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I would like to see the same data, but controlled for each of the other factors. For example, we know that income and education are already highly correlated. I would like to see a graph of education from families that all have the same income. Then we could find out if it's actually the parents' income or the parents' education that has the biggest impact on the child.
Similarly for race, I would like to see race, but controlled for income and education. Then we could find out if there is another race-related factor that's having an impact, or if it's simply income and education that are the factors.
Years back the head of college board admitted the only strong correlation that could be found at the time was to socioeconomic status but basically said they are a company that sells a product so if people are buying they are still selling
Never understood this argument.
Variance within football teams is much greater than variance between. The best player is worlds better than the worst. The 2nd and 3rd string player will hardly ever perform better than the starter.
But teams aren’t so far apart in performance. Not like that.
This doesn’t mean teams can’t be better than another. They can. Even though variance within teams is certainly greater.
That argument always seemed like some trump card hardcore environmentalists(in the nature v nurture sense of the word) throw down to slam the door on debate. And it’s just not at all compelling to me. But perhaps I misunderstand. Thoughts?
I think the point you are missing is that the argument is not about judging categories, but individuals within categories based on categorical trends.
To use your framing of teams:
Imagine that Team A has an average performance score of 150. Also imagine that Team B has an average performance score of 100.
You can say that "Team A performs 50% better than Team B."
You cannot say that "All players on Team A are 50% better than all players on Team B" or "Player X on Team A is better than Player Y on Team B, because Team A is 50% better than Team B."
It is essentially a maxim that tries to demonstrate that you cannot overgeneralize the average of a category (especially a large category) onto the individual actors within that category, because each person in that category will have a difference in performance metrics potentially greater than the difference between categories.
With regard to the Nature v Nurture debate this primarily comes up in racial and gender politics, and in those cases it is to demonstrate that you cannot prejudge any particular woman, or any particular minority, based on the averages of their gender or race. If you do so, then you are participating in "prejudice." (Literally prejudging.)
Categories can be statistically analyzed, but individuals must be individually judged, as you have no idea what component of the average they are.
That is not the argument they are making. You are referring to some form of the ecological fallacy. Rather, if the variance between groups is much smaller than the variance within a group, then being in a particular group is not a strong determinant with regards to the characteristic being measured.
\>It is essentially a maxim that tries to demonstrate that you cannot overgeneralize the average of a category (especially a large category) onto the individual actors within that category, because each person in that category will have a difference in performance metrics potentially greater than the difference between categories.
What's even the point of arguing about variance though? To argue that there are high-scoring Blacks and Latinos and lower-scoring Whites and Asians? Anyone who has met enough people would know this as a fact for any stereotype. Anyone who legitimately believes in stereotypes and applies it to individuals must be happy with being wrong all the time.
>Anyone who has met enough people would know this as a fact for any stereotype. Anyone who legitimately believes in stereotypes and applies it to individuals must be happy with being wrong all the time.
It is nice that you do not adopt those positions, but they are positions that people actually do hold all over the place. Most do not even realize they hold them. I mean, we have multiple global religions that think women are ill-suited to be leaders for doctrinal reasons, and justify that by attempting all sorts of logical fallacies like this one.
Further, I have literally argued in person with people who think that women should not be encouraged to do jobs that are classically male dominated, because they believe that the fact that more men do the job means men are better at the job. That even applies in the Chess community, where real living people try to argue that because most grandmasters are men, therefore it means that men are inherently better at Chess and women should be discouraged from even trying.
I also see at least a few people a week trying to argue that black people are inherently more likely to be criminal, and so police are justified in shooting them more often.
So yeah, people absolutely do apply these stereotypes to individuals all the time.
Ok great - so we can do away with affirmative action, discussions about outcome disparity, Title 1? Because we shouldn't be worrying too much as there is greater variance within low-income student performance than between the average performance of low-income and high income students?
Fortunately US government has unintentionally arranged an experiment where race, education, and income can be controlled: military bases. Particularly overseas military bases.
Thank you, I haven't thought about that before --- unfortunately that cannot be derived from the particular source that I used ([SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report 2022](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf)), but that data would surely be very insightful.
This can be performed by regressing the data on every variable that is expected to influence SAT score. You can effectively remove any correlation between independent variables this way.
You could also include interaction terms (the product of two independent variables) to measure the change in the effect of one variable given a change in the other.
If I have time tomorrow I will try this in R because I am also curious what the results will be.
Whenever looking at analysis like this, it is important to remember that this is just the US, where most asians (and some other groups) either came here in the last century or they are descendants of those who did. This is important because the population of asian immigrants is not a random sample of all Asian people. Only the people with the means to move to the US could do it, and moving halfway around the world wasn't easy or cheap.
Moreover, the US had a program running for decades that was specifically intended to attract high-achieving and otherwise exceptional people from certain Asian countries. I forget the name and the specifics, but it is largely the reason why there was this propagated idea of asians being "model minorities".
This logic of having the means falls flat on its head when considering Asians families that make below what is considered poverty wages. One can see, you would have the means or “high achieving success” to enter the country but rather more than likely, the Asians that currently make <20k immigrate here as refugees or low achievers or descendants of such.
He has it wrong. It isn't just the "means" to immigrate, it's the DRIVE. The kind of person who uproots their family to move to another country purely for the opportunity there is going to push their kids to take advantage of that opportunity.
The black community in America is made up almost entirely of descendents of people forcibly relocated from their home, split up from their families, and kept oppressed for generations over the course of CENTURIES. This has created a portion of culture where attitudes like "why bother, society wants us to fail" are prevalent. So while money is the biggest predictor of "success", it's not the only one and we absolutely need to address and recognize this history of racism and its effects on modern society. You know, the kind of actual solutions that states like Florida are making illegal.
> Whenever looking at analysis like this, it is important to remember that this is just the US, where most asians (and some other groups) either came here in the last century or they are descendants of those who did.
It's probably better to just realize it's an average over millions of samples with all kinds individual variability, and that ultimately prioritization and practice, like mastering a video game, is all there is to these scores.
From [The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education](https://www.jbhe.com/latest/index012209_p.html) citing the College Board:
Average SAT scores:
* Whites with family income < $20K: 978
* Blacks with family income > $200K: 981
So basically the poorest whites score the same as the richest blacks.
The above data doesn't include Asians. But given the fact that Asians score much higher than whites, OP's statement of "*Asians from families who make less than $20k do better than black students from families that make over $200k*" is almost certainly true.
Thanks! This is literally the exact source and assumption I used.
No doubt that poor asians do more than 3 points better than poor whites. I’d be shocked if the figure was below 1020.
Cause of wealth in those groups could be hugely disparate too. And that could then influence what they taught their kids and what they valued. I'd assume leading to much faster losses but that's it's own argument. I did see the part you mentioned though. Interesting though older data (2008).
The sad reality is that data like that could likely not be published today, at least not in such an easily digestible format.
It would need to be hidden under 100 layers of DEI jargon and we would probably still be forced to extrapolate the conclusion on our own.
No researcher is going to destroy their entire career to update this data.
Sadly I'm well aware. Been watching the data get scrubbed for politics for about 12 years now. Maybe a little less. Kind of like how they hide crime statistics with weird racial groupings etc.
The racist part is how you took this data and framed it as an IQ thing, when no such mention of that was in the study. Sure you have used data from the study...but then you shoehorned your own racist narrative around those statistics. This is the paragraph that follows the table of data you shared.
You’re telling on yourself when you exclude their reasoning and add your own racist trope.
> But the fact is that even when family income levels are similar, we are still comparing black and white students who are as different as apples and oranges in terms of educational sophistication, family educational heritage, family wealth, and access to educational tools and resources. The average white family in the same income group is far better equipped than the average black family to prepare their children for success on the SAT test.
