Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.
Conant’s cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today. Then, America’s elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America’s wealthy sent their children. The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom.
[…]
It makes no difference, however, that the charges about coaching are wrong, just as it makes no difference that the whole idea that rich parents can buy their children high SAT scores is wrong. One part of the indictment is true, and that one part overrides everything else: the children of the affluent and well educated really do get most of the top scores. For example, who gets the coveted scores of 700 and higher, putting them in the top half-dozen percentiles of SAT test-takers? Extrapolating from the 2006 data on means and standard deviations reported by the College Board, about half of the 700+ scores went to students from families making more than $100,000 per year. But the truly consequential statistics are these: Approximately 90 percent of the students with 700+ scores had at least one parent with a college degree. Over half had a parent with a graduate degree.
In that glaring relationship of high test scores to advanced parental education, which in turn means high parental IQ, lies the reason that the College Board, politically correct even unto self-destruction, cannot bring itself to declare the truth: the test isn’t the problem. The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids. They are smart because their parents are smart. The parents have passed their smartness along through parenting practices that are largely independent of education and affluence, and through genes that are completely independent of them.
The cognitive stratification of American society — for that’s what we’re talking about — was not a problem 100 years ago. Many affluent people were smart in 1907, but there were not enough jobs in which high intellectual ability brought high incomes or status to affect more than a fraction of really smart people, and most of the really smart people were prevented from getting those jobs anyway by economic and social circumstances (consider that in 1907 roughly half the adults with high intelligence were housewives).
From 1907 to 2007, the correlation between intellectual ability and socioeconomic status (SES) increased dramatically. The socioeconomic elite and the cognitive elite are increasingly one. If you want the details about how this process worked and how it is transforming America’s class structure, I refer you to The Bell Curve (1994), the book I wrote with the late Richard Herrnstein. For now, here’s the point: Imagine that, miraculously, every child in the country were to receive education of equal quality. Imagine that a completely fair and accurate measure of intellectual ability were to be developed. In that utopia, a fair admissions process based on intellectual ability would fill the incoming classes of the elite colleges predominantly with children of upper-middle-class parents.
In other words, such a perfect system would produce an outcome very much like the one we see now. Harvard offers an easy way to summarize the revolution that accelerated after World War II. As late as 1952, the mean SAT Verbal score of the incoming freshman class was just 583. By 1960, the mean had jumped to 678. In eight years, Harvard transformed itself from a college with a moderately talented student body to a place where the average freshman was intellectually in the top fraction of 1 percent of the national population. But this change did not mean that Harvard became more socioeconomically diverse. On the contrary, it became more homogeneous. In the old days, Harvard had admitted a substantial number of Boston students from modest backgrounds who commuted to classes, and also a substantial number of rich students with average intelligence. In the new era, when Harvard’s students were much more rigorously screened for intellectual ability, the numbers of students from the very top and bottom of the socioeconomic ladder were reduced, and the proportion coming from upper-middle-class backgrounds increased.
Regarding “the charges about coaching [for the SAT] are wrong,” Murray may believe it, but the gamers of the SAT certainly know that coaching works. I live in the Southwest, where a lot of Dot Indians reside: they work in Chip Fabs, Higher Ed, and Medicine. Within two miles from my home are two separate coaching academies that cater to the Dot Indians — not the Feather Indians, of which we have a plethora along with their gambling dens. Murray is a weak reed to stave off America’s collapse. His performance on the recent podcasts on Ricochet with Steve Sailer was abysmal.
P.S. I actually owe my success in life to the Big Tests. They got me into the Ivy League in the early 1960s. BTW, both of my parents never went to college.
“(consider that in 1907 roughly half the adults with high intelligence were housewives)”
When u tryna jump out of being dissolved by the acid bath of modernity but end up poisoning yourself with blurplepill.
Dan Kurt, it’s not the “coaching” that makes a difference, it’s taking practice tests, which is all the coaching really offers.
Are poor kids with dumb parents in cultures that don’t care about college likely to underperform their potential on the tests? Of course. They don’t care about the test and they don’t spend any time reading about the types of questions they’ll encounter or taking practice tests.
All you need is a bit of familiarity with the test and a bit of practice to score closer to your full potential. Some do the practice, some don’t.
As Murray says, some kids benefit from parenting practices that are largely independent of education and affluence. Those kids take practice tests. Practice tests are available for free online and in books that cost 9 bucks.
Are your “dot Indians” “gaming” the test? No. They are practicing for it. Are they dummies who are acing the test via trickery? No, they are just performing close to their potential, instead of underperforming like the kids who don’t bother to wonder what the SAT is until 15 minutes after the test starts.
