I assume this was using SAT scores from the past 20 +/- years. When I tested in the early 1980's, a score of 1600 would have been regional news and more times than not resulted in allegations of cheating. With today's relaxed scoring, there were at least a handful of perfect scores in my children's school each year, making intergenerational comparisons difficult.
They identified that in the early 80's as the biggest point of contention for minorities so they removed it and took the emphasis off understanding the actual meanings of things, which is pursuant to analogy. They did the same with both inductive and deductive reasoning for the very same motive. Like it or not, whether you can handle the truth or not, all this lowering of standards was driven by the need to blame people's condition on "disparate impacts" which is a kind of fairy tale that claims if people don't like you because you are black you will grow up to be a murderous thug who fires into houses where children are sleeping.
I am really happy they have come out of the closet now and are openly declaring all intelligence to be a white and asian conceit. Math that says 1+1=2 is a cultural imposition.
I like the part where the food supply begins to align more closely with the brains assigned to keep it functioning. That's happened many times before and it will be a real barrel of monkeys, you can believe it. I think some people called it "famine" in the bad old days before edjamafacashun progressind.
With an average IQ of 94 now (legal definition of a "cretin") in the United States (White Europeans truly to be pitied thinking that is all the fault of illegal immigration) and a majority of all college students graduating with below average intelligence compared to the general public, I cannot believe that there is anyone left drawing a false parallel between education and intelligence. The original draw of the college, the entire point as it were, is that it drew high IQ people to study in a way they never did in High School, assuring employers they could get the best and brightest without administering IQ tests. The raw material of bright people plus concerted self-discipline. Today hiring people because of their educational credentials is suicide for any organization. A majority of college students read and write at the level of children and cannot hold an adult conversation.
All the nightmare scenarios of Charles Murray have played out exactly as he warned they would. America today IS Mike Judge's IDIOCRACY and it's not a movie. It's the reality of what is left in America.
Without seeming self-serving, I want you to stop and think about the net effect over a 50 year period of having all public institutions dominated and run by the dumbest and most savage people. The dysgenic effect is inevitable and now we see the result.
I should not be included in any of these overviews - I went to hide out in the library when I was a little boy and was truant for ten years but did not leave school grounds. I knew it would end up like this. You can only watch as some grown man pretending to be a 15 year old stuffs yet another bright kid into a locker somewhere and know perfectly well the United States is a doomed nation. It won't get better until the slate is wiped clean and we have something new from the ashes. America blames its trouble on everybody else but you need look no further than the average American to guess how it got this bad. Somebody was not in the loop mentally for about 50 years is how it got this bad.
People are just waking up now in 2024 A.D. and shrieking "This is bad! We better do something ... you know, intellamajent!" Yeah, no kidding. I recommend most of the country go back to sleep. Won't be long now. Give'em fluids and try to keep'em warm. That's all you can do for them.
How many times was the SAT re-centered? Many of us have scores that are from 30 or 40 years ago. Wondering how those scores are relative to today’s scores.
The minimum score on the SAT is 400 - you get that for signing your name. The second chart that has scores going down to 200 should actually cut off at 400.
They claim a minimum of 200, though no one can really achieve that. I used their full range, in case someone cares enough to think what 200 SAT theoretically corresponds to. Or maybe you are right, and the minimum is 200 for each part, making the total score minimum 400.
It used to be that a wrong answer would subtract some fraction of a correct answer from your score. Eliminating one wrong answer made guessing an expected addition to the score, but it was possible to bring a score below the starting point.
What!? Failure to separate physics and philosophy? Fatal error! Both of these disciplines should be merged together and separated from all others to form a single field called LORDS OF HUMANKIND
Every smart kid takes the SAT. There is not some hidden cache of geniuses not taking this test.
Nobody with a 145 IQ is botching a standardized test.
Each year only about a thousand kids get a perfect SAT score nationwide. Fewer than one in a thousand. It is that rare.
Every year there are surely far more than 1,000 kids with an IQ of 135 + (that’s only a shade over two standard deviations above the norm - still sub genius - more like a one in a hundred IQ). In fact there are more than 10,000 kids with that IQ. As measure by IQ tests. Not SAT.
You’re pretty obviously mistaken about the avg intelligence of a perfect SAT scorer. It’s closer to 145.
You make a good point. Speculating here, but I suspect many of the kids with IQ 135-145 take the SAT much sooner than 11th grade. Perhaps as early as 8th. The general population norm sample Emil references assumes a nationally representative sample of kids 11th and 12th grade.
I have followed the blog for some time now and usually enjoy your analysis.
