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Re: Effective HS Physics (was Statistics / more ...)



Are you familiar with the Terman studies?
Those predictions came out pretty well, although I don't recall
that there was a Palo Alto (or any other locale) control group.
Regards,
Jack

On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, John S. Denker wrote:

John Clement wrote:

I read that IQ was originally designed to predict
success in school.

I don't believe everything I read.

There's a big difference between "originally designed
to predict" and "actually successful at predicting".

It is relatively straightforward to test what a
person knows at the moment; it is much, much harder
to predict what a person will achieve later.

I haven't found anybody seriously claiming to make such
predictions ... and if I do find them, I will assume
they are charlatans until proven otherwise.

Furthermore, even a moment's thought reveals that
intelligence is multi-dimensional -- therefore any
one-dimensional number like an IQ value cannot possibly
represent intelligence. There's a theorem that says
you cannot change dimensionality in a way that is one-to-one
and continuous.

The College Board has repeatedly redefined what SAT
stands for; currently it is "Scholastic Assessment
Test"... but it doesn't say precisely what it is
assessing.

Similar remarks apply to the GREs. There's a much
longer list of what they don't predict than what
they do.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Aug97/GRE.study.ssl.html

] The Graduate Record Examination (GRE)
] does little to predict who will do well in graduate school for
] psychology and quite likely in other fields as well, according to a
] new study by Cornell and Yale universities.
]
] Of the three subtests of the GRE (verbal, quantitative and
] analytical) and the GRE advanced test in psychology, only the
] analytical subtest predicted any aspect of graduate success
] beyond the first-year grade point average (GPA), and this
] prediction held for men only. The verbal subtest and psychology
] test predicted first-year GPA, but this prediction vanished by the
] second year's GPA.


--
"But as much as I love and respect you, I will beat you and I will kill
you, because that is what I must do. Tonight it is only you and me, fish.
It is your strength against my intelligence. It is a veritable potpourri
of metaphor, every nuance of which is fraught with meaning."
Greg Nagan from "The Old Man and the Sea" in
<The 5-MINUTE ILIAD and Other Classics>