

Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics - barry-cotter
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/05/psychometric-thresholds-for-physics-and.html

======
tokenadult
From this blogger, I like much better his post on the distinction between
rationality and IQ,

[http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/04/rationality-vs-
intellig...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/04/rationality-vs-
intelligence.html)

a subject brought to popular attention especially by psychologist Keith R.
Stanovich.

[http://www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli...](http://www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/English)

I should also point out that what is really relevant to success in a college
course in physics or mathematics, even more than SAT score or some other IQ
proxy, is specific subject matter background in science and mathematics. Whole
countries do MUCH better than the United States in providing good background
in science and mathematics to pupils in K-12 education,

<http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf>

so much so that the United States median achievement level is only at the
bottom quartile level for those countries, or (from another point of view) the
United States top quartile level of achievement is only at the median level
for those countries. I think United States policy-makers ought to devote a lot
more time to thinking about how to learn from those good examples.

Some United States mathematicians have taken care to look at how badly
mathematics is taught to elementary pupils in the United States

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf>

<http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf>

and have suggested reforms.

<http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083>

~~~
temphn
> I should also point out that what is really relevant to success in a college
> course in physics or mathematics, even more than SAT score or some other IQ
> proxy, is specific subject matter background in science and mathematics.

But this is not meaningful without controlling for IQ. What allows you to
achieve "subject matter background in science and mathematics"?

> the United States median achievement level is only at the bottom quartile
> level for those countries

And this is not meaningful without controlling for ethnicity. Disaggregated
results show that Americans of European descent are competitive with
Europeans, Americans of Asian descent competitive with East Asians, and so on.

[http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-ba...](http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html)

[http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/badgering-
the-w...](http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/badgering-the-
witless.html)

<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2463278>

In the last link, yummyfajitas seems to have noted this particular point to
you before.

~~~
tokenadult
_What allows you to achieve "subject matter background in science and
mathematics"?_

Ask a question, get an answer. What allows you to achieve subject matter
background in science and mathematics is good teaching of those subjects.
That's the point of the international educational achievement comparisons.
They show, as do studies of high-ability United States students,

[http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_Hanushe...](http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_HanushekPetersonWoessmann.pdf)

[http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-
child-l...](http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-child-left-
behind/)

that what limits educational achievement (and thus preparation for college
studies) of many United States students is not limits in their capacity to
learn, but limits in the curriculum they were taught. The United States school
system doesn't step up to INCREASE the ability of the national populace the
way many other school systems do better.

After edit: If you actually want to learn something serious about ethnicity in
its many manifestations around the world, start here

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations)

and keep reading until you've read a dozen or so of those books, to get past
the many errors found in most blog posts on the subject.

------
dvse
Why is a physics professor surprised by this? You will get exactly the same
"step" plot directly from the binomial distribution if you assume independent
trials and a linear dependency between the SAT band and the probability of
getting an A in a course.

If someone's probability of getting an A in a single course is 0.7 or above,
the probability of getting at least 8 As out of 16 courses rapidly converges
to 1, similar result holds for those with probability below 0.3.

Nothing new has been shown here - can't believe they actually wrote a paper.

~~~
Confusion

      You will get exactly the same "step" plot
    

Except that they don't, for other majors than physics and mathematics.

~~~
dvse
They don't show it. The obvious explanation is that the grades in humanities
are not as strongly correlated with SAT.

~~~
quandrum
So what you're say is, you didn't read the article?

~~~
carbocation
It's not helpful to simply call the commenter out on not reading the article.
First, it's unproductive, and second, it's merely conjecture. Perhaps you both
read it but interpreted it differently? It would instead be more productive to
point out why you think the person didn't read the article, thereby furthering
discussion.

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ZoFreX
I thought that it was much more interesting that they had hardly any data for
students with a SAT-m under 600, which makes the conclusions slightly less
convincing.

That said, there is a clear wall in the data they have so far. It would
definitely be interesting to look into this further and see if that is the
case, and also investigate more fields (I didn't see anywhere in the paper a
complete listing of all the subjects they compared, which was a pity). I know
I would not be surprised if a similar pattern was found in Computer Science!

------
Aqwis
For curiosity's sake, how many percent of the students taking a typical
college course in math or physics typically receive the grade A? (As you might
guess, I'm not American.)

~~~
khermitian
It varies by school and professor. I know several big schools suffer from
grade inflation
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#Grade_Inflation...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#Grade_Inflation_in_the_United_States)
In general, I think its usually a average of a B, at least at Northwestern
University, but other people might have different experiences.

~~~
Aqwis
Thanks. For the record, the average grades for the courses at my university
tend to be Cs (in the case of the big introductory courses, the average is
usually closer to a D than a B), with about 10% of the students receiving As.
This discrepancy is quite unintuitive; (intuitively) you'd expect that the
grade "A" means about the same thing in two different university systems that
use letter grades.

~~~
khermitian
My experience above is from discussions with professors in higher level
classes. Im not too sure if that applies to intro levels. I think that once
you reach a certain level of difficultly the grade does not really reflect how
well you learn the material, but more of how ridiculously smart everyone else
in the class is (see that most of the test averages come out to about 50% or
less).

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j_baker
As always, it's important to note that correlation does not imply causation.
Do students with higher SAT-M scores make better physicists, or do physics
programs reward students who are better test-takers?