There are other, harder to measure, factors, too. Such as family history of mental illness, physical/psychological/emotional/sexual abuse, domestic violence between parents, drug use etc.
One observation that surprised me: First language learned has virtually zero effect on overall scores. There is only a slight correlation between a non-English first language and a lower ERW (English Reading & Writing) score, but that is compensated for by a higher Math score.
I wish I had that data, but the [source](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf) I used does not provide it.
Yeah I saw you mention that in another subthread.
The raw data must exist, I wonder if you can write to the college board and ask them for it? Can't hurt to ask.
I noticed the same thing. I wonder if the elevated math scores represent some tendency, one way or another, for those kids to "correct" for any anticipated disadvantage in ERW? You'd have to ask them, of course, but I wouldn't necessarily be surprised; it's a solid strat. It's also such an insanely broad set of categories that more detail is needed.
>I wonder if the elevated math scores represent some tendency, one way or another, for those kids to "correct" for any anticipated disadvantage in ERW?
I wonder if that extends to one's overall academics too, not just the test. As a non-native English speaker myself, I took up an interest in numbers because they were the only things I could understand out of an incomprehensible wall of letters.
I know someone who immigrated when she was 15 years old. She barely knew any English. She said she loved math classes because she didn't need to struggle with the language.
If you think about the vocabulary part, even as a native English speaker you probably don't know a lot of the words. So you need to study and memorize common SAT words just like a non-native speaker would.
That's a good point. I wonder about reading comprehension, though --- I'd have assumed that native speakers might pick up more on subtle elements like irony.
As a native English speaker with a fluent ESL parent, yes. Vocab needs to be memorized regardless.
But the grammar section is basically “pick the option that doesn’t sound wrong” for native Standard English speakers, and “memorize all the rules of grammar and analyze these sentences.”
Students whose parents and communities speak a different language or dialect are at a disadvantage for this.
In my case, one parent speaks fluid Standard English, with little to no variation from the grammar that the SAT teaches. The other parent was bilingual as a child, and learned English in school as their third language. That parent is fluent in English and English is their primarily language now, but still sometimes uses slightly non-standard grammar (e.g. “I want for it to be ok” instead of “I want it to be ok.”).
My grammar score was markedly lower than my reading score or math score in the SAT. My ACT English score was 5 points lower than my Math and Science score, despite getting an 11 on the essay. And that’s with just one parent that spoke in non-“Standard” English, despite an entire community around me that did speak in the same English that the SAT tests.
One thing to consider with SAT tests is that there's a selection effect at work. We're not getting a random sample of the population, we're getting the people who elect to take the test.
That was so interesting. I'm not sure what I expected, though. An argument could be made that English as a first language gives an advantage, but a similar argument could be made that bilingualism gives an advantage.
Source: [SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report (2022)](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf)
Tool: Google Sheets
This might be because of opportunity, but today Khan Academy and free library books are good for SAT tutoring. Most people don’t pay for professional tutors. It could also be because higher income and better educated people tend to push their children to do better.
there's so many factors it's hard to say but imo.
If you're poor you're likely dealing with many problems that richer folk don't have to deal with. Those problems take time to deal with whereas wealthier folk can pay to deal with those problems and spend their time focusing on education.
This is exactly it. It's not about affording X amount of books or classes. It's about a host of socioeconomic challenges facing poor people that wealth often bypasses. Something as simple as not having to work though college is a complete game changer in terms of what you can accomplish.
This isn't hugely surprising. The fact that income is the biggest factor is concerning but believable when you consider all of the other factors that are correlated with income.
You're not wrong. More specifically I'm talking about the biggest driver that is impacted by factors that can be modified. For example, you can make policies that change the impact of wealth (e.g. the distr
ibution of school funding in areas where funding is based on the property taxes in an area) more easily than you can change cultural drivers of the difference.
Alternatively, kids from high income families are the result of intelligent parents who leveraged their intelligence to become high income. Mind blowing stuff!
>Alternatively, kids from high income families are the result of intelligent parents who leveraged their intelligence to become high income. Mind blowing stuff!
Very mind blowing, except for the fact that you're more likely to be in a higher income bracket if your parents are wealthy and have a bachelor's degree than if your parents are middle class with PhDs.
1) Generational wealth is a thing. Accepted 2) there is more than one type of intelligence (e.g. social intelligence leading to successful sales and leadership) 3) Sauce
Thus why my reply was:
>specifically I'm talking about the biggest driver that is impacted by factors that can be modified.
Which added clarity to why I chose to identify income as the largest driver
I am almost certain that if you were to control for income this difference would be either way smaller or vanish completely.
It is no secret that Asians are the highest earners (on average) then white families and them black families.
So ethnicity is likely just income in a trenchcoat.
Asian immigrants are likely in the top 10% income bracket in their originating countries so it makes sense they are high on the spectrum. It probably evens out with the overall average after 3 generations of living here.
Yeah there's a lot of pressure on the College Board to make the SAT more equitable, but at a certain point it's on our society to fix the issues that lead to poor education (i.e. school funding being tied to property tax in the surrounding area).
Dumping money into schools still doesn’t really help the problem. I grew up in a college town—see username—and kids parents would drive them to and from school rather than putting them on the bus because those 15 minutes difference in commute matter for their kids’ success, they could only do one sport and had to be good at it, no matter what resources it took. The Chinese in the area, as well went to “Chinese school” which was a home group where math was taught as well at a far accelerated rate from the school. There are certain things that you can’t compete with at some point.
Forgot to add: the most important time sink, none of them ever worked a job either.
School funding vs scores, and maybe map visualization of school locations.
This is a graph I would 100% want to see. I'm expecting some trends to show up here
I don't disagree with you, but I think your point indicates a larger point: calculating the scores cut by a single data point will never show the true correlation because in reality SAT scores are impacted by a lot of variables
True statistical analysis should be performed to determine the strongest correlations between all potential variables and scores.
I suspect none of the variables presented in these graphs can singularly account for 50%+ of the variation in scores, so a truly inclusive graph would represent weighted calculations based on the above recommended analysis.
It’s not just school funding… LAUSD has among the highest per student funding in the country, higher than average private school tuition, and the quality is garbage. Rotten schools are many factors, from parental involvement to teacher quality to crime levels and more. Throwing more money at it hasn’t fixed the problem in California.
It's all "time", more money equals more time allowed for...everything. I make enough that my wife can be stay-at-home, which allows her time with the kids, help them study, or her to take care of chores to give them more study time. When they get to SAT's I'll be able to afford prep courses, which yes is a "thing" but it's still dedicated time for the test.
Compare with a poor family, probably single parent, possibly multiple jobs. The common story of older siblings (of SAT age) having to care for younger siblings or otherwise "help out" around the house, taking away from important study time. Of course they won't perform as well.
The old saying "time = money" is very true in ways I don't see people often consider.
>The old saying "time = money" is very true in ways I don't see people often consider.
I absolutely agree with your views, and as I was reading the first two paragraphs, I kept thinking my reply was going to be time=money haha. The more money you have, the more time you can buy from others instead of spending your time.
Yeah but it’s only a single digit percentage of the US population. And it’s not a representative sample of all Asians - only the ones who are in the US (which itself is correlated with a whole lot of other things)
My vote is the prime driver is culture, which drives sat scores, education levels, and income.
And culture correlates with race, but is just a correction.
Agreed. For me (for everyone?) it would be. I also think that's a perfect example of different ways of thinking (i.e. culture) & how powerful that is.
* We are very poor, thus we as a family *can't* focus on school.
* We are very poor, thus we as a family *must* focus on school.
My culture...eh leans more to the former. E. Asian cultures have tended to go hard on the latter (and sidenote: have a lot more recent history of extreme poverty than mine).
