This is interesting because it shows a specific mechanism by which smart kids of non-college-educated parents drop out. She failed a test in her first month in college, and her mother told her maybe she wasn't meant to be there. I vaguely remember failing a test early in college too, but it never would have occurred to my (intelligentsia-class) parents that I wasn't meant to be educated. I can only imagine how discouraging that feels.
Her mom's doubt certainly makes things worse, but I think the mechanism in motion in this case is best described by Eric Raymond's "Curse of the Gifted" [0]. She's smart, intuitive, and hadn't had any trouble in academia before. When things get really complicated in college, everything collapses, and it takes a lot of effort and support to get back on your feet. Having college educated parents helps with the support part, but it doesn't prevent you from collapsing in the first place.
If the primary effect was "smart kid hits wall when natural smarts aren't enough," then we would see drop-out rates consistent across socioeconomic status.
Many kids in college have those moments. What the data tells us is that the ones with the social and economic infrastructure in place to see it for what it is - a minor setback - tend to graduate more. That indicates to me that it is inaccurate to elevate this phenomenon higher than the social and economic support structures.
Quick fact check: she's not smart. She's smart only in comparison to the rest of her high school, and the article points out she was admitted under UT's affirmative action program, wherein (for Austin) if you outperform 93% of your high school classmates, they let you in. But the article also points out that she scored the equivalent of a 1030 on the SAT. She's barely above average for the ACT-taking population of Texas as a whole (she scored 22 vs a state average of 21).
I see. So this whole "smart" concept can be reduced to a simple quiz. Tell that to my brother, who is bad at test taking, and almost failed high school. He now has a doctorate and makes a 3 figure salary.
As in poor analytical thinking non-technical? Edit: I just re-read my previous post and your response and I realize that I left out my masters degree (and bachelors) were in computer science. I'm guessing you inferred from the English and history tests that I am non-technical. My fault for leaving out the subject of my degrees.
I don't know. I've generally been one of the top engineers on every dev team I've been on, was the first engineering hire of one startup and am the director of engineering for the current one.
Is classify myself as an above average engineer. Not a superstar, but solid and I get things done and done well.
I basically see no correlation between my SAT score and my ability and success. It's hard for me to look at only the SAT scores of others and say much of anything about them.
I'm surprised more people are not calling you out on your elitism. How can you fail to grasp that people in disadvantaged situations don't get the support to succeed the way non-disadvantaged students do. Maybe she had a job in high school to help out her single mom and buy a smartphone to participate in her social circles. Kids in the better high school in the same town had brand new cars and phones and time to study and to party.
And you also seem to be saying these disadvantaged kids shouldn't be helped to reach their potential.
> The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers.
Not true, it's taken by a self-selecting minority of college-aspiring high schoolers. The SAT-taking population is far, far more representative than the ACT-taking population. In isolation, that actually makes an ACT percentile better than it would appear, but there are other effects around.
In 2005 22 was the 62nd percentile among ACT takers nationwide (21 was the 55th). Assuming ACT takers are mostly representative of the population, this girl is smarter than 55-62% of US high school students, roughly as smart as 0-7% of them, and dumber than the remaining 38%. For a college student, this is not an inspiring figure.
> If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.
No, the top 7% figure is for GPA. And you don't need to overcome anything to be at the top of a group that isn't competing for the position. For any group, there will always be a top 10%.
This comparison is to the wrong cohort. She was among the top of her high school cohort. That's the point -- among a pool of people in the community he was raised in, she rose above the pack, didn't come through a culture the tests are optimized to select for.
So apparently getting a certain grade on a standardized test makes you smart? Having never met this girl, none of us have any idea if she's smart, but she's certainly not dumb for a score she got on a standardized test when she was like 16...
You do realize the entire idea of a standardized test is to give you information about someone you've never met? The ACT and SAT are well-developed intelligence tests.
That's the idea, but the idea that it's even possible to test intelligence with a multiple choice test is fallacious. Intelligence is simply too difficult to define. The fine tuning on these sorts of tests simply betrays a false sense of confidence of their usefulness in measuring intelligence.
I will concede that scores on the ACT or SAT are correlated with intelligence. But like most tests, you can improve your score with practice and study. If I can get a better score after preparing for the test, it doesn't measure intelligence, at least not directly.
Anecdotally, I have seen ACT scores improve with work and time. Most people at my high school took the ACT not the SAT, so possibly the effect is not the same. But, as I'm sure you would agree, it's a terrible argument to say a given study must be wrong because I observed differently in a unscientific sample from my own personal life. I will concede that changing your score is difficult, and possibly much more so than my experience shows.
That still does not change my central assertion that the ACT or the SAT are not good tests of intelligence. Or that IQ tests are not good tests of intelligence. I don't deny that high scoring test takers of such tests are usually intelligent but as the famous line goes, correlation does not imply causation.
Intelligence is a very tricky thing to define. People typically try to quantify intelligence as one's ability to solve tricky problems, solve problems quickly, retain hordes of knowledge, etc; but these things leave out rather important aspects of intelligence such as creativity, so-called "emotional intelligence", and the value of personal experiences. This is not an exhaustive list of things that are missed by these tests. Suggested reading here is Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book Outliers.
I'm moving the goal posts a bit on this conversation, but an even broader point to make about intelligence is that if you have a certain amount (what ever that means, again I'm not claiming that you can measure this), magically gaining more intelligence would have relatively little impact on your ability to have a successful life. It is my opinion that hard work, social connections, and even luck are more important than intelligence. Again, anecdotally, I have seen brilliant friends struggle to gain any sort of measure of success in life while the friends I judged as less intelligent are blowing them out of the water. Successful people are intelligent people, but they are rarely geniuses.
And this is where my argument begins to loop back around to the point the original article makes: Outcomes improve for people from poor and underprivileged backgrounds when they are integrated into a social groups with people who make them feel like they belong in higher education and encourage them to learn from bad test scores or rough semesters. So what does it matter if this girl has only slightly above average intelligence (as measured by tests that are flawed indicators of intelligence anyway)? If participating in these programs helps her become a productive member of society and become successful against her personal goals, isn't that a huge win?
> in this case is best described by Eric Raymond's "Curse of the Gifted" [0]. She's smart, intuitive, and hadn't had any trouble in academia before. When things get really complicated in college, everything collapses, and it takes a lot of effort and support to get back on your feet.
Might as well just call it spoilt brat syndrome. They were never given any challenges and they never sought them out (intellectually anyway, it seems). Then a few obstacles comes along and they collapse, never having had to deal with such things before. Then woe is them for having been lulled into a false sense of security all their life, including their parents.
Grade inflation and overoptimistic parents are probably partly to blame for this. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for these spoilt brats. Oh, so you actually have to work in order to get an A, or even work for a measly B? Life truly is unjust for demanding anything from you.
>They were never given any challenges and they never sought them out
This is the point - basic education and high schools aren't challenging students enough to prepare them to higher ed. If in addition to that you also don't have adults with higher education in your life to use as a reference, it makes it pretty hard to realize that you're not actually that good. Who wants to criticize themselves when all they hear is praise?
She is really not all that smart, nursing is something you would learn at a vocational school in other countries and I can't imagine the statistics they had to learn in the first year were harder than what you usually would learn in an advanced high school class. Being smart would mean that you are able to absorb new material quickly, which she obviously failed to do.
I wonder what the data says for people with "Tiger moms", even if they are first generation college students. Is that level of encouragement helpful, in comparison?
How the fuck does failing a test indicate anything that harsh? You could fail 10 tests for all that matters as long as it is indicative of something else or w/e. How can any of that ever be indicative of such negative BS unless you replace 'grades' with 'mental congruence metric' which does not exist.
As long as you know the grade is not representative of you, you're all good. WTF that level of external validation seeking will destroy you.