Rich kids do better on the test because they are smarter and because their parents encourage them to practice, not because they have access to some cheat codes that can only be purchased for thousands of dollars.
100 years ago schools taught the fundamentals. Now it’s social justice and equity bs k-12.
Rule of the Smart is disastrous. Hell, we’re into a new dark age morally, socially, family, financial, governance.
The smart come in two flavors: Cringers and Sociopaths. They succeed by looting the nation, creating over $44 Trillion from thin air since 2008, every time their gambling gets them in trouble they call the Federal Reserve.
They’re smart at taking paper tests and gaming the system — after that pure theft and mischief.
What exactly does “gaming the system” mean?
Pragmatic intelligence does what works. Doing what doesn’t work is for chumps.
If the people who ace the paper tests turn out to be awful people, then maybe the test is the problem. It’s a metric. Maybe the wrong metric, but it’s what society has agreed on.
Cognitive stratification may be nothing more than a mirage rising from how we measure intelligence.
Say what you will about rule of the smart, but rule of the stupid is worse.
LOL, Harry. I sense success…within stated system. Some people pass all the tests except real life.
As for “what does gaming the system mean?” let me help. It means doing what WORKS FOR YOU at any cost to everyone else, aka “the chumps.” Blackrock, the Fed, the K street whores, we can go on. It means selling your country and oath, or shareholders out for money. It means Ivy Leaguers gambling on the markets margin then having their fellow cognitive elites at the Fed create trillions more to cover their market gambling debts.
Harry, the chumps keep the lights on and everything else that actually happens in real life, such as food by chump farmers, water, electricity, housing, Amazon deliveries. As it turns out, doing any real work or keeping things working is for Chumps.
Let the cognitive elite get it then, because this isn’t working for us, and the cognitive elite are utter frauds good only for stealing.
VXXC says, “As it turns out doing any real work or keeping things working is for Chumps.”
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/226/680/53f.png
Meet your Cognitive Elites:
“IR to them is sitting around an oak table in DC drinking double lattes.”
[International Relations]
____[everything]‘…to them is sitting around an oak table in DC drinking double lattes.”
“There is a hilarious part in Robert Kaplan’s book The Good American, a biography of Bob Gersony. Gersony was the US establishment’s go-to guy when it came to finding out what was going on at various hotspots, including post-Dayton Bosnia. His method involved conducting dozens if not hundreds of interviews with local people affected by the stuff.
An international relations professor at Tufts brings Gersony in to talk to his class every year and the students don’t know what to make of it. They think Gersony’s Ponce de Leon or Richard Francis Burton or something. IR to them is sitting around an oak table in DC drinking double lattes.”
“Do what works!” he says…
What’s working in Ottawa is putting up ‘barriers’ aka T-walls.
For let the world be Belfast and Baghdad!
Invest in cement. It’s a growth industry. Cement is “global” too. Most don’t know that our T-walls in Iraq were made by a company called Meran. The blast/bomb walls. For you C/E types, Meran is Iranian. Smart people those Iranians! It's so hard to be on both sides of a 'trade'.
Enjoy the latte.
I have no intention of doing what works for the elite.
As for the greater good, that’s a problem of definition.
My principle of subtractive pragmatic ethics: don’t do what doesn’t work for you. This is the first principle of any workable system of ethics whatsoever.
Second principle: don’t demand anyone else do what doesn’t work for him.
“I have no intention of doing what works for the elite.”
And the ethical thing would be to crush our current crop, and drive them before us.
Problem is, people crave leadership and grab the closest thing. The Prog/collectivists/technocrats have triangulated away the competition by institutional capture, etc.; and there hasn’t been much push back to the massive asset bubble that funds their destructive projects.
Crush the current crop? It’s all about the timing. A strategy of calculated, persistent pushback by the ruled helps them know when their rulers have become weak enough to topple.
In when that happens, you will know cognitive stratification has been oversold.
There are certain people who have an inordinate need for power. They call this leadership because it sounds better. But they’re not leaders. They’re just bullies.
An actual leader gets in front. A bully shouts orders from behind.
“Meet your Cognitive Elites:[...]”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4ZDyzPqnT4
The future ‘evil genius overlords’, folks.
Pseudo-Chrysostom: “Harvard rules the world for no reason and here’s a video to prove it.”
Harvard doesn’t rule the world and everything has a reason. Your failure to understand the reason does not preclude its necessary existence.
Harvard rules the world and everything has a reason. Your failure to understand my point is unfortunate but such is the hazards of brevity on teh interwebs.
