Well

[uostudent]

I scored over 1200 without studying and having partied and gotten three sheets to the wind the night before. The SAT is a poor barometer of intelligence or academic seriousness. I exhibited neither and still did well.

My point remains that had those players not been good at football, most of them would not be going to Stanford. Therefore, what it means for them to go to Stanford is not the same.

Again, that wasn't the point. There are kids at Stanford who are legacy admits who don't belong there (when considering their academic accolades). In fact, being a former athlete often helps in obtaining a job. There's the the regular alumni network and then there's the athlete network. I know that Nike hires a ton of former athletes (who were also good students).

Agree that the SAT isn't the best measure of intelligence. I also didn't study for the SAT, but I'm a reasonably good test taker. My HS GPA was pretty average. I didn't become a serious student until the end of my sophomore year of college.

I think it's a better measure than it gets credit for. It's not perfect obviously, but I personally have found a pretty good correlation between how smart I perceive someone to be and how they do on the SAT. Of course, I got a 1500+ (2300+ actually, but that's just because they added a third 800 point section for writing) so maybe I'm saying this because I just want to feel good about myself.

Actually, I'm curious now. Does anyone know if the NCAA factors in the writing portion of the SAT? Because the SAT is no longer out of 1600, it's out of 2400. But most schools care more about the math and reading (used to be called verbal) sections than the writing section, so I could see the NCAA only choosing to care about M+R, making the scores for athletes still out of 1600.

The only thing that the SAT is supposed to be used for is to determine how prepared a high school will be for their freshman year of college. There is some correlation between one's SAT score and their freshman year GPA. Obviously there are outliers.

No idea about the writing section. When I took the SAT, it was out of 1600. I'm still pretty pissed off that they removed the analogies portion from the test. That part of the test killed my verbal score

I do know that a lot of colleges ignore the writing section because it's too subjective.

The problem with the SAT is that it's a test of knowledge rather than intelligence. And people from different environments are going to have different knowledge. I think it is a mistake to consider someone smart due to what they have or have not been exposed to.

I scored well on the SAT because I grew up in a white-bread Oregon suburb. Same type of place the authors of the test probably came from. If Blount grew up in the same place that I did, he might do circles around me on the SAT.

Agree with this 100%. Blount is from a pretty poor area and I believe he was the first person in his family to go to college.

That being said, I hung out with Blount multiple times. He's a nice guy, but he isn't the sharpest tool in the shed.

[Tray Dub]

Yeah it's certainly a complicated issue. On the one hand, a kid from a low-income area with bad schooling should not be judged as dumber for scoring 100 points less than some upper-middle class graduate of an adequate high school. On the other, in my senior class, I could pretty much rank the people I knew well enough by how smart I thought they were, and that intelligence ranking would have been pretty damn accurate as a ranking of SAT scores. Of course, that's because that removes a lot of the variables that exist when comparing a kid from Harlem to a kid from Newport Beach. The SAT does indeed intend to measure not intelligence but rather preparedness, but as a general principle the smarter a kid is the better prepared he is for college. The opposite is also true. So while I would never hire or befriend or whatever someone only because of a metric like the SAT, it's not worthless. There is at least a correlation between SAT and general intelligence, though it is far from a perfect, 1 to 1 relationship.

[dd10snoop28]

Yeah it's certainly a complicated issue. On the one hand, a kid from a low-income area with bad schooling should not be judged as dumber for scoring 100 points less than some upper-middle class graduate of an adequate high school. On the other, in my senior class, I could pretty much rank the people I knew well enough by how smart I thought they were, and that intelligence ranking would have been pretty damn accurate as a ranking of SAT scores. Of course, that's because that removes a lot of the variables that exist when comparing a kid from Harlem to a kid from Newport Beach. The SAT does indeed intend to measure not intelligence but rather preparedness, but as a general principle the smarter a kid is the better prepared he is for college. The opposite is also true. So while I would never hire or befriend or whatever someone only because of a metric like the SAT, it's not worthless. There is at least a correlation between SAT and general intelligence, though it is far from a perfect, 1 to 1 relationship.

Well said.