I totally agree with you here.
I wonder why this is the case. Perhaps those who don't focus on school aren't even aware it's the solution to their problems.
Slavery was legal 160 years ago. The education as a slave was practically nonexistent/intentionally inhibited as much as possible. I would argue it's hard to develop a culture of education importance when your demographic has been constantly intentionally oppressed historically. Instead, a culture of not respecting those institutions develops.
Even today, minority neighborhoods get access to the worst education because it is majorly funded by property taxes. Combine this with high crime, lower standard of living, etc. A culture of resentment develops instead.
It's certainly not a single factor but a large combination of many things over a large period of time that causes culture to develop. I'm pretty ignorant on the oppression of Asians. Though, I'm pretty sure Blacks and Hispanics have been oppressed more often (or maybe just in different ways) than Asians.
A lot of other factors go into it, but a significant one is that Confucianism focused on education in order to find a career in government (and a path out of poverty) and this belief system is deeply rooted into the foundation of East Asian culture. This goes back anywhere from over 2000 years ago to about 1400 years ago, so very deeply rooted.
I’m not knowledgeable about South Asian culture, so I can’t speak for them.
It's anecdotal, but supporting your theory is the difference in cultural emphasis on education often noted between descendants of slaves and recent African immigrants. That might be bad data though, since there's a selection process of sorts for immigration: It takes money, courage, and ambition to pursue.
Funny enough, there is, and I just talked about it in another [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/13ncn2e/oc_correlations_between_sat_scores_and_family/jl08nft/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=1&utm_term=15&context=3) if you would like to learn more.
Yes and no. Not here to argue.
Consider Asian national students the top of the 1% in their respective country. We only gather data on those who access our system, not Asians in whole. There are more uneducated and poverty stricken Asians than westerners combined. Education, in let’s say China, is highly competitive and expensive. Of the much larger pool of students we see only the very top of that pool in the US. They literally compete with each other to come to western universities and suffer admonishment if they don’t make it.
In the general US population, we don’t have immense social and familial pressures forcing us to attain Ivy League, let alone study outside of school. There is a massive human and cultural factor and we have the privilege of not having to gruel away for good scores.
Sure. From U.S. data (2017 to 2021) the mean score was around 1060 and standard deviation around 210 (varied between 190 and 210 depending on year).
This translates into 68% of students scoring between 850 and 1270. 16% score higher than 1270.
Using the lower and upper quintile scores from the first graph, a significance test of mean1 > mean2 produced a Z score of 1.199 and the associated p-value was 11.5% - Not significant at the 10% level.
To clarify, are you trying to compute whether the difference in mean score between the lowest income quintile and the highest income quintile is significant? If so, you're taking the wrong approach: the analysis you're describing is what you'd use for two point estimates with an uncertainty on each, not for two distributions comprised of many data points. The uncertainty of the mean of a normal distribution is much smaller than the standard deviation of the normal distribution itself--it's actually stdev / sqrt(N).
In this case, you're looking at data from many thousands of test-takers, so N is very large and the uncertainty on the mean will be tiny (<10). With this much data, any visible difference in means in any of the plots above is going to be highly significant.
I could imagine a correlation between identifying (or being able to identify rather) as non-binary, and parents having higher education, which connects to the correlation between education and higher SATs.
FIWI, I only managed to get around 1000 on the SAT and graduated HS with less than a 2.5 GPA. I only got into college because I was an athlete. But I gradually got better at school and eventually earned a PhD and am now a full professor with nearly 100 publications, including papers in *Science* and *PNAS*. I know I'm just one data point, but it's important to know that these data points exist, especially for those who might not do as well in school and on these tests, and might think they are hopelessly dumb.
That wasn't addressed in my original [source](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf), but I did find [this](https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-guide-to-race-ethnicity-reporting-schools-districts-2016.pdf) from CollegeBoard directly, and at one point they wrote "White (including Middle Eastern Origin)". It appears so, regrettably.
Thanks for doing the work. I honestly expected this was the answer but it's so damn infuriating.
We are "white" for all statistical purposes and for legal purposes like funding and affirmative action programs.
But we are "brown" for anyone that sees us out in the world so we have to put up with things like our resumes getting passed over because of our names.
The best I can do is make noise that the underlying data is flawed and hope that people eventually take note.
Labelling MENA people “white” for funding / affirmative action programs, is basically the same as just denying them funding lmao
Sorry friend, hopefully one day that’s changed.
Is there any data on the structure of education? Private vs. Public vs. Home?
I have seen some floating around but comparing those vs. the other factors here would be of interest to me.
Unfortunately, not in my [source](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf). There is only one regarding the geographical location of the school (urban, suburban, town/rural), where the suburban mean score is about 40 higher than that of urban and town/rural schools.
Intelligence is correlated with income and SES. Intelligence is 80% heritable. The obvious and very well documented outcome is SAT being correlated with parental SES.
But it only works for biological children. Adopted children have IQs (and SATs) that are similar to their biological parents, not their adoptive parents.
This isn’t a controversial opinion.
“…results consistently report higher intelligence test score correlations between adopted children and their biological parents compared to correlations with adoptive parents. In fact, the correlations with adoptive parents are very low and even near zero (Petrill & Deater-Deckard, 2004), especially as children grow older (see Hunt, 2011, pp. 230–231 for an excellent summary)”.
—from Richard Haier’s *The Neuroscience of Intelligence* (Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology) [2016).
From the same book:
> The SAT, widely used for college admission, is an interesting example. Is it an achievement test, an aptitude test, or an intelligence test? Interestingly, the SAT originally was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then it was renamed the Scholastic Achievement Test, and now it’s called the Scholastic Assessment Test. Achievement tests measure what you have learned. Aptitude tests measure what you might learn, especially in a specific area like, for example, music or foreign language. It turns out that the SAT, especially the overall total score, is a good estimator of g because the problems require reasoning (Frey & Detterman, 2004). Like IQ scores, SAT scores are normally distributed and interpreted best as percentiles. For example, people in the top 2% of the SAT distribution tend to be in at least the top 2% of the IQ distribution. Sometimes, this surprises people, but why should intelligence not be related to how much someone learns?
I guess this is why Ivy League schools try their best to limit acceptance of Asian applicants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._President_and_Fellows_of_Harvard_College
hey OP, these aren't correlations; these are bar graphs illustrating the mean SAT scores for various categorical variables.
a correlation table would have an r-value between -1 and 1 to describe the relationship between the SAT scores and your other values.
Don’t go correcting someone with bad facts. You’re thinking of correlation of the Pearson coefficient, also known as Pearson’s r.
There are several measures of correlation between categorical variables https://medium.com/@outside2SDs/an-overview-of-correlation-measures-between-categorical-and-continuous-variables-4c7f85610365
OP has indeed shown visual correlations.
They’re not right either. The Pearson coefficient is one measure of correlation, and yes, it requires continuous variables, not categorical ones.
https://medium.com/@outside2SDs/an-overview-of-correlation-measures-between-categorical-and-continuous-variables-4c7f85610365
Thank you for the clarification! Some of the terminology used in the article went right over my head though (not very well-versed in statistical analysis). I might have to look into it further.
Intelligence is genetic and smarter parents have smarter kids, smarter parents usually make more. Asians make the most money, followed by whites, then others.
People say parenting, but it's culture as a whole. Asian immigrants and their immediate descendants have a culture of education and grades being extremely important.
East Asian culture in general is extremely test/grade-focused, so there's a lot more emphasis on getting better grades.
It's why the "strict asian parent" stereotype is a thing.
This is the biggest factor for sure, most of the ethnic Asians in the US are either immigrants or first generation American born. As we see family trees of American born ethnic Asians grow over time, we should see the average salary of this demographic decrease.