However, the SAT-IQ Z score comparison exemplified a mathematically correct but theoretically wrong estimate. Such is the nature of psychometrics, though. I would think of those IQ correlations as the minimum cognitive requirement to attain that specific SAT score — not the average.
The reason why is that most intelligent students (arbitrarily defined as having an IQ >120) take either the SAT or ACT — sometimes both. This elite sample skews the cohort and distorts the results in comparison to the general population. Therefore, it makes little sense to assume — even if mathematically correct — that the average person who scores a 1400 on the SAT (97.4 percentile) has an IQ of less than 125.
Any score above a 1400 allows most students to gain admission to competitive schools. I would comfortably estimate that an SAT 1400= IQ 130+, on average. It becomes difficult to calculate a precise number insofar as the correlation is imperfect; however, the Z score correction is theoretically implausible.
There are in general no theoretical minimum IQs to achieve anything in life, as it is always possible to have sufficiently high levels of compensating traits. Thresholds observed in data arise due to the general inability to achieve sufficiently high levels of these compensating traits to achieve whatever goal, whether completing a degree, writing a book, or whatever.
There is no distortion from selection bias as they report norms from a representative sample as well.
There is no need to assume particular values when the mathematics are literally given here that allow you to estimate that 1400 SAT predicts an average IQ of about 123. You seem to forget that 123 IQ is about 94th centile of IQ, which is not very far from the 97th on the SAT.
Where are all the people with genius IQs in your analaysis, Emil? Do you know how many kids in a given year have a 145IQ? More than there are perfect SAT scores.
Your analysis is extremely wonky at the high end. It is farcical at a glance.
Perfect SAT scores are not so uncommon these days.
But 1600 is a large bin capturing everybody at the ceiling of the test. 135 IQ may be a reasonable floor for people scoring 1600, but I doubt it’s the median of this group. 1600 SAT = 135 IQ is clickbait.
Theres a reason they measure IQ via different testing means. IQ is no predictor of ethics or morals tho and those seem to be whats gone missing in the last couple decades.
If intelligence predicts ethics why are so many people in authority positions always seeking to Take Advantage by manipulating narratives to induce Joe Q Public to consistently act against his best interests?
Until accountability is restored/applied, ain't an "intelligent" authority out there I'd defer to. I am my own authority. ;)
The relevant counterfactual is how 80 IQ people would behave if they were placed in such positions and had the competence to manipulate things in the ways you describe. You're incredibly naive if you think those people would be more upstanding given such circumstances.
The existence of morally deficient "smart" people doesn't preclude a correlation between mental capacity and ethics.
You heard of Jordan Peterson and his comments on the folks with IQ of 80 or so? The armed forces wouldn't take them in because they couldn't be trained to do anything proficient. Only someone who thinks in left or right would mis-presume I'd be advocating for morons to be put in seats of authority when they already put the psychopaths/sociopaths in those positions so they'd have people to hang should it come to that and if not, they get their paedo world after all huh. Hope people get a clue that morals and ethics have little to do with intelligence. It all has to do with sympathy/empathy, which both ends of the IQ spectrum are very short on.
Flynn pointed out that higher IQ folks will be able to entertain abstract hypotheticals. Whereas a peasant farmer is much more literal minded and likely to not understand a question like "imagine you're black, how would your life change?"
Moral progress is probably tied to the phenotypic limit being reached for analytic reasoning.
"1600 SAT is about 135 IQ" I don't think this is correct. The article that provides this conversion has estimates of one-time SAT scores and one-time IQ scores. IQ scores' reliabilities are estimated using the same test at two different occasions. (Perhaps two versions of the same test.) But this isn't how we understand IQ/g. A better estimate of g reliability would be obtained using two different tests (e.g., Ravens and WAIS) the same time distance apart as before. I'll bet reliability will be much lower–correct me if I'm wrong. Also correct for SAT reliability. People who get 99th percentile in various standardized tests consistently are smarter, on average, than those who get it once.
SAT has become more studiable basically every year since the 90s, I doubt it is 0.8 at this point. I know a lot of kids who went hundreds of points up on their second go-around just from studying, or got hundreds of points lower on their PSAT than on their SAT. In the 80s and 90s a score of 1250 was enough to get you into MENSA, while today a score of 1250 is not particularly significant at all.
