Why are some people really good at standardized testing? Forum

[alexonfyre]

Nothing that extreme, but it was clear he didn't quite take it seriously, given that he had done so well before with little to no prepping. Most of the study he did the first time was due to parental goading, the second time around he tried harder, and got ADD status for the test (Basically the time limits are gone, other than the entire thing must be done in 3 hours.) same scores

But he took it seriously the second time around, didn't he?

Yeah, the second time was serious. He said he felt confident coming out of it, too. Who knows? I still don't get it.

[Tautology]

Nothing that extreme, but it was clear he didn't quite take it seriously, given that he had done so well before with little to no prepping. Most of the study he did the first time was due to parental goading, the second time around he tried harder, and got ADD status for the test (Basically the time limits are gone, other than the entire thing must be done in 3 hours.) same scores

But he took it seriously the second time around, didn't he?

I'm not seeing how this anecdote is evidence of anything really.

[094320]

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[alexonfyre]

Nothing that extreme, but it was clear he didn't quite take it seriously, given that he had done so well before with little to no prepping. Most of the study he did the first time was due to parental goading, the second time around he tried harder, and got ADD status for the test (Basically the time limits are gone, other than the entire thing must be done in 3 hours.) same scores

But he took it seriously the second time around, didn't he?

I'm not seeing how this anecdote is evidence of anything really.

It might not be, but in a discussion about standardized testing and "natural test takers" it always brings that story back to mind.

[Tautology]

Nothing that extreme, but it was clear he didn't quite take it seriously, given that he had done so well before with little to no prepping. Most of the study he did the first time was due to parental goading, the second time around he tried harder, and got ADD status for the test (Basically the time limits are gone, other than the entire thing must be done in 3 hours.) same scores

But he took it seriously the second time around, didn't he?

I'm not seeing how this anecdote is evidence of anything really.

It might not be, but in a discussion about standardized testing and "natural test takers" it always brings that story back to mind.

Alright then, I'll let you live!

[09042014]

The guy could be a choker. Folds under pressures of the real thing.

[Entchen]

I am good at standardized tests. I did well on the SAT in 7th and 8th grades, the PSAT in 10th, the SAT in 11th, and now the LSAT, all without much effort or taking any prep classes (I did study for the LSAT, but it was like, take MAYBE one PT/week, that's it).

I grew up in an upper middle class family that cared about education. I read a lot as a child. I started learning my third language before I was in kindergarten. I did logic games and puzzles of all sorts for fun as a kid. Some of my favorite classes in undergrad were logic classes. I worked in a library all through high school. I ate three healthy meals every day with my family, and they usually involved critical conversation about various topics. I watched School House Rock. I was in a gifted students pull-out program in middle school that allowed me to study in depth topics that interested me. Basically, I had pretty much every advantage growing up to prepare me for this sort of thing.

BUT. Plenty of people I went to high school with, or went to college with, whose family backgrounds were no more disadvantaged than mine, do not do as well on standardized exams, or need to put much more effort in.

Certainly those background factors contribute, but I really, really believe that even within that group preconditioned to do well, there is a lot of luck involved. The way standardized tests want you to think is just the way I naturally think. I am lucky that way. There are lots of people whom I consider to be as intelligent as me, or moreso, even, who do not have the same ease with standardized testing as me. I'm sure many of those people could write a MUCH better essay than me, I'm better at filling in bubbles. It's a talent just like any other, and there are lots of other things I am not at all talented at.

I hope this does not come off as obnoxious or like I'm a huge tool. I do not think that my skill at taking this sort of exam makes me any more or less intelligent than people whose skills lie elsewhere, it just makes me lucky that the thing I am good at happens to be the thing that carries so much weight with admissions.

[Hey-O]

I guess the real question is does it matter? Are some people good at standardized testing because they are smarter than other people? That's the question that everyone is dancing around.

[minuit]

I guess the real question is does it matter? Are some people good at standardized testing because they are smarter than other people? That's the question that everyone is dancing around.

my answer, based on anecdotal evidence, is yes. one of the smartest people i know just took the LSAT and didn't start studying until the end of april. he got a 177 - he's just smarter. now, less smart people can still get that score with a lot of studying, but naturally gifted people are really out there and just kick ass without trying as hard.

[hax123]

I guess the real question is does it matter? Are some people good at standardized testing because they are smarter than other people? That's the question that everyone is dancing around.

Many people are unwilling to accept that genetic differences explain variation in standardized test performance because they are afraid that such a belief may lead to the conclusion that racial differences in standardized test performance are also partly genetic.

