Posts Tagged ‘Not the cognitivie elite’

Not the cognitive elite

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

Theoretically elite colleges select people with very high scores on the college entrance exam, thus select very smart people, thus our ruling elite is composed of very smart people.

There are two problems with this story.  One is that they do not in fact select people with very high scores on the college entrance exam, and the other is that during the 1990s, high scores on the college entrance exam frequently ceased to correlate with being very smart.

LSAT is pretty much an IQ test, and if colleges aim for a high LSAT score, they are aiming for a high IQ student body, but during the 1990s SAT and PSAT ceased to correlate strongly with IQ, suggesting a loss of enthusiasm for dangerously smart students.
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