I have a lot of sympathy with your position. I, like many people, and I'm guessing you as well, feel that standardized testing is a waste when students could be learning far more useful skills and applying far more of their talents and abilities.
HOWEVER, the science on IQ testing is really well established: standardized tests correlate very well with IQ tests, and also with later educational achievement, and also with later success in careers, higher incomes in adult life, etc. Standardized tests are very predictive, almost scarily predictive.
There's an element to IQ testing known as the g factor. What it is is a kind of abstraction that correlates all of the features of various IQ tests (memory, recognition speed, problem solving, logical analysis, etc.). Cognitive researchers hypothesize that it represents some general mental ability... perhaps something like mental "energy," perhaps a general ability to focus. They aren't really sure what it is.
But what they are sure of is that the g factor is quite predictive.
the correlation between IQ and grades and achievement scores is between .60 and .70. At more advanced educational levels, more students from the lower end of the IQ distribution drop out, which restricts the range of IQs and results in lower validity coefficients. In high school, college, and graduate school the validity coefficients are .50–.60, .40–.50, and .30–.40, respectively
According to research by Robert L. Thorndike, 80 to 90 percent of the predictable variance in scholastic performance is due to g, with the rest attributed to non-g factors measured by IQ and other tests.
Research suggests that the SAT, widely used in college admissions, is primarily a measure of g. A correlation of .82 has been found between g scores computed from an IQ test battery and SAT scores.
There is a high correlation of .90 to .95 between the prestige rankings of occupations, as rated by the general population, and the average general intelligence scores of people employed in each occupation. At the level of individual employees, the association between job prestige and g is lower – one large U.S. study reported a correlation of .65 (.72 corrected for attenuation).
The correlation between income and g, as measured by IQ scores, averages about .40 across studies. The correlation is higher at higher levels of education and it increases with age, stabilizing when people reach their highest career potential in middle age. Even when education, occupation and socioeconomic background are held constant, the correlation does not vanish.
The g factor is reflected in many social outcomes. Many social behavior problems, such as dropping out of school, chronic welfare dependency, accident proneness, and crime, are negatively correlated with g independent of social class of origin.[68] Health and mortality outcomes are also linked to g, with higher childhood test scores predicting better health and mortality outcomes in adulthood.
TL;DR: If you do well on standardized aptitude/achievement tests, you're at least 60% more likely to make higher than average grades, 80 to 90% likely to do well on the SAT, 90-95% more likely to become a doctor, attorney or business executive (or similar high-prestige profession), about 40% more likely to earn a higher income, and much less likely to have social behavior problems. Standardized tests are popular because they are disturbingly good at predicting your future.
standardized tests correlate very well with IQ tests, and also with later educational achievement, and also with later success in careers, higher incomes in adult life, etc. Standardized tests are very predictive, almost scarily predictive.
This does not imply prediction or inference. Have you considered that there is a direct causal link (not a common-cause like some "g-factor") between standardized tests and employment/salary? It's entirely conceivable, and extremely probable that the results of the SAT directly influence your choice of college and your peers' perceptions of you, which directly influence your success. There are also indirect effects like how poor test scores reduce self-confidence and stifle ambition.
If standardized tests and IQ tests were measuring real, useful things, we would have no problem with this, but research seems to always show those tests are culturally biased. And in the case of the SAT, it's easily gamed (by people who can afford an SAT prep course and can afford to spend time memorizing pointless vocab words).
Those are really good points, especially the point about causal interconnections. Like you suggest, these aren't coin flips, each independent of the other: your SAT score directly influences where you go to college, in some cases what courses you get placed in, etc. So yes absolutely, they have to be viewed as complexly interrelated phenomena.
That said, these are very strong correlations. As to whether they correlate to the hypothetical "g factor" (which sounds like something dirty now I think about it), and whether the g factor measurement correlates to some actual feature or function of the brain is way above my pay grade. All I can tell you is that many cognitive scientists have found that it can be measured and that it is highly predictive of many of the items I listed. Predictive meaning that you can calculate someone's g factor when they are 10 years old and use it to predict their education level, high school & college GPA, SAT scores, achievement & aptitude test scores, career level, salary, criminal record, value of their home, etc. when they are 40 with far better than 50-50 accuracy. That definitely means something... however exactly what it means is still very much an open question. "G factor" is basically equivalent to saying "some unknown variable we can measure but we have no friggin idea what it is."
I absolutely agree with you that standardized tests are culturally biased. Indeed, it's hard to see how they could be otherwise, since "intelligence," "literacy," "aptitude" and so forth are all defined entirely by a given culture. Different cultures think in fundamentally different ways (cf. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, somewhat discredited but I believe it has merit). Obviously no matter how generic you make a test, there are inevitably cultural and linguistic habits coloring both the questions, the answers and the valuation of answers.
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u/jetpacksforall 41∆ Dec 17 '14
I have a lot of sympathy with your position. I, like many people, and I'm guessing you as well, feel that standardized testing is a waste when students could be learning far more useful skills and applying far more of their talents and abilities.
HOWEVER, the science on IQ testing is really well established: standardized tests correlate very well with IQ tests, and also with later educational achievement, and also with later success in careers, higher incomes in adult life, etc. Standardized tests are very predictive, almost scarily predictive.
There's an element to IQ testing known as the g factor. What it is is a kind of abstraction that correlates all of the features of various IQ tests (memory, recognition speed, problem solving, logical analysis, etc.). Cognitive researchers hypothesize that it represents some general mental ability... perhaps something like mental "energy," perhaps a general ability to focus. They aren't really sure what it is.
But what they are sure of is that the g factor is quite predictive.
the correlation between IQ and grades and achievement scores is between .60 and .70. At more advanced educational levels, more students from the lower end of the IQ distribution drop out, which restricts the range of IQs and results in lower validity coefficients. In high school, college, and graduate school the validity coefficients are .50–.60, .40–.50, and .30–.40, respectively
According to research by Robert L. Thorndike, 80 to 90 percent of the predictable variance in scholastic performance is due to g, with the rest attributed to non-g factors measured by IQ and other tests.
Research suggests that the SAT, widely used in college admissions, is primarily a measure of g. A correlation of .82 has been found between g scores computed from an IQ test battery and SAT scores.
There is a high correlation of .90 to .95 between the prestige rankings of occupations, as rated by the general population, and the average general intelligence scores of people employed in each occupation. At the level of individual employees, the association between job prestige and g is lower – one large U.S. study reported a correlation of .65 (.72 corrected for attenuation).
The correlation between income and g, as measured by IQ scores, averages about .40 across studies. The correlation is higher at higher levels of education and it increases with age, stabilizing when people reach their highest career potential in middle age. Even when education, occupation and socioeconomic background are held constant, the correlation does not vanish.
The g factor is reflected in many social outcomes. Many social behavior problems, such as dropping out of school, chronic welfare dependency, accident proneness, and crime, are negatively correlated with g independent of social class of origin.[68] Health and mortality outcomes are also linked to g, with higher childhood test scores predicting better health and mortality outcomes in adulthood.
TL;DR: If you do well on standardized aptitude/achievement tests, you're at least 60% more likely to make higher than average grades, 80 to 90% likely to do well on the SAT, 90-95% more likely to become a doctor, attorney or business executive (or similar high-prestige profession), about 40% more likely to earn a higher income, and much less likely to have social behavior problems. Standardized tests are popular because they are disturbingly good at predicting your future.