Dear Dr Kirkegaard, SAT is an extremely preppable test. Therefore any interference with IQ can only be made with the first attempt, unprepped score that is unavailable to you. The actual scores students receive only has a tentative link to their IQ, and are a much greater reflection of their educational opportunities and the prep company they used. That said, I do believe SAT correlates well with ability to succeed in college, where prepatation and a strong background are a tremendous help in absorbing knowledge. I would hesitate, however, to link it to any inherent inborn intelligence. :-)
If we get extremely technical, you are partially correct about minimum IQs. However, research on how grit and IQ correlates to scholastic achievement shows no improvement for those below 85. We can at least interpret that to mean no person with an IQ below 85 could become a surgeon, regardless of effort.
An IQ of 123 compared to 130 appears minors, true. The difference, in reality, is quite sizable. But I still believe the math distorts the IQ of high-scoring test takers. I cannot imagine that many students with an IQ >125 scored below a 1350.
Nevertheless, these are extremely technical disagreements. Even more so when considering the fact that many believe the test measures only wealth, etc. Thanks for responding!
I'm OK with these being the means. Having worked with various professionals for many years, it sounds about right. Especially when taking into account inflation in test scores.
40 years ago, a score above 1500 on the SAT was pretty much unheard of.
What would be interesting is the 95th/5th percentile IQ's by score.
Mensa has refused to accept SAT and ACT scores for membership about a quarter century now. The correlation between those and IQ isn't what it used to be.
As frivolous as the organization may seem from the outside, they have always been dead serious about admission. (Far more so than universities, at least in the English-speakingabout it.
They have a little-known research arm; I assume they get their data from or through that. If the correlation between native intelligence and test scores weakens, they would be among the first to know. And among the first to do something about it.
I assume this was using SAT scores from the past 20 +/- years. When I tested in the early 1980's, a score of 1600 would have been regional news and more times than not resulted in allegations of cheating. With today's relaxed scoring, there were at least a handful of perfect scores in my children's school each year, making intergenerational comparisons difficult.
It's using the 2021 results.
America went straight downhill after they scrapped verbal analogies, the most g-loaded subsection.
They identified that in the early 80's as the biggest point of contention for minorities so they removed it and took the emphasis off understanding the actual meanings of things, which is pursuant to analogy. They did the same with both inductive and deductive reasoning for the very same motive. Like it or not, whether you can handle the truth or not, all this lowering of standards was driven by the need to blame people's condition on "disparate impacts" which is a kind of fairy tale that claims if people don't like you because you are black you will grow up to be a murderous thug who fires into houses where children are sleeping.
I am really happy they have come out of the closet now and are openly declaring all intelligence to be a white and asian conceit. Math that says 1+1=2 is a cultural imposition.
I like the part where the food supply begins to align more closely with the brains assigned to keep it functioning. That's happened many times before and it will be a real barrel of monkeys, you can believe it. I think some people called it "famine" in the bad old days before edjamafacashun progressind.
About Charles Murray: "I'm okay with Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's SAT 1600=IQ 135 as of 2022. In 1993, 1600 was surely well clear of 140."
For those wondering (as I was): https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/1515062296065843200
With an average IQ of 94 now (legal definition of a "cretin") in the United States (White Europeans truly to be pitied thinking that is all the fault of illegal immigration) and a majority of all college students graduating with below average intelligence compared to the general public, I cannot believe that there is anyone left drawing a false parallel between education and intelligence. The original draw of the college, the entire point as it were, is that it drew high IQ people to study in a way they never did in High School, assuring employers they could get the best and brightest without administering IQ tests. The raw material of bright people plus concerted self-discipline. Today hiring people because of their educational credentials is suicide for any organization. A majority of college students read and write at the level of children and cannot hold an adult conversation.
All the nightmare scenarios of Charles Murray have played out exactly as he warned they would. America today IS Mike Judge's IDIOCRACY and it's not a movie. It's the reality of what is left in America.
Without seeming self-serving, I want you to stop and think about the net effect over a 50 year period of having all public institutions dominated and run by the dumbest and most savage people. The dysgenic effect is inevitable and now we see the result.
I should not be included in any of these overviews - I went to hide out in the library when I was a little boy and was truant for ten years but did not leave school grounds. I knew it would end up like this. You can only watch as some grown man pretending to be a 15 year old stuffs yet another bright kid into a locker somewhere and know perfectly well the United States is a doomed nation. It won't get better until the slate is wiped clean and we have something new from the ashes. America blames its trouble on everybody else but you need look no further than the average American to guess how it got this bad. Somebody was not in the loop mentally for about 50 years is how it got this bad.
People are just waking up now in 2024 A.D. and shrieking "This is bad! We better do something ... you know, intellamajent!" Yeah, no kidding. I recommend most of the country go back to sleep. Won't be long now. Give'em fluids and try to keep'em warm. That's all you can do for them.