[Tautology]

I guess the real question is does it matter? Are some people good at standardized testing because they are smarter than other people? That's the question that everyone is dancing around.

Many people are unwilling to accept that genetic differences explain variation in standardized test performance because they are afraid that such a belief may lead to the conclusion that racial differences in standardized test performance are also partly genetic.

And because variation in test scores has yet to be successfully linked to genetics? Not that I'm doubting it, but if we have that evidence I don't know about it.

[Hey-O]

I guess the real question is does it matter? Are some people good at standardized testing because they are smarter than other people? That's the question that everyone is dancing around.

Many people are unwilling to accept that genetic differences explain variation in standardized test performance because they are afraid that such a belief may lead to the conclusion that racial differences in standardized test performance are also partly genetic.

I think that standardized testing does measure general intelligence, but I don't think that means it's genetic. Or that doing poorly on testing precludes someone from being intelligent. Just that most people who do well are actually intelligent.

I don't think that intelligence is mostly genetic. Far too many environmental factors at play.

[Tautology]

I guess the real question is does it matter? Are some people good at standardized testing because they are smarter than other people? That's the question that everyone is dancing around.

Many people are unwilling to accept that genetic differences explain variation in standardized test performance because they are afraid that such a belief may lead to the conclusion that racial differences in standardized test performance are also partly genetic.

I think that standardized testing does measure general intelligence, but I don't think that means it's genetic. Or that doing poorly on testing precludes someone from being intelligent. Just that most people who do well are actually intelligent.

I don't think that intelligence is mostly genetic. Far too many environmental factors at play.

Blah, I guess I have to retract my previous statement, looks like there is pretty good evidence that intelligence is genetic.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... study.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/na ... twins2.htm

[094320]

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[jason8821]

For all of the people that think it's genetic, shouldn't we also define intelligence. If intelligence is simply being able to hold several things in your head simultaneously as I believe to be sort of a traditional definition, then the LSAT is not a great indicator, for those who are extremely detailed and take tons of notes/underline during the LSAT, try not doing that. Try to just read the passage and go right to the questions. Do you find it significantly more difficult? Are you more "intellignet" then as per the above definition than someone who can do this more efficiently? Organization is not "intelligence" when looking at the traditional definition. However, it helps a lot on the LSAT. You don't need to have a good memory to be good at logic games. In fact, I have never heard of anyone who is capable of doing entire logic games in their head. You need to have extremely good organizational skills and to be able to arrange variables in a linear fashion, and then only basic memory is required. I was talking to a friend of mine who got like 20/23 the first time he ever saw logic games. He happens to be pretty good at math, but even better at algebra. He said that he believes his ability to write things out in an organized fashion is actually the result of having a very poor short term memory, so it's a compensation factor. If intelligence is simply a measurement of being able to hold several things in your head at once, and still remember where they fit than not all people who have this ability will be successful at a test like the LSAT because the test is designed to beat people who don't write things down, or at least use well organized mental maps. The LSAT completely off pure memory would take someone who was incredibly "intelligent".

[alexonfyre]

Blah, I guess I have to retract my previous statement, looks like there is pretty good evidence that intelligence is genetic.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... study.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/na ... twins2.htm

Yeah +1

There's a measure they use in general in child development research when working with infants and newborns. I read in my textbook(which I sold, so I can't find the citation) that it correlated years down the line and was fairly predicative of (I THINK, it was over a year ago that I took this course) SAT scores(or IQ, pretty sure it was SAT though). I feel like 'environment' hasn't come to play as much yet in newborns.

Nevermind found the citation and it was IQ and infants, though not necessarily newborns.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/jour ... 1&SRETRY=0

A meta-analytic review of the literature on infant habituation and recognition memory performance as predictors of later IQ suggests several conclusions: (1) Habituation and recognition memory assessments made on a variety of risk and nonrisk samples in the first year of life predict later IQ assessed between 1 and 8 years of age with a weighted (for N) average of normalized correlations of .36 or a raw median correlation of .45. (2) The size of the predictive correlation is essentially the same for habituation and for recognition memory paradigms. (3) This prediction phenomenon is not obviously associated solely with one laboratory, one particular infant response measure, or a few extremely disordered infants. (4) The level of prediction to childhood IQ is substantial given the reliability of the infant measures. (5) Predictions are somewhat higher for risk than for nonrisk samples. (6) Predictions are consistently higher than for standardized infant tests of general development for nonrisk but not for risk samples, and they are not consistently higher than predicting from parental education and socioeconomic status or a few other infant behaviors for nonrisk samples. (8) Coefficients may be higher when the predicting assessments are made between 2 and 8 months of age than earlier or later, but prediction coefficients are remarkably consistent across the observed outcome age period of 2–8 years.

