The Dink Network

A general question for the Americans here: in your experience, how well do the SAT and ACT measure intelligence?

For instance, do you know many people who are dumb and did well on standarized tests? Or who are smart but did poorly?

I thought the purpose of the SAT and ACT was not to measure your intelligence, but to predict how well you would perform in college.

I only studied for the ACT during the car ride to the school were the testing was held, and I scored a 32 (somewhere in the 98-99th percentile). I then went on to do 'very well' (mostly A's, some A-'s, nothing lower) in college.

So I guess it was accurate for me.

Hmm... I don't think you can measure how well it predicts performance in college, because different colleges might have different levels of difficulty. I suppose within a single school, you could make see if SAT scores correlated with performance, but the people a school accepts are all going to have similar ACT scores for obvious reasons. Of course, intelligence is even worse, because you can't really define it, but one might say that having a low ACT score is often correlated with being stupid.

My main problem with using these standardized tests as a mark of intelligence is that they're obviously biased towards people born and reared in English speaking countries. And even the math section isn't perfect. For example, I got a 35 on the math portion of the ACT (34 overall).

(BTW, Dan, where are you going to school?)

But that's its purpose, as a college entrance exam. It doesn't try to measure someone's overall intelligence (like in an IQ test), it simply measures how well someone would do in a typical American college environment, which is itself biased towards people born and reared in English speaking countries.

I'm actually finished with school, and graduated two months ago. I did go to Grand Valley State University.

Congrats on graduating... like many midwestern (public) schools, GVSU probably deserves to be better known.

It's sort of off-topic, but I scored 1200 on the SAT. I guess that's alright, but I'm going to take them again. I'll be one of the few, since the colleges in-state (read: North Dakota and Minnesota) don't require scores from SAT to enroll, just ACT. I haven't gotten my scores back from ACT yet, but I'm expecting them to be in the mid 20s.