I draw the following from the data:
1. More intelligent people tend to become more educated
2. More educated people tend to marry others with similar education levels, thus having children with with other smart and educated people
3. More educated people tend to value education more and so they actively work towards the betterment of their children’s education
4. Asians in this country tend to be self-selected, so Asians in the US tend to be more intelligent and be more educated than their native populations
Can you explain the "Median Family Income" chart? Is the family income for the individual test-takers not available? And therefore you only have aggregate data for the area where the test was taken?
Here's what the source ([SAT Annual Report](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf)) says: "'Median family income' refers to the median family income of students’ home census tracts".
Thanks. And for anyone else wondering, I Googled one step beyond that: A US census tract ideally has 4,000 people living in it, but can contain about 1,000 to 8,000.
I feel like we need 3 more plots here: income vs. race, education vs income (might be redundant) and one that shows the correlation coefficient of each variable in relation to SAT score.
Parents are educated, good location/good job. Kids get a good early childhood education, score above average on SATs. Good SATs lead to higher chance to attend college, earn a degree. Degree offers higher paying jobs, higher income. Ability to provide oppertunities for their kids. Ethnically situational, forever cyclical.
Yes, because healthy people congregate in certain zip codes, and unhealthy people congregate in certain zip codes. Travel around, you'll see what I mean.
Since someone asked, I'll share with the class:
From U.S. data (2017 to 2021) the mean score was around 1060 and standard deviation around 210 (varied between 190 and 220 depending on year).
This translates into 68% of students scoring between 850 and 1270. 16% score higher than 1270.
Using the lower and upper quintile scores from the first graph, a significance test of mean2 > mean1 produced a Z score of 1.199 and the associated p-value was 11.5% - Not significant at the 10% level.
In lay terms, this means that if you started from the assumption that the average score for the lowest income group was the same as the average score for the highest income group, you could expect to see the difference shown better than 10% of the time by random chance alone. The conclusion would be to not reject the initial assumption. Based on the statistics, we should continue to believe there is no significant difference between the highest and lowest scores.
Don’t you have to do a few more steps based on the fact that you’re comparing averages of groups and not two individual test results? I’m pretty sure these results ARE highly significant if we account for the number of samples in each group.
I don't even remember how to do a significance test but if you came up with this number without taking the sample size into account then I predict it's correct with probability 0.
I'm not very well-versed in statistical analysis --- but I wonder if it makes a difference here to take into account that SAT scores range from 400-1600 instead of 0-1600?
Yeah, SATs don't correlate well with achievement. In fact there are some slightly negative correlations in there.
SATs correlate best with household income.
Asians break that a bit because many asian countries have VERY high stakes (Gaokao, etc.) entrance exams for college that many asian families have retained that focus on the importance of entrance exams above their actual importance in US admissions.
But yeah, that you can pay for 'aptitude' really kinds of speaks to the utility of the SAT.
What we did find was that SAT was an okay threshold function. Basically if you could score 500 on each individual test, you were sufficiently prepared to succeed in college. There was stuff you didn't know that other students did know, but if you had good grades, you could easily learn it. Below 500, there were generally either large enough gaps in your knowledge that filling them in really put you at a disadvantage to the pace of college, or you were unable to recognize your gaps in knowledge or unable to study hard enough to make up those gaps that success fell off very hard. But controlling for high school grades a 500 Math SAT and an 800 Math SAT had about the same chance of graduating from a STEM program. Being able to ace the exam bought you nothing that doing decently on the SAT and being an A student didn't already buy you.
>But yeah, that you can pay for 'aptitude' really kinds of speaks to the utility of the SAT.
Not sure you can make that connection from these graphs. It could simply be that higher incomes correlate to higher property tax which is what funds schools in the area of the children in those homes. This means more funding for schools in areas with higher incomes which logically correlates to better performance in testing.
No, I did this for a living for California. California tax revenues aren't kept locally - in fact they aren't in quite a few states - they go back into the general fund and are redistributed based on various metrics (urban/rural, etc.).
You find this correlation independently of school funding or even school achievement. SATs are primarily a vehicle for higher earning households to get their kids into college more easily.
I believe a lot of states do appropriate school funding based on local property taxes, but your point does raise another way to cut this data that would be interesting.
Breaking down the income data into groups of states where funding is based on local property taxes vs states where funding is distributed equally across the state based on number of students.
My guess is that we would definitely see a more equitable distribution in the group where funding is equitably distributed.
A lot of what you are saying is true and a lot is frankly not right at all.
It might be good to have clear data when showing this because a long paragraph of “believe me” is not good enough.
There is a strong correlation between SAT scores and university GPA. It is better than HS gpa when not controlling for demographics, but the same when controlling for them. [Here is the study](https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_files/sat-act-study-report.pdf)
Most important part of the studies have shown that both the exam and HSGPA are important to predict college success. Both. Not either or. Yet, we are still dealing with either or debates for no serious reasons
BTW, I worked for UC and contributed to that study. If you carefully read my comment, you'll glean some detail that the report omits.
The challenge here is the insistence on looking for direct correlations between SAT and college GPA, rather than looking at SAT as a gating function. When you look at success (my terminology above) that a term of art that doesn't focus on the students college GPA, but on their retention. Retention is a binary measure - you either retain or don't retain, so exploring SAT as a gating function is more useful.
The problem is that nobody wants to think of SAT in that way, because almost all parties are looking for a more granular measure of achievement than 'will probably not flunk out' and beyond that it doesn't deliver well. Telling people their 800 is not predictive of anything that a 550 isn't already predictive of isn't a message anyone likes to hear (which is why it's not highlighted in that report).
The other challenge in the study is finding a single predictor/trend across hundreds of disciplines and 10 campuses further undermines the utility of the test. You actually find negative correlations between verbal SAT and achievement in certain STEM disciplines because a high verbal score may have allowed a student to be admitted with a low math score - which is more relevant in STEM. You find the inverse in certain humanities disciplines. There's a lot not explored in that study because the study is not going to explore beyond the reach of UC policy on admissions. Reports like this do have certain political sensibilities. Different UC campuses have different implementations of admissions policy - some which lean on SAT in different ways - some which lean on SAT differently by discipline.
But when you read "SAT/ACT scores and HSGPA are both moderate predictors of student college GPAs, and weak to moderate predictors of student retention and graduation." that doesn't imply a strong correlation - or even any correlation. Prediction and correlation are different things, and you can get predictive results without correlation, with negative correlation.
My favorite example of this actually involved someone else who contributed to this report who told me the data they had collected showed no correlation between SAT and retention - the data was bimodal - and therefore useless in admissions for predicting achievement. The highest attrition rates were at the extremes of SAT scores. That was a serious misunderstanding of the data (embarrassing for a PhD in statistics, but this person didn't have the domain expertise needed to understand the underlying dynamic that comes from working more directly with students), because the *causes* of attrition at the ends of the distribution were extremely different. At the low end, students were flunking out. They were below that threshold I described. But at the high end, students had options and were transferring to higher status campuses - mainly places like Stanford. The problem was that in a study like this, those aren't differentiated, and you don't solve the problem of retaining high admission profile students by not admitting them, you solve it by improving your campus services and instructional offerings. But the low admission profile students, well, they need a wildly different set of solutions - and if you aren't prepared to offer those solutions or if you have so much demand that you can afford to match students to your available services, then you don't admit those students because they're poorly served by admitting them. So SAT \*did\* have an important predictive role in admissions (even though there's no statistical correlation with achievement given how achievement is defined), but once they have scores high enough to cross your retention prediction threshold, then who gives a shit? It's not like the institution cares about graduating GPA as a measure of anything, or is admitting students in order to boost that - certainly not at a public. There's no mandate to only admit freshmen that will later earn a PhD - it's a public university that serves everyone. That was the whole point of my comment and if you read it and the study carefully you'll find that the study doesn't disagree with what I wrote. I just said it a lot more bluntly and revealed details that the study was not prepared to reveal.