The gap between individuals can already be predicted between 2 and 8 months of age. Some of this might still be environmental, but I think it runs counter to the idea that it's just the environment.

Edit:Research on newborns isn't as common in the field(or available for met-analysis) because it's kind of difficult logistically to do studies on newborns(Hi, I hear you *just* gave birth, can we do a test on your newborn?)

I refuse to believe any studies based on IQ. It is a specious measure at best and while I can tell the difference between low IQ and high IQ in conversations and perhaps class settings, I have known too many people on both sides doing opposite their IQs on tests to take IQ very seriously in any study.
That said, the data that study had seemed pretty nail in the coffin on the whole "nature" vs" nurture" argument. Though I do think nurture is probably the difference between a 175 and a 180

[d34d9823]

For all of the people that think it's genetic, shouldn't we also define intelligence. If intelligence is simply being able to hold several things in your head simultaneously as I believe to be sort of a traditional definition, then the LSAT is not a great indicator, for those who are extremely detailed and take tons of notes/underline during the LSAT, try not doing that. Try to just read the passage and go right to the questions. Do you find it significantly more difficult? Are you more "intellignet" then as per the above definition than someone who can do this more efficiently? Organization is not "intelligence" when looking at the traditional definition. However, it helps a lot on the LSAT. You don't need to have a good memory to be good at logic games. In fact, I have never heard of anyone who is capable of doing entire logic games in their head. You need to have extremely good organizational skills and to be able to arrange variables in a linear fashion, and then only basic memory is required. I was talking to a friend of mine who got like 20/23 the first time he ever saw logic games. He happens to be pretty good at math, but even better at algebra. He said that he believes his ability to write things out in an organized fashion is actually the result of having a very poor short term memory, so it's a compensation factor. If intelligence is simply a measurement of being able to hold several things in your head at once, and still remember where they fit than not all people who have this ability will be successful at a test like the LSAT because the test is designed to beat people who don't write things down, or at least use well organized mental maps. The LSAT completely off pure memory would take someone who was incredibly "intelligent".

Defining intelligence is very difficult, but your definition is still kinda weird. For me, it has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with intuitive abstraction and reasoning in the abstract space. Your definition seems more like "has a good memory."

Also, I can do logic games in my head if I concentrate and I know people (much smarter than me) who can do them in their head without difficulty.

[jason8821]

For all of the people that think it's genetic, shouldn't we also define intelligence. If intelligence is simply being able to hold several things in your head simultaneously as I believe to be sort of a traditional definition, then the LSAT is not a great indicator, for those who are extremely detailed and take tons of notes/underline during the LSAT, try not doing that. Try to just read the passage and go right to the questions. Do you find it significantly more difficult? Are you more "intellignet" then as per the above definition than someone who can do this more efficiently? Organization is not "intelligence" when looking at the traditional definition. However, it helps a lot on the LSAT. You don't need to have a good memory to be good at logic games. In fact, I have never heard of anyone who is capable of doing entire logic games in their head. You need to have extremely good organizational skills and to be able to arrange variables in a linear fashion, and then only basic memory is required. I was talking to a friend of mine who got like 20/23 the first time he ever saw logic games. He happens to be pretty good at math, but even better at algebra. He said that he believes his ability to write things out in an organized fashion is actually the result of having a very poor short term memory, so it's a compensation factor. If intelligence is simply a measurement of being able to hold several things in your head at once, and still remember where they fit than not all people who have this ability will be successful at a test like the LSAT because the test is designed to beat people who don't write things down, or at least use well organized mental maps. The LSAT completely off pure memory would take someone who was incredibly "intelligent".

Defining intelligence is very difficult, but your definition is still kinda weird. For me, it has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with intuitive abstraction and reasoning in the abstract space. Your definition seems more like "has a good memory."

Also, I can do logic games in my head if I concentrate and I know people (much smarter than me) who can do them in their head without difficulty.

Were you a math major? I do believe it's possible to do these in your head, but the people who have the best shot at it are people have run through similar problems several times throughout their life. Also I think that reasoning at it's purest form is just the result of having profound memory. Sorry if this doesn't make sense as I am not a psychologist nor am I extremely well versed in this topic. But if you look at an excellent chess player, they remember situations they have been (I think I am kind of stealing this from a previous LR question) none the less, if you remember things at different levels either subconsciously (intuitive) or consciously, you are intelligent. A chess player who can hold 7 moves in their head and possible outcomes for each one usually has better reasoning skills. Some one can multiply or divide 4872 by 319 in quick time has to think on several levels. You would have to hold many thoughts simultaneously. The distinction is probably more a long the lines of whether someone has intuition. Intuition may be a larger part of intelligence, but when excluding intuition, intelligence seems to have more to do with memory than anything else.