You say that Harvard rules the world.
I say, how many divisions does Harvard have?
How many compartmented programs does it run?
How many wetworks teams does it employ?
What is the size of its black budget?
Harvard rules because the global anti-american empire is a theocracy, and the vatican of the GAE is Harvard.
“Before World War I, most of the world was ruled by Kings and aristocrats. Until 1820, Kings ruled in Britain, and until 1860, aristocrats still had lots of power in England. Leftism did not really get much traction until 1820.
“Harvard has been around and doing its best to end all that since Charles the second purged the Church of England of leftists, but their big victories started after 1860.
“Until the American civil war, Harvard was the Vatican of New England. After the civil war, the Vatican of America. After World War II, the Vatican of the world. “
“Harvard has been around and doing its best to end all that since Charles the second purged the Church of England of leftists.”
Whereupon they all packed like rats for the new frontier. Letting them go alive was blunder of the millennium, really.
The only problem with that line of reasoning is that it can’t be rebutted, and it can’t be rebutted because it has no content, not even on its own terms. It would apply equally had Germany persevered in the Second World War. For the especially thick-headed I’ll note that had Germany persevered in the Second World War the world would be completely different in every way. And yes, the Ivy League would be populated by Americans still, a lot of people not having stepped foot in a lot of places, like Alan Dershowitz et al. at Yale circa 1960 YTD. The Germans really dropped the ball. When you need someone to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, count on a fucking German.
I grant your concession.
Yes, had the Germany won the world war, Germany would have ruled the world. In the event, FDR won the world war, and so communism ruled the world. Pretty heady stuff, eh?
Jim says, “The only problem with that line of reasoning is that it can’t be rebutted, and it can’t be rebutted because it has no content.”
HHAHA. Let’s see, I can’t refute your argument, so, I’ll say it has no context.
Meaning that your argument is not an argument at all so I don’t have to refute it, (even though I can’t).
Who, I ask, who or what kind of person would promote this method of reasoning???
Someone help me out here. I’m completely flummoxed. It’s a black void.
Why maybe I’ll turn on the TV and they will tell me that people get heart attacks from the hot, the cold, energy prices, changing seasons, eating, not eating, quarantine, pooping, etc. It’s just like global warming. No matter what the globe warms for any and all reasons.
It’s all such a mystery.
Bomag says, “And the ethical thing would be to crush our current crop, and drive them before us…”
Where are the Vandals when you need them?
Pseudo-Chrysostom: “Yes, had the Germany won the world war, Germany would have ruled the world.”
No, Germany wouldn’t have ruled the world. Germany would’ve expanded to more or less the present borders of the European Union and stayed there under the comfy umbrella of their super cool nuclear rockets.
Then as part of their subsequent operations the Germans would’ve provided leverage to certain interests native to the United States of America, leverage sufficient to excise certain foreign elements and their implements, not least the Federal Reserve.
Sam: “HHAHA. Let’s see, I can’t refute your argument, so, I’ll say it has no context. Meaning that your argument is not an argument at all so I don’t have to refute it, (even though I can’t).”
ConteNt, not conteXt.
The problem with the Puritan Hypothesis is not only that it’s gibberish, although it is, not only that it defames Real Americans, which it does, but that it’s essentially Magic Dirt Theory applied to American institutions. The Founding Fathers understood what you do not: the mystery of blood. They literally, not figuratively, believed citizenship to be transmitted by biological descent. If citizenship is transmitted biologically how can you with a straight face blame the descendants of Puritans for the doings of the Ivy League’s assigns?
‘Germany would’ve expanded to more or less the present borders of the European Union and stayed there under the comfy umbrella of their super cool nuclear rockets.”
The formal boundaries of the Reich would likely not extend far past the subcontinent – much like how America’s formal boundaries did not substantially change after the second war of communist aggression.
But what a world is there? In the hypothetical mirror case where total victory is achieved by unconditional surrender of all of Germany’s enemies, what would we have? A world full of broken losers, and one super power standing above all of them – with one significant exception to the east.
In the world as it was, the nations of europe were and have been all vassal states of the GAE, quite regardless of the mere formalities of the matter.
“If citizenship is transmitted biologically how can you with a straight face blame the descendants of Puritans for the doings of the Ivy League’s assigns?”
Uh, quite easily? Rather, it is exactly because of the former that we do the latter?