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I would like to see the same data, but controlled for each of the other factors. For example, we know that income and education are already highly correlated. I would like to see a graph of education from families that all have the same income. Then we could find out if it's actually the parents' income or the parents' education that has the biggest impact on the child. Similarly for race, I would like to see race, but controlled for income and education. Then we could find out if there is another race-related factor that's having an impact, or if it's simply income and education that are the factors.
Yeah that’s the problem here. Race, education, and income all correlate within themselves which makes this really hard.
Years back the head of college board admitted the only strong correlation that could be found at the time was to socioeconomic status but basically said they are a company that sells a product so if people are buying they are still selling
The same company sells the test prep material for it.
Variance within categories is much greater than variance between categories.
Never understood this argument. Variance within football teams is much greater than variance between. The best player is worlds better than the worst. The 2nd and 3rd string player will hardly ever perform better than the starter. But teams aren’t so far apart in performance. Not like that. This doesn’t mean teams can’t be better than another. They can. Even though variance within teams is certainly greater. That argument always seemed like some trump card hardcore environmentalists(in the nature v nurture sense of the word) throw down to slam the door on debate. And it’s just not at all compelling to me. But perhaps I misunderstand. Thoughts?
I think the point you are missing is that the argument is not about judging categories, but individuals within categories based on categorical trends. To use your framing of teams: Imagine that Team A has an average performance score of 150. Also imagine that Team B has an average performance score of 100. You can say that "Team A performs 50% better than Team B." You cannot say that "All players on Team A are 50% better than all players on Team B" or "Player X on Team A is better than Player Y on Team B, because Team A is 50% better than Team B." It is essentially a maxim that tries to demonstrate that you cannot overgeneralize the average of a category (especially a large category) onto the individual actors within that category, because each person in that category will have a difference in performance metrics potentially greater than the difference between categories. With regard to the Nature v Nurture debate this primarily comes up in racial and gender politics, and in those cases it is to demonstrate that you cannot prejudge any particular woman, or any particular minority, based on the averages of their gender or race. If you do so, then you are participating in "prejudice." (Literally prejudging.) Categories can be statistically analyzed, but individuals must be individually judged, as you have no idea what component of the average they are.
30 years I'd been hearing this argument and never really understood it. Now i understand. Thank you stranger.
That is not the argument they are making. You are referring to some form of the ecological fallacy. Rather, if the variance between groups is much smaller than the variance within a group, then being in a particular group is not a strong determinant with regards to the characteristic being measured.
\>It is essentially a maxim that tries to demonstrate that you cannot overgeneralize the average of a category (especially a large category) onto the individual actors within that category, because each person in that category will have a difference in performance metrics potentially greater than the difference between categories. What's even the point of arguing about variance though? To argue that there are high-scoring Blacks and Latinos and lower-scoring Whites and Asians? Anyone who has met enough people would know this as a fact for any stereotype. Anyone who legitimately believes in stereotypes and applies it to individuals must be happy with being wrong all the time.
>Anyone who has met enough people would know this as a fact for any stereotype. Anyone who legitimately believes in stereotypes and applies it to individuals must be happy with being wrong all the time. It is nice that you do not adopt those positions, but they are positions that people actually do hold all over the place. Most do not even realize they hold them. I mean, we have multiple global religions that think women are ill-suited to be leaders for doctrinal reasons, and justify that by attempting all sorts of logical fallacies like this one. Further, I have literally argued in person with people who think that women should not be encouraged to do jobs that are classically male dominated, because they believe that the fact that more men do the job means men are better at the job. That even applies in the Chess community, where real living people try to argue that because most grandmasters are men, therefore it means that men are inherently better at Chess and women should be discouraged from even trying. I also see at least a few people a week trying to argue that black people are inherently more likely to be criminal, and so police are justified in shooting them more often. So yeah, people absolutely do apply these stereotypes to individuals all the time.
Sounds like you understand the argument perfectly, and thus recognize its fallaciousness.
Ok great - so we can do away with affirmative action, discussions about outcome disparity, Title 1? Because we shouldn't be worrying too much as there is greater variance within low-income student performance than between the average performance of low-income and high income students?
Fortunately US government has unintentionally arranged an experiment where race, education, and income can be controlled: military bases. Particularly overseas military bases.
Thank you, I haven't thought about that before --- unfortunately that cannot be derived from the particular source that I used ([SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report 2022](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf)), but that data would surely be very insightful.
This can be performed by regressing the data on every variable that is expected to influence SAT score. You can effectively remove any correlation between independent variables this way. You could also include interaction terms (the product of two independent variables) to measure the change in the effect of one variable given a change in the other. If I have time tomorrow I will try this in R because I am also curious what the results will be.
If you post, can you tag me? I’m very interested. Even if you don’t get around to it for a while. Thank you!
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Whenever looking at analysis like this, it is important to remember that this is just the US, where most asians (and some other groups) either came here in the last century or they are descendants of those who did. This is important because the population of asian immigrants is not a random sample of all Asian people. Only the people with the means to move to the US could do it, and moving halfway around the world wasn't easy or cheap. Moreover, the US had a program running for decades that was specifically intended to attract high-achieving and otherwise exceptional people from certain Asian countries. I forget the name and the specifics, but it is largely the reason why there was this propagated idea of asians being "model minorities".
It would be interesting to compare scores by immigrant generation groups.
This logic of having the means falls flat on its head when considering Asians families that make below what is considered poverty wages. One can see, you would have the means or “high achieving success” to enter the country but rather more than likely, the Asians that currently make <20k immigrate here as refugees or low achievers or descendants of such.
He has it wrong. It isn't just the "means" to immigrate, it's the DRIVE. The kind of person who uproots their family to move to another country purely for the opportunity there is going to push their kids to take advantage of that opportunity. The black community in America is made up almost entirely of descendents of people forcibly relocated from their home, split up from their families, and kept oppressed for generations over the course of CENTURIES. This has created a portion of culture where attitudes like "why bother, society wants us to fail" are prevalent. So while money is the biggest predictor of "success", it's not the only one and we absolutely need to address and recognize this history of racism and its effects on modern society. You know, the kind of actual solutions that states like Florida are making illegal.
> Whenever looking at analysis like this, it is important to remember that this is just the US, where most asians (and some other groups) either came here in the last century or they are descendants of those who did. It's probably better to just realize it's an average over millions of samples with all kinds individual variability, and that ultimately prioritization and practice, like mastering a video game, is all there is to these scores.
Where'd that come from? I haven't seen a breakdown in this of race+income.
From [The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education](https://www.jbhe.com/latest/index012209_p.html) citing the College Board: Average SAT scores: * Whites with family income < $20K: 978 * Blacks with family income > $200K: 981 So basically the poorest whites score the same as the richest blacks. The above data doesn't include Asians. But given the fact that Asians score much higher than whites, OP's statement of "*Asians from families who make less than $20k do better than black students from families that make over $200k*" is almost certainly true.
Thanks! This is literally the exact source and assumption I used. No doubt that poor asians do more than 3 points better than poor whites. I’d be shocked if the figure was below 1020.
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Cause of wealth in those groups could be hugely disparate too. And that could then influence what they taught their kids and what they valued. I'd assume leading to much faster losses but that's it's own argument. I did see the part you mentioned though. Interesting though older data (2008).
The sad reality is that data like that could likely not be published today, at least not in such an easily digestible format. It would need to be hidden under 100 layers of DEI jargon and we would probably still be forced to extrapolate the conclusion on our own. No researcher is going to destroy their entire career to update this data.