[Hey-O]

For all of the people that think it's genetic, shouldn't we also define intelligence. If intelligence is simply being able to hold several things in your head simultaneously as I believe to be sort of a traditional definition, then the LSAT is not a great indicator, for those who are extremely detailed and take tons of notes/underline during the LSAT, try not doing that. Try to just read the passage and go right to the questions. Do you find it significantly more difficult? Are you more "intellignet" then as per the above definition than someone who can do this more efficiently? Organization is not "intelligence" when looking at the traditional definition. However, it helps a lot on the LSAT. You don't need to have a good memory to be good at logic games. In fact, I have never heard of anyone who is capable of doing entire logic games in their head. You need to have extremely good organizational skills and to be able to arrange variables in a linear fashion, and then only basic memory is required. I was talking to a friend of mine who got like 20/23 the first time he ever saw logic games. He happens to be pretty good at math, but even better at algebra. He said that he believes his ability to write things out in an organized fashion is actually the result of having a very poor short term memory, so it's a compensation factor. If intelligence is simply a measurement of being able to hold several things in your head at once, and still remember where they fit than not all people who have this ability will be successful at a test like the LSAT because the test is designed to beat people who don't write things down, or at least use well organized mental maps. The LSAT completely off pure memory would take someone who was incredibly "intelligent".

Defining intelligence is very difficult, but your definition is still kinda weird. For me, it has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with intuitive abstraction and reasoning in the abstract space. Your definition seems more like "has a good memory."

Also, I can do logic games in my head if I concentrate and I know people (much smarter than me) who can do them in their head without difficulty.

Were you a math major? I do believe it's possible to do these in your head, but the people who have the best shot at it are people have run through similar problems several times throughout their life. Also I think that reasoning at it's purest form is just the result of having profound memory. Sorry if this doesn't make sense as I am not a psychologist nor am I extremely well versed in this topic. But if you look at an excellent chess player, they remember situations they have been (I think I am kind of stealing this from a previous LR question) none the less, if you remember things at different levels either subconsciously (intuitive) or consciously, you are intelligent. A chess player who can hold 7 moves in their head and possible outcomes for each one usually has better reasoning skills. Some one can multiply or divide 4872 by 319 in quick time has to think on several levels. You would have to hold many thoughts simultaneously. The distinction is probably more a long the lines of whether someone has intuition. Intuition may be a larger part of intelligence, but when excluding intuition, intelligence seems to have more to do with memory than anything else.

No way. Intelligence is not mostly memory. Memory helps with intelligence, but in my experience doesn't make a person intelligent.

This is just my opinion, but intelligent people 1.) can understand complex relationships between entities 2.) can explain those relationships in simple terms

[d34d9823]

No way. Intelligence is not mostly memory. Memory helps with intelligence, but in my experience doesn't make a person intelligent.

This is just my opinion, but intelligent people 1.) can understand complex relationships between entities 2.) can explain those relationships in simple terms

Yeah, have to agree here. Some of the smartest people I know have terribad memory in certain areas.

1) is what I'm trying to get at also. The ability to abstract concepts from data, see the abstract relationships in your mind, and relate those relationships to other abstract structures you've encountered before is the key component of intelligence for me. Seeing the correspondence between pressure, pressure drop, and flow; and voltage, resistance, and amperage is a good example.

I think 2) is not necessarily true. I know some really smart people who are unable to articulate their thoughts well, but only people who have 2) get recognized as smart. (If you mean "explain" as in "comprehend" than I agree).

[jason8821]

No way. Intelligence is not mostly memory. Memory helps with intelligence, but in my experience doesn't make a person intelligent.

This is just my opinion, but intelligent people 1.) can understand complex relationships between entities 2.) can explain those relationships in simple terms

Yeah, have to agree here. Some of the smartest people I know have terribad memory in certain areas.

1) is what I'm trying to get at also. The ability to abstract concepts from data, see the abstract relationships in your mind, and relate those relationships to other abstract structures you've encountered before is the key component of intelligence for me. Seeing the correspondence between pressure, pressure drop, and flow; and voltage, resistance, and amperage is a good example.

I think 2) is not necessarily true. I know some really smart people who are unable to articulate their thoughts well, but only people who have 2) get recognized as smart. (If you mean "explain" as in "comprehend" than I agree).

