

SAT Scores and Family Income: The least surprising correlation of all time - cwan
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/

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tokenadult
It's too bad these data aren't reported each year by the College Board as a
scatterplot, to show the large variance in SAT scores at all self-reported
income levels.

See also

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Income2.png>

(which appears to be based on genuine data from the College Board, the one
year it released such data) for another view of what might be going on.

After edit: See the other thread just opened here on HN also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791381>

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byoung2
When I taught SAT at Kaplan I participated in a program called SAT Advantage
where we offered SAT prep for free at high schools in low-income areas. I had
several students score in the 95th percentile (Kaplan hires teachers who score
90th percentile or higher), and one got a perfect score in math.

It is possible with a little effort to beat the odds. The wealthy kids I
usually taught had parents who could afford $1000 for an SAT class or $3000
for private tutoring. An idea I have for an educational technology startup
would level this playing field using the web.

~~~
gwern
> It is possible with a little effort to beat the odds. The wealthy kids I
> usually taught had parents who could afford $1000 for an SAT class or $3000
> for private tutoring. An idea I have for an educational technology startup
> would level this playing field using the web.

I once took an SAT prep class; it wasn't one of the 3k private tutoring
classes, but I remember thinking, as I finished the last class, 'I learned and
did _nothing_ here that wasn't already in this mammoth SAT prep book'.

Libraries around here have tons of these SAT prep books, even for the newer
SATs. I suspect that libraries (school and otherwise) even in your low-income
areas have at least 1 or 2 decent SAT prep books.

What could your startup do for the kids in these low-income areas that they
can't already do for themselves with the prep books available to them? If it
is a lack of motivation or awareness, how would your startup motivate them to
actually do the studying or get them more aware of the startup's resources
than of the books?

~~~
poppysan
Live instruction is more valuable than self-instruction to a majority of
children of any age.

The point can be made by taking your question 1 step further.

If the information is available to kids via books, then why have school at
all?

~~~
gwern
The obvious answer is that what a class buys is a sunk cost, to force the
parent to send the kid to the class, and then the kid out of sheer boredom or
osmosis will wind up learning something. If the kid had the motivation to
begin with, the book would be quite enough. (I had the motivation simply
because I wanted to show up my elder sister; so the class was a waste for me.)

Which directly leads to one of the questions I posed: how could this startup
force the target kids to learn, if it's remote? Without a good answer to that,
I don't think it's a good idea.

(And on a tangent: school can be a good idea, even for motivated students,
simply because some things are very difficult to teach yourself out of a book.
It'd be kind of hard to learn how to read and write from just books, for
example.)

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ShabbyDoo
What surprises me most about these graphs is how relatively flat they are!

Let's pretend for a moment that the distribution of SAT scores across income
strata would be identical if all kids were forced to take the test. Given that
a much greater percentage of wealthy kids take the SAT and the probability one
takes it likely increases along with his expected score, you would think the
correlation would be the inverse of the NYT graph. If a wealthy child is an
idiot, his parents will encourage him to take the test in hope that some
college somewhere will accept him. But, a dumb poor kid probably dropped out
of school before he had a chance to even take the SAT. So, the positive
correlation in the NYT article suggests a much greater disparity of test
taking ability (and all that it might imply) than just the slope of the graph
naively implies.

------
tvaughan
[http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/08/least-surprising-
corr...](http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/08/least-surprising-correlation-
of-all.html)

~~~
gabrielroth
The correlation between parental income and IQ also holds for adopted kids,
which makes it hard to blame genetics: <http://bit.ly/2RzLIp>

~~~
lsd5you
Assuming parents adopt at random...?

------
eli
It'd be much more interesting if they tried to tackle which specific factors
made the most difference. (Based on my own anecdotal experience, rich people
are not especially smarter than the poor or middle-class)

Perhaps a better question is which school did you attend? Or, did you take a
prep course?

~~~
hughprime
Based on my experience that's half true: rich kids aren't noticeably smarter
than middle-class kids, but middle-class kids are noticeably smarter than the
truly poor kids.

This is about what we'd expect, assuming a society which is reasonably
meritocratic and intelligence which is at least partly inheiritable.

~~~
scott_s
It's easy to explain that phenomenon without calling upon meritocracy or
inherited traits: people with more resources (human and material) have more
opportunity to become smarter.

~~~
sp332
Or maybe poor people value something other than intelligence. This argument
works for both heritable and learned attributes.

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gjm11
There's one thing about it that surprises me a little: the comparatively big
jump moving between the $180k-$200k and the $200k+ categories. Sure, that last
category includes the veryveryvery rich as well as the merely quite rich, but
I'd have expected -- wrongly, perhaps -- that both the link between (parents')
intelligence and wealth, and the ability of wealth to purchase better
education (in a broad sense). would be showing diminishing returns by that
point.

Perhaps it's just a statistical artefact: the last category is relatively
small. On the other hand, the absolute numbers are pretty big.

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grandalf
The scores are mostly all in the average range. I'd be curious to see the
income graph for scores at -2, -1, +1, +2, and +3 standard deviations from the
mean.

~~~
tokenadult
The graph shows the central tendency of scores (the median score) for each
self-reported income range. As I posted in my first reply here, it is
regrettable that College Board doesn't simply report a scatter plot of all
score levels found in all self-reported income ranges.

------
MaysonL
And here's an example pointing to how this correlation can be broken:
<http://www.hcz.org/our-results>