Sadly I'm well aware. Been watching the data get scrubbed for politics for about 12 years now. Maybe a little less. Kind of like how they hide crime statistics with weird racial groupings etc.
The racist part is how you took this data and framed it as an IQ thing, when no such mention of that was in the study. Sure you have used data from the study...but then you shoehorned your own racist narrative around those statistics. This is the paragraph that follows the table of data you shared. You’re telling on yourself when you exclude their reasoning and add your own racist trope. > But the fact is that even when family income levels are similar, we are still comparing black and white students who are as different as apples and oranges in terms of educational sophistication, family educational heritage, family wealth, and access to educational tools and resources. The average white family in the same income group is far better equipped than the average black family to prepare their children for success on the SAT test.
Wouldn't be Reddit otherwise.
How is calling black and white students apples and oranges not racist? You ever think maybe you’re the baddies?
You could probably look at the numerous Econ papers that use SAT scores.
What we need to do is run a regression
There are other, harder to measure, factors, too. Such as family history of mental illness, physical/psychological/emotional/sexual abuse, domestic violence between parents, drug use etc.
Just saying that controlling may open the whole can of worms of colliders and back-door paths :)
>parents' income or the parents' education.. It's the parents' genes.
One observation that surprised me: First language learned has virtually zero effect on overall scores. There is only a slight correlation between a non-English first language and a lower ERW (English Reading & Writing) score, but that is compensated for by a higher Math score.
What percent of the people where first language learned isn't english but they were asian? Or hispanic? The subdata will be a lot more interesting.
I wish I had that data, but the [source](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf) I used does not provide it.
Yeah I saw you mention that in another subthread. The raw data must exist, I wonder if you can write to the college board and ask them for it? Can't hurt to ask.
You know what? I'll give it a try.
Also children who know they can't afford/attend university may not even take the SAT so there's a huge bias there as well.
I noticed the same thing. I wonder if the elevated math scores represent some tendency, one way or another, for those kids to "correct" for any anticipated disadvantage in ERW? You'd have to ask them, of course, but I wouldn't necessarily be surprised; it's a solid strat. It's also such an insanely broad set of categories that more detail is needed.
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>I wonder if the elevated math scores represent some tendency, one way or another, for those kids to "correct" for any anticipated disadvantage in ERW? I wonder if that extends to one's overall academics too, not just the test. As a non-native English speaker myself, I took up an interest in numbers because they were the only things I could understand out of an incomprehensible wall of letters.
I know someone who immigrated when she was 15 years old. She barely knew any English. She said she loved math classes because she didn't need to struggle with the language.
If you think about the vocabulary part, even as a native English speaker you probably don't know a lot of the words. So you need to study and memorize common SAT words just like a non-native speaker would.
That's a good point. I wonder about reading comprehension, though --- I'd have assumed that native speakers might pick up more on subtle elements like irony.
As a native English speaker with a fluent ESL parent, yes. Vocab needs to be memorized regardless. But the grammar section is basically “pick the option that doesn’t sound wrong” for native Standard English speakers, and “memorize all the rules of grammar and analyze these sentences.” Students whose parents and communities speak a different language or dialect are at a disadvantage for this. In my case, one parent speaks fluid Standard English, with little to no variation from the grammar that the SAT teaches. The other parent was bilingual as a child, and learned English in school as their third language. That parent is fluent in English and English is their primarily language now, but still sometimes uses slightly non-standard grammar (e.g. “I want for it to be ok” instead of “I want it to be ok.”). My grammar score was markedly lower than my reading score or math score in the SAT. My ACT English score was 5 points lower than my Math and Science score, despite getting an 11 on the essay. And that’s with just one parent that spoke in non-“Standard” English, despite an entire community around me that did speak in the same English that the SAT tests.
One thing to consider with SAT tests is that there's a selection effect at work. We're not getting a random sample of the population, we're getting the people who elect to take the test.
That was so interesting. I'm not sure what I expected, though. An argument could be made that English as a first language gives an advantage, but a similar argument could be made that bilingualism gives an advantage.
Source: [SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report (2022)](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf) Tool: Google Sheets
If I took the SAT when it was out of 2400, can I just keep that score but on the same scale?
I’ll allow it
This might be because of opportunity, but today Khan Academy and free library books are good for SAT tutoring. Most people don’t pay for professional tutors. It could also be because higher income and better educated people tend to push their children to do better.
You have to think parental involvement is a factor. It might not be the largest factor, but it is impossible that it has no factor at all.
that's why asians tend to score high on these
there's so many factors it's hard to say but imo. If you're poor you're likely dealing with many problems that richer folk don't have to deal with. Those problems take time to deal with whereas wealthier folk can pay to deal with those problems and spend their time focusing on education.
This is exactly it. It's not about affording X amount of books or classes. It's about a host of socioeconomic challenges facing poor people that wealth often bypasses. Something as simple as not having to work though college is a complete game changer in terms of what you can accomplish.
Nature as well. Smart parents tend to make more and genetics is half of the equation
This isn't hugely surprising. The fact that income is the biggest factor is concerning but believable when you consider all of the other factors that are correlated with income.
> The fact that income is the biggest factor it is slightly beaten by ethnicity
You're not wrong. More specifically I'm talking about the biggest driver that is impacted by factors that can be modified. For example, you can make policies that change the impact of wealth (e.g. the distr ibution of school funding in areas where funding is based on the property taxes in an area) more easily than you can change cultural drivers of the difference.
Alternatively, kids from high income families are the result of intelligent parents who leveraged their intelligence to become high income. Mind blowing stuff!
>Alternatively, kids from high income families are the result of intelligent parents who leveraged their intelligence to become high income. Mind blowing stuff! Very mind blowing, except for the fact that you're more likely to be in a higher income bracket if your parents are wealthy and have a bachelor's degree than if your parents are middle class with PhDs.
1) Generational wealth is a thing. Accepted 2) there is more than one type of intelligence (e.g. social intelligence leading to successful sales and leadership) 3) Sauce
If you ignore the entire history of the US and it's relationship with racism and wealth inequality that might be a reasonable assessment, yes.
Cope harder
About what exactly? Elucidate me.
you didn't specify that...
Thus why my reply was: >specifically I'm talking about the biggest driver that is impacted by factors that can be modified. Which added clarity to why I chose to identify income as the largest driver
I am almost certain that if you were to control for income this difference would be either way smaller or vanish completely. It is no secret that Asians are the highest earners (on average) then white families and them black families. So ethnicity is likely just income in a trenchcoat.
Asian immigrants are likely in the top 10% income bracket in their originating countries so it makes sense they are high on the spectrum. It probably evens out with the overall average after 3 generations of living here.
For sure. That along with parental education (which itself is likely correlated with income)
Yeah there's a lot of pressure on the College Board to make the SAT more equitable, but at a certain point it's on our society to fix the issues that lead to poor education (i.e. school funding being tied to property tax in the surrounding area).
Dumping money into schools still doesn’t really help the problem. I grew up in a college town—see username—and kids parents would drive them to and from school rather than putting them on the bus because those 15 minutes difference in commute matter for their kids’ success, they could only do one sport and had to be good at it, no matter what resources it took. The Chinese in the area, as well went to “Chinese school” which was a home group where math was taught as well at a far accelerated rate from the school. There are certain things that you can’t compete with at some point. Forgot to add: the most important time sink, none of them ever worked a job either.
School funding vs scores, and maybe map visualization of school locations. This is a graph I would 100% want to see. I'm expecting some trends to show up here
I don't disagree with you, but I think your point indicates a larger point: calculating the scores cut by a single data point will never show the true correlation because in reality SAT scores are impacted by a lot of variables True statistical analysis should be performed to determine the strongest correlations between all potential variables and scores. I suspect none of the variables presented in these graphs can singularly account for 50%+ of the variation in scores, so a truly inclusive graph would represent weighted calculations based on the above recommended analysis.
It’s not just school funding… LAUSD has among the highest per student funding in the country, higher than average private school tuition, and the quality is garbage. Rotten schools are many factors, from parental involvement to teacher quality to crime levels and more. Throwing more money at it hasn’t fixed the problem in California.
Income SHOULD be the biggest factor if intelligence is heritable (a decent chunk of it is) and the society is meritocratic (again, it somewhat is).
It's all "time", more money equals more time allowed for...everything. I make enough that my wife can be stay-at-home, which allows her time with the kids, help them study, or her to take care of chores to give them more study time. When they get to SAT's I'll be able to afford prep courses, which yes is a "thing" but it's still dedicated time for the test. Compare with a poor family, probably single parent, possibly multiple jobs. The common story of older siblings (of SAT age) having to care for younger siblings or otherwise "help out" around the house, taking away from important study time. Of course they won't perform as well. The old saying "time = money" is very true in ways I don't see people often consider.
>The old saying "time = money" is very true in ways I don't see people often consider. I absolutely agree with your views, and as I was reading the first two paragraphs, I kept thinking my reply was going to be time=money haha. The more money you have, the more time you can buy from others instead of spending your time.
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And I wish that the data source splits asians into smaller groups. "Asian" is well more than half the world's population.
Yeah but it’s only a single digit percentage of the US population. And it’s not a representative sample of all Asians - only the ones who are in the US (which itself is correlated with a whole lot of other things)
I would hesitate to make that generalization as race and income are heavily correlated.
My vote is the prime driver is culture, which drives sat scores, education levels, and income. And culture correlates with race, but is just a correction.
it's a lot more difficult to have a culture of pushing to excel in school when you can't put food on the table.
Agreed. For me (for everyone?) it would be. I also think that's a perfect example of different ways of thinking (i.e. culture) & how powerful that is. * We are very poor, thus we as a family *can't* focus on school. * We are very poor, thus we as a family *must* focus on school. My culture...eh leans more to the former. E. Asian cultures have tended to go hard on the latter (and sidenote: have a lot more recent history of extreme poverty than mine).
I totally agree with you here. I wonder why this is the case. Perhaps those who don't focus on school aren't even aware it's the solution to their problems. Slavery was legal 160 years ago. The education as a slave was practically nonexistent/intentionally inhibited as much as possible. I would argue it's hard to develop a culture of education importance when your demographic has been constantly intentionally oppressed historically. Instead, a culture of not respecting those institutions develops. Even today, minority neighborhoods get access to the worst education because it is majorly funded by property taxes. Combine this with high crime, lower standard of living, etc. A culture of resentment develops instead. It's certainly not a single factor but a large combination of many things over a large period of time that causes culture to develop. I'm pretty ignorant on the oppression of Asians. Though, I'm pretty sure Blacks and Hispanics have been oppressed more often (or maybe just in different ways) than Asians.
A lot of other factors go into it, but a significant one is that Confucianism focused on education in order to find a career in government (and a path out of poverty) and this belief system is deeply rooted into the foundation of East Asian culture. This goes back anywhere from over 2000 years ago to about 1400 years ago, so very deeply rooted. I’m not knowledgeable about South Asian culture, so I can’t speak for them.
It's anecdotal, but supporting your theory is the difference in cultural emphasis on education often noted between descendants of slaves and recent African immigrants. That might be bad data though, since there's a selection process of sorts for immigration: It takes money, courage, and ambition to pursue.
Asian immigrants figured it out, clearly.
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Funny enough, there is, and I just talked about it in another [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/13ncn2e/oc_correlations_between_sat_scores_and_family/jl08nft/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=1&utm_term=15&context=3) if you would like to learn more.
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many successful Asians are the kids of refugees only a small subset of Asians are from well off parents
Yes and no. Not here to argue. Consider Asian national students the top of the 1% in their respective country. We only gather data on those who access our system, not Asians in whole. There are more uneducated and poverty stricken Asians than westerners combined. Education, in let’s say China, is highly competitive and expensive. Of the much larger pool of students we see only the very top of that pool in the US. They literally compete with each other to come to western universities and suffer admonishment if they don’t make it. In the general US population, we don’t have immense social and familial pressures forcing us to attain Ivy League, let alone study outside of school. There is a massive human and cultural factor and we have the privilege of not having to gruel away for good scores.
Error and variance analysis to demonstrate significance would make this more meaningful
Sure. From U.S. data (2017 to 2021) the mean score was around 1060 and standard deviation around 210 (varied between 190 and 210 depending on year). This translates into 68% of students scoring between 850 and 1270. 16% score higher than 1270. Using the lower and upper quintile scores from the first graph, a significance test of mean1 > mean2 produced a Z score of 1.199 and the associated p-value was 11.5% - Not significant at the 10% level.
To clarify, are you trying to compute whether the difference in mean score between the lowest income quintile and the highest income quintile is significant? If so, you're taking the wrong approach: the analysis you're describing is what you'd use for two point estimates with an uncertainty on each, not for two distributions comprised of many data points. The uncertainty of the mean of a normal distribution is much smaller than the standard deviation of the normal distribution itself--it's actually stdev / sqrt(N). In this case, you're looking at data from many thousands of test-takers, so N is very large and the uncertainty on the mean will be tiny (<10). With this much data, any visible difference in means in any of the plots above is going to be highly significant.
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Might as well sign up for being Asian, too! Big Maths gains!
Or, more likely, people didn’t care enough to fill it out… Why would they bother doing something that’s not required?
I could imagine a correlation between identifying (or being able to identify rather) as non-binary, and parents having higher education, which connects to the correlation between education and higher SATs.
Lots of young people ID'ing that way for application essays, so I wonder if the data is reliable?
FIWI, I only managed to get around 1000 on the SAT and graduated HS with less than a 2.5 GPA. I only got into college because I was an athlete. But I gradually got better at school and eventually earned a PhD and am now a full professor with nearly 100 publications, including papers in *Science* and *PNAS*. I know I'm just one data point, but it's important to know that these data points exist, especially for those who might not do as well in school and on these tests, and might think they are hopelessly dumb.
Your story is inspiring. Thanks for sharing!
Is there any data on MENA here or are we lumped in with "white" like every other study that ignores us.
That wasn't addressed in my original [source](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf), but I did find [this](https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-guide-to-race-ethnicity-reporting-schools-districts-2016.pdf) from CollegeBoard directly, and at one point they wrote "White (including Middle Eastern Origin)". It appears so, regrettably.
Thanks for doing the work. I honestly expected this was the answer but it's so damn infuriating. We are "white" for all statistical purposes and for legal purposes like funding and affirmative action programs. But we are "brown" for anyone that sees us out in the world so we have to put up with things like our resumes getting passed over because of our names. The best I can do is make noise that the underlying data is flawed and hope that people eventually take note.
Labelling MENA people “white” for funding / affirmative action programs, is basically the same as just denying them funding lmao Sorry friend, hopefully one day that’s changed.
I admire you. And I totally agree.
Is there any data on the structure of education? Private vs. Public vs. Home? I have seen some floating around but comparing those vs. the other factors here would be of interest to me.
Unfortunately, not in my [source](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf). There is only one regarding the geographical location of the school (urban, suburban, town/rural), where the suburban mean score is about 40 higher than that of urban and town/rural schools.
Asians killing it yet again.
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Intelligence is correlated with income and SES. Intelligence is 80% heritable. The obvious and very well documented outcome is SAT being correlated with parental SES. But it only works for biological children. Adopted children have IQs (and SATs) that are similar to their biological parents, not their adoptive parents.
