graduate of Phillips - Andover would score better than a graduate of the Chicago Public Sclools. If not, then P- A parents have wasted a lot of money.
You must not have done too well on the Math part (800 + 800 = 1600)...
But, be that as it may, 1350/1600 is pretty impressive (particularly for the days before the SAT test taking classes).
That right thar's pretty funny.
After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.
“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.
“Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.”
Has anyone ever devised an ‘intelligence’ test that rich educated people do not do better on?
Genetics provide the potential. If one is born nearly devoid of potential, it is highly unlikely he or she would become a part of higher income classes. Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient.
not yet, but they have been working on it for 60 years :)
no IQ test ever devised has erased the IQ gap among different races of people.
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