I agree with the fact that people who are intelligent can lack memory in certain areas of their life. For instance, they may have no clue what color shirt they worse yesterday, but I don't see how it's possible to have an ok, or even decent memory in math if you are math genius, or reading/vocab if you are a verbal genius. SO if someone is looking at a problem through each step, and can't remember what they just did as the problem gets increasingly more difficult, what do they do, they forget the answer and scream eureka as their subconscious just tells them the answer. I find it hard to to believe that is how it works. You can have a bad long term momry and be brilliant, but you can't have a bad short term memory in whatever field you are brilliant in, and expect to answer tough problems. The only way is if you just had incredible attention to detail, and wrote every single thing down perfectly, but then I don't know if that qualifies you as intelligent, or superbly orgainzed.

[rv11]

Being bad at standardized testing is just a mindset. All standardized tests are quite different. Not being able to choose between 4-5 answer choices isn't your problem.

[Hey-O]

No way. Intelligence is not mostly memory. Memory helps with intelligence, but in my experience doesn't make a person intelligent.

This is just my opinion, but intelligent people 1.) can understand complex relationships between entities 2.) can explain those relationships in simple terms

Yeah, have to agree here. Some of the smartest people I know have terribad memory in certain areas.

1) is what I'm trying to get at also. The ability to abstract concepts from data, see the abstract relationships in your mind, and relate those relationships to other abstract structures you've encountered before is the key component of intelligence for me. Seeing the correspondence between pressure, pressure drop, and flow; and voltage, resistance, and amperage is a good example.

I think 2) is not necessarily true. I know some really smart people who are unable to articulate their thoughts well, but only people who have 2) get recognized as smart. (If you mean "explain" as in "comprehend" than I agree).

I agree with the fact that people who are intelligent can lack memory in certain areas of their life. For instance, they may have no clue what color shirt they worse yesterday, but I don't see how it's possible to have an ok, or even decent memory in math if you are math genius, or reading/vocab if you are a verbal genius. SO if someone is looking at a problem through each step, and can't remember what they just did as the problem gets increasingly more difficult, what do they do, they forget the answer and scream eureka as their subconscious just tells them the answer. I find it hard to to believe that is how it works. You can have a bad long term momry and be brilliant, but you can't have a bad short term memory in whatever field you are brilliant in, and expect to answer tough problems. The only way is if you just had incredible attention to detail, and wrote every single thing down perfectly, but then I don't know if that qualifies you as intelligent, or superbly orgainzed.

This is sort of a silly straw man. The person you are describing usually has some kind of head trauma that leads to short term memory loss.

The point is that a person could be very intelligent and only have an average memory.

Smart people often have amazing memories, but that is correlation, not causation. People who can remember things seem smart, but if they can't work with the knowledge they have then what's the point of remembering all those things?

[094320]

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[Hey-O]

I agree that IQ is a non-ideal measure, just saying, whatever IQ is measuring has a strong relation with other things we tend to associate with intelligence, and the ability to correlate this with measures from a very very young age suggests that intelligence is at least partially genetic.

So I actually study human cognition, so let me clear up some ideas about memory.

"is what I'm trying to get at also. The ability to abstract concepts from data, see the abstract relationships in your mind, and relate those relationships to other abstract structures you've encountered before " =Working Memory and this is what is considered intelligence. This is the memory that you use while solving a problem--your ability to keep all these abstract ideas and variables, and have them interact with each other in your head in order to reach some sort of answer or solution. Working memory is highly correlated with intelligence.

Long-term memory is like your ability to remember stuff you heard in lecture last week and is a different part of the cognitive process, and is not what we normally consider intelligence. I know plenty of people who are highly intelligent in general, particularly with working with problems, etc., but can't remember basic facts from the history of their own lives.

In order to become good in a subject you can't have like brain-damage level bad long-term memory, but an exceptional transfer of information into long-term memory isn't really the hallmark of intelligence. Strong working memory is.

Chess is an example of players using chunking. Most good chess players(except maybe when we get to the level of grandmasters) don't necessarily have exceptional working memory. Rather, they play chess so often that they come to recognize patterns and play stored in long-term. If you take an expert at chess and have them look at a *valid* set-up of the board that could be reached from actual play for like a few seconds and then have them recreate the board from memory, they do it with ease. If you give them a fake board that can't be reached from actual play, their ability to recreate it is the same as someone who doesn't play chess at all. Master chess players are individuals who through many many hours managed to build up exceptional expertise.

This is an interesting idea. Let me get what you're saying here. Working memory is really the ability to hold complex ideas in your head long enough to make connections between them.

I think we're agreeing about substance and disagreeing about the definition of memory. It is still all about the ability to make connections.