In 1991, "People" magazine ran an article on five of the nine students who had scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT that year. (All boys.)
June 1987 - you can see the "5 brainy kids" above Princess Di on the cover. But, yeah, there were fewer than 10 that year.
https://people.com/royals/princess-diana-people-magazine-covers-through-the-years/
How many times was the SAT re-centered? Many of us have scores that are from 30 or 40 years ago. Wondering how those scores are relative to today’s scores.
1995 was the major recentering I am aware of. The big swing up was in the upper end of Verbal, where a 730 mapped to 800.
The minimum score on the SAT is 400 - you get that for signing your name. The second chart that has scores going down to 200 should actually cut off at 400.
They claim a minimum of 200, though no one can really achieve that. I used their full range, in case someone cares enough to think what 200 SAT theoretically corresponds to. Or maybe you are right, and the minimum is 200 for each part, making the total score minimum 400.
200 is the minimum for each section - Verbal and Math. It has the effect of creating a bell curve on either side of 1,000.
It used to be that a wrong answer would subtract some fraction of a correct answer from your score. Eliminating one wrong answer made guessing an expected addition to the score, but it was possible to bring a score below the starting point.
What!? Failure to separate physics and philosophy? Fatal error! Both of these disciplines should be merged together and separated from all others to form a single field called LORDS OF HUMANKIND
Separation of powers maybe
Every smart kid takes the SAT. There is not some hidden cache of geniuses not taking this test.
Nobody with a 145 IQ is botching a standardized test.
Each year only about a thousand kids get a perfect SAT score nationwide. Fewer than one in a thousand. It is that rare.
Every year there are surely far more than 1,000 kids with an IQ of 135 + (that’s only a shade over two standard deviations above the norm - still sub genius - more like a one in a hundred IQ). In fact there are more than 10,000 kids with that IQ. As measure by IQ tests. Not SAT.
You’re pretty obviously mistaken about the avg intelligence of a perfect SAT scorer. It’s closer to 145.
You make a good point. Speculating here, but I suspect many of the kids with IQ 135-145 take the SAT much sooner than 11th grade. Perhaps as early as 8th. The general population norm sample Emil references assumes a nationally representative sample of kids 11th and 12th grade.
Two possible counters:
1. SAT is not perfectly correlated to IQ and might be subjected to noise, a perfect SAT score can have IQ under 145 and vice versa
2. SAT scores have factors that are orthogonal or even run counter to IQ, e.g. rhetorically biased questions
What about SAT and COMPLETED undergraduate degree?
I have followed the blog for some time now and usually enjoy your analysis.
However, the SAT-IQ Z score comparison exemplified a mathematically correct but theoretically wrong estimate. Such is the nature of psychometrics, though. I would think of those IQ correlations as the minimum cognitive requirement to attain that specific SAT score — not the average.
The reason why is that most intelligent students (arbitrarily defined as having an IQ >120) take either the SAT or ACT — sometimes both. This elite sample skews the cohort and distorts the results in comparison to the general population. Therefore, it makes little sense to assume — even if mathematically correct — that the average person who scores a 1400 on the SAT (97.4 percentile) has an IQ of less than 125.
Any score above a 1400 allows most students to gain admission to competitive schools. I would comfortably estimate that an SAT 1400= IQ 130+, on average. It becomes difficult to calculate a precise number insofar as the correlation is imperfect; however, the Z score correction is theoretically implausible.
There are in general no theoretical minimum IQs to achieve anything in life, as it is always possible to have sufficiently high levels of compensating traits. Thresholds observed in data arise due to the general inability to achieve sufficiently high levels of these compensating traits to achieve whatever goal, whether completing a degree, writing a book, or whatever.
There is no distortion from selection bias as they report norms from a representative sample as well.
There is no need to assume particular values when the mathematics are literally given here that allow you to estimate that 1400 SAT predicts an average IQ of about 123. You seem to forget that 123 IQ is about 94th centile of IQ, which is not very far from the 97th on the SAT.
Where are all the people with genius IQs in your analaysis, Emil? Do you know how many kids in a given year have a 145IQ? More than there are perfect SAT scores.
Your analysis is extremely wonky at the high end. It is farcical at a glance.
Perfect SAT scores are not so uncommon these days.
But 1600 is a large bin capturing everybody at the ceiling of the test. 135 IQ may be a reasonable floor for people scoring 1600, but I doubt it’s the median of this group. 1600 SAT = 135 IQ is clickbait.
Theres a reason they measure IQ via different testing means. IQ is no predictor of ethics or morals tho and those seem to be whats gone missing in the last couple decades.
