Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Income, IQ, and the SAT

There's a new piece about IQ, income, and SAT scores in the WSJ. The DI Friday post had linked to a story about it with a somewhat misleading quote about IQ and pure luck. I decided to investigate.

Maybe the Davidson folks could write a script to automatically lock any threads started by articles by right wing cranks, racists, and academic frauds like Charles Murray...

So-so attempt at using a tactic for shutting down a discussion of discomfiting ideas: make an emotional claim that's irrelevant to the point at hand and shout down anyone who tries to talk about how icky things like facts.

I had noted that the Davidson Institute sent the link to the story in a Friday post. I think we can assume that they decided that the story was relevant to gifted education.

Please stick to facts and not insults.

Personally, I think that Charles Murray makes some good points, and I'm about as liberal as they come.

I earlier started a thread on the Murray essay: SAT not an affluence test. That thread was locked but then reopened. I think it's better not to have multiple threads about the same article.

I like Charles Murray quite a bit. In some cases he has exposed some truths through data analysis that people find uncomfortable. He explains his data analysis methods, and you can decide for yourself whether he performed the analysis correctly. In other cases, he asserts some opinions (e.g. the importance of religion in society) that I may not agree with, but it is easy to tell what is opinion and what is the result of his research.

But since you mentioned academic frauds, you were probably thinking of Murray's adversary, Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard professor who wrote the Mismeasure of Man in response to The Bell Curve. His fraudulent approach to analyzing the data has been roundly criticized in the NY Times, Nature, Scientific American, etc.

Charles Murray classified his highest IQ group as 125+, so for the twelfth time, he has nothing to say about the highly gifted.

Dude,

Did you actually read the Charles Murray article? He confronts the often commonly held assertion that the SAT only measures affluence, and the ability of wealthy parents to send children to expensive private schools and test prep courses. He explains why IQ has a larger determinant on the SAT than parental income.

The current SAT has a low ceiling, and therefore is not very good at discriminating among high school students with IQs > ~130. But the SAT, along with the ACT are important tests with relevance to the gifted community. Both tests are excellent measures of IQ for younger test takers. And they are an important component of college admissions.

If anything, Charles Murray's article should give hope to non-wealthy parents of gifted children (particularly those that haven't discovered the Davidson Institute yet). The deck is not as stacked against them as much as it may initially seem.

Murray's article would have been better if it was published in the NY Times, which has a less affluent audience than the WSJ. I think the NY Times also has more influence nationally than the WSJ (despite the WSJ having higher readership). But I am not sure the NY Times would have published it.

According to research cited in the thread Genetics and intelligence differences
so what is true of the demographics of the 125+ IQ population is true of the 145+ IQ population, only more so.

The issue here isn't whether the apple falls far from the tree.