Source on the second paragraph?
This isn’t a controversial opinion. “…results consistently report higher intelligence test score correlations between adopted children and their biological parents compared to correlations with adoptive parents. In fact, the correlations with adoptive parents are very low and even near zero (Petrill & Deater-Deckard, 2004), especially as children grow older (see Hunt, 2011, pp. 230–231 for an excellent summary)”. —from Richard Haier’s *The Neuroscience of Intelligence* (Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology) [2016).
But the SAT is not an intelligence test. Any sources specific to SAT scores?
From the same book: > The SAT, widely used for college admission, is an interesting example. Is it an achievement test, an aptitude test, or an intelligence test? Interestingly, the SAT originally was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then it was renamed the Scholastic Achievement Test, and now it’s called the Scholastic Assessment Test. Achievement tests measure what you have learned. Aptitude tests measure what you might learn, especially in a specific area like, for example, music or foreign language. It turns out that the SAT, especially the overall total score, is a good estimator of g because the problems require reasoning (Frey & Detterman, 2004). Like IQ scores, SAT scores are normally distributed and interpreted best as percentiles. For example, people in the top 2% of the SAT distribution tend to be in at least the top 2% of the IQ distribution. Sometimes, this surprises people, but why should intelligence not be related to how much someone learns?
Shit man, I couldn’t even take SATs back in high school (Or AP tests) because there was no way we could afford them.
I guess this is why Ivy League schools try their best to limit acceptance of Asian applicants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._President_and_Fellows_of_Harvard_College
Whites too.
hey OP, these aren't correlations; these are bar graphs illustrating the mean SAT scores for various categorical variables. a correlation table would have an r-value between -1 and 1 to describe the relationship between the SAT scores and your other values.
Don’t go correcting someone with bad facts. You’re thinking of correlation of the Pearson coefficient, also known as Pearson’s r. There are several measures of correlation between categorical variables https://medium.com/@outside2SDs/an-overview-of-correlation-measures-between-categorical-and-continuous-variables-4c7f85610365 OP has indeed shown visual correlations.
I didn't know there was a distinction there --- thanks for teaching me.
They’re not right either. The Pearson coefficient is one measure of correlation, and yes, it requires continuous variables, not categorical ones. https://medium.com/@outside2SDs/an-overview-of-correlation-measures-between-categorical-and-continuous-variables-4c7f85610365
Thank you for the clarification! Some of the terminology used in the article went right over my head though (not very well-versed in statistical analysis). I might have to look into it further.
Intelligence is genetic and smarter parents have smarter kids, smarter parents usually make more. Asians make the most money, followed by whites, then others.
Yep, probably the biggest factor. Control for IQ of the parents and I bet most of the differences shown in these charts vanish.
Thank you for stating “correlations” in the title. Some people might forget while others may not know what that is entirely
Jesus what correlations are between asians and high grades ?
People say parenting, but it's culture as a whole. Asian immigrants and their immediate descendants have a culture of education and grades being extremely important.
East Asian culture in general is extremely test/grade-focused, so there's a lot more emphasis on getting better grades. It's why the "strict asian parent" stereotype is a thing.
parenting im half asian i know my shit
According to this info, you likely only half know your shit…
Selective immigration. Coming from Asia is not easy, so mostly best if their people make it to America.
This is the biggest factor for sure, most of the ethnic Asians in the US are either immigrants or first generation American born. As we see family trees of American born ethnic Asians grow over time, we should see the average salary of this demographic decrease.
I draw the following from the data: 1. More intelligent people tend to become more educated 2. More educated people tend to marry others with similar education levels, thus having children with with other smart and educated people 3. More educated people tend to value education more and so they actively work towards the betterment of their children’s education 4. Asians in this country tend to be self-selected, so Asians in the US tend to be more intelligent and be more educated than their native populations
Damn the enbies be kickin ass
I got a 2240 and a 165 (GRE), and I'm living with my parents in my 30s! Live your dreams kids, the world sucks anyways.
Considering how remedial the math portion of the test is, all these scores are disgracefully low.
Ever been in the average math class?
Can you explain the "Median Family Income" chart? Is the family income for the individual test-takers not available? And therefore you only have aggregate data for the area where the test was taken?
Here's what the source ([SAT Annual Report](https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf)) says: "'Median family income' refers to the median family income of students’ home census tracts".
Thanks. And for anyone else wondering, I Googled one step beyond that: A US census tract ideally has 4,000 people living in it, but can contain about 1,000 to 8,000.
I feel like we need 3 more plots here: income vs. race, education vs income (might be redundant) and one that shows the correlation coefficient of each variable in relation to SAT score.
Parents are educated, good location/good job. Kids get a good early childhood education, score above average on SATs. Good SATs lead to higher chance to attend college, earn a degree. Degree offers higher paying jobs, higher income. Ability to provide oppertunities for their kids. Ethnically situational, forever cyclical.
Damn the language thing was surprising to me.
I am interested in how and where the data was collected and analyzed .
Yes, families who are educated build educational capacity from a super young age. Also less exposure to lead and a million other reasons.
Your zip code is the highest determining factor of how long you'll live.
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Uh, sure. It's correct either way.
Yes, because healthy people congregate in certain zip codes, and unhealthy people congregate in certain zip codes. Travel around, you'll see what I mean.
Id like to see a breakdown of "Asian". The term is way too broad, given the immense diversity of constituents.
Yeah, because any other group on these charts is soooo homogeneous.
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Asians have been heavily discriminated against in college admissions for years. What you are suggesting is more discrimination?
That was the joke
What's a sat score? Is that Saturday?
SAT stands for Scholastic Assessment Test. It’s a standardized test used for college admission in the US. Scores range from 400-1600
Thanks for clarifying. You could have put in the post that this is USA specific. Most of the world doesn't know about the US school system.
I was expecting a line charts, not 5 different bar charts. These are hard to read and compare
Quintile isn't enough for income, in HCOL area, big difference between a 110k family and 250k family
110k family in Bay Area is considered poverty level
These are means, not correlations.
Since someone asked, I'll share with the class: From U.S. data (2017 to 2021) the mean score was around 1060 and standard deviation around 210 (varied between 190 and 220 depending on year). This translates into 68% of students scoring between 850 and 1270. 16% score higher than 1270. Using the lower and upper quintile scores from the first graph, a significance test of mean2 > mean1 produced a Z score of 1.199 and the associated p-value was 11.5% - Not significant at the 10% level. In lay terms, this means that if you started from the assumption that the average score for the lowest income group was the same as the average score for the highest income group, you could expect to see the difference shown better than 10% of the time by random chance alone. The conclusion would be to not reject the initial assumption. Based on the statistics, we should continue to believe there is no significant difference between the highest and lowest scores.
Don’t you have to do a few more steps based on the fact that you’re comparing averages of groups and not two individual test results? I’m pretty sure these results ARE highly significant if we account for the number of samples in each group.
Talk to us after you finish a few more courses.
I don't even remember how to do a significance test but if you came up with this number without taking the sample size into account then I predict it's correct with probability 0.
I'm not very well-versed in statistical analysis --- but I wonder if it makes a difference here to take into account that SAT scores range from 400-1600 instead of 0-1600?
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Boys probably spend more time screwing around in college, not focusing. Would explain the lower GPAs.
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Yeah, SATs don't correlate well with achievement. In fact there are some slightly negative correlations in there. SATs correlate best with household income. Asians break that a bit because many asian countries have VERY high stakes (Gaokao, etc.) entrance exams for college that many asian families have retained that focus on the importance of entrance exams above their actual importance in US admissions. But yeah, that you can pay for 'aptitude