Intelligence predicts ethics too. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0305724730020309?journalCode=cjme20 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-09080-006 These are not the most convincing of studies, but you get the idea.
If intelligence predicts ethics why are so many people in authority positions always seeking to Take Advantage by manipulating narratives to induce Joe Q Public to consistently act against his best interests?
Until accountability is restored/applied, ain't an "intelligent" authority out there I'd defer to. I am my own authority. ;)
. .you assume people in authority are intelligent and not just pushy.
For my money, intelligent people are laying low until the circus collapses.
Intelligence predicts ethics, but not perfectly.
We can agree to disagree. Its not even accurate in General terms.
The relevant counterfactual is how 80 IQ people would behave if they were placed in such positions and had the competence to manipulate things in the ways you describe. You're incredibly naive if you think those people would be more upstanding given such circumstances.
The existence of morally deficient "smart" people doesn't preclude a correlation between mental capacity and ethics.
You heard of Jordan Peterson and his comments on the folks with IQ of 80 or so? The armed forces wouldn't take them in because they couldn't be trained to do anything proficient. Only someone who thinks in left or right would mis-presume I'd be advocating for morons to be put in seats of authority when they already put the psychopaths/sociopaths in those positions so they'd have people to hang should it come to that and if not, they get their paedo world after all huh. Hope people get a clue that morals and ethics have little to do with intelligence. It all has to do with sympathy/empathy, which both ends of the IQ spectrum are very short on.
Flynn pointed out that higher IQ folks will be able to entertain abstract hypotheticals. Whereas a peasant farmer is much more literal minded and likely to not understand a question like "imagine you're black, how would your life change?"
Moral progress is probably tied to the phenotypic limit being reached for analytic reasoning.
I’m a classics student haha!
"1600 SAT is about 135 IQ" I don't think this is correct. The article that provides this conversion has estimates of one-time SAT scores and one-time IQ scores. IQ scores' reliabilities are estimated using the same test at two different occasions. (Perhaps two versions of the same test.) But this isn't how we understand IQ/g. A better estimate of g reliability would be obtained using two different tests (e.g., Ravens and WAIS) the same time distance apart as before. I'll bet reliability will be much lower–correct me if I'm wrong. Also correct for SAT reliability. People who get 99th percentile in various standardized tests consistently are smarter, on average, than those who get it once.
SAT has become more studiable basically every year since the 90s, I doubt it is 0.8 at this point. I know a lot of kids who went hundreds of points up on their second go-around just from studying, or got hundreds of points lower on their PSAT than on their SAT. In the 80s and 90s a score of 1250 was enough to get you into MENSA, while today a score of 1250 is not particularly significant at all.
Dear Dr Kirkegaard, SAT is an extremely preppable test. Therefore any interference with IQ can only be made with the first attempt, unprepped score that is unavailable to you. The actual scores students receive only has a tentative link to their IQ, and are a much greater reflection of their educational opportunities and the prep company they used. That said, I do believe SAT correlates well with ability to succeed in college, where prepatation and a strong background are a tremendous help in absorbing knowledge. I would hesitate, however, to link it to any inherent inborn intelligence. :-)
If we get extremely technical, you are partially correct about minimum IQs. However, research on how grit and IQ correlates to scholastic achievement shows no improvement for those below 85. We can at least interpret that to mean no person with an IQ below 85 could become a surgeon, regardless of effort.
An IQ of 123 compared to 130 appears minors, true. The difference, in reality, is quite sizable. But I still believe the math distorts the IQ of high-scoring test takers. I cannot imagine that many students with an IQ >125 scored below a 1350.
Nevertheless, these are extremely technical disagreements. Even more so when considering the fact that many believe the test measures only wealth, etc. Thanks for responding!
I'm OK with these being the means. Having worked with various professionals for many years, it sounds about right. Especially when taking into account inflation in test scores.
40 years ago, a score above 1500 on the SAT was pretty much unheard of.
What would be interesting is the 95th/5th percentile IQ's by score.
Mensa has refused to accept SAT and ACT scores for membership about a quarter century now. The correlation between those and IQ isn't what it used to be.
Mensa is not really the go to expert on these matters. What data does Mensa have others don't?
As frivolous as the organization may seem from the outside, they have always been dead serious about admission. (Far more so than universities, at least in the English-speakingabout it.
They have a little-known research arm; I assume they get their data from or through that. If the correlation between native intelligence and test scores weakens, they would be among the first to know. And among the first to do something about it.
they will never divulge statistic by race, because it would clearly show a certain race substantially lower than the rest.
SAT differences by race have been reported for decades.