Damnyankees are the spawn of a bad seed; scum who fled England to Massachusetts like bugs from a burning brushpile when they were quite justly Physically Removed and Separated from society for their heretical modes of thought and behavior. An almost perfect distillation of some of the most subversive sub-sections of the anglo-saxon race, drawn out of the host society, and regathered in one place; the novel instauration of an accursed breed the likes of which the world had yet to see.
The fact that their predecessors were allowed to leave in simple exile, rather than Liquidated as a Class, is perhaps one of the greatest world-historical tragedies in the last millennium. A cancer that festered, metastasized in it’s foothold in the new world, until eventually they dragged down, not just their brothers on their own continent, but their brothers across the seas too; the ancestral homes that had once triumphed over them, now laid low.
The last American soldiers to fight for life liberty and property wore gray.
Pseudo-Chrysostom: “Damnyankees”
My blog comments have become so powerful that I can actually make my blog comment enemies tell the truth.
Listen heah, you loyalist mothahfuckah, New England is the reason that the United States of America ever existed independent of that seething hive of vermin and villainy, the City of London. But not just anywhere in New England, where the spirit of liberty burned bright, but the place in New England where the spirit of liberty burned brightest. Where do you think the Boston Tea Party happened? Boston, Massachussetts. How do you think that the War of Independence began? With the Siege of Boston. Why was the Battle of Bunker Hill in Massachussetts? Because Massachussetts was the driving force behind American Independence, because biological Puritans bore the freedom-loving soul of America.
Why do you think, when they first wrested control of American borders circa 1840, they repopulated Boston first?
You hate America and love Britain because you love conformity, you love obedience, you love submission. And you know what? I don’t blame you. In fact, I grant you absolution. It isn’t your fault, after all. You can’t help it. It’s hereditary. You were born with it. Just like I was born with a genius-level IQ, impossibly aristocratic features, and an unquenchable burning drive for liberty and privacy and justice, you, like all military-minded Southrons, were born with the reflexive drive to seek out a demanding, disdainful master and obey him like a loyal dog.
The true reason that THEY hate Russia isn’t because of Jewish racial animus against Christians; it’s because Russia (excepting a forty-year Hollywoodesque interlude) has been Our Greatest Ally since Caesar Alexander II cock-blocked the Reds from invading and occupying sovereign American clay for the third time in three generations. THEY’ve been seething ever since.
New England was indeed a hotbed of liberty once the Puritans had mellowed out and become closet deists.
Later, what was left of Puritanism morphed into various weirdo vegetarian cults, and thence into Unitarian Universalism.
Jim,
You talk like a fag and your shits all retarded.
The jew was never more powerful in the world than in America. For when he first started darkening her shores in the waning days of the 19th century, he found there already a promiscuous treason willing to truck with any alien whose hatred of his neighbors equaled his own.
Harry Jones,
They never mellowed out. They got kicked out of England for trying to be holier than Jesus, and never stopped trying. And in the natural due course of trying to be holier than jesus, they dropped the window dressings of Christianity that they theretofore decorated themselves with, while keeping the same substantial doctrines in practice. You could hardly imagine a more perfect archetype of meddling controlfreakery.
The Southron cries out as he rebels.
The whig cries freedom as he stabs you in the back.
Let’s just say the Puritans tuckered out. Ran out of steam. Lost their morale.
Meddling controlfreakery wasn’t invented by the Puritans. It’s as old as hydraulic empires. The Karens will always be with us. It’s just a question of how much of their shit the rest of us are willing to put up with.
Jim says, “Listen heah, you loyalist mothahfuckah, New England is the reason that the United States of America ever existed independent of that seething hive of vermin and villainy, the City of London.”
Jim’s brilliant deep analysis, “George Washington was a Yankee”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp5iPmpZiNE
Sam: “Jim’s brilliant deep analysis, ”George Washington was a Yankee”.”
The South has always supplied the United States’ military.
Pseudo-Chrysostom: “I know you are but what am I?”
Buck status: BROKEN.
All glory to God; all power to America First.
Jim lines the needle up with a vein. “This is the price of freedom” he solemnly intones as the fifth daily mandated oestrogen shot plunges home. Specially recommended by the Harvard Board of Health to treat the oppressive tyranny of toxic masculinity. This is merely a suggestion and private companies are all inependently choosing to enforce it. Yim thanks the goddess for the constitution.
His smartphone dings as the firmware User Trust and Safety app registers that the proprietary RFID in the shot has been discharged. Access to his CarCloud driving-as-a-service account is allowed again, and he spotted a sale on tendies at the whole foods yesterday.
He can’t wait.
Good catch, Pseudo-Chrysostom, thanks, nigga.
All glory to God; all power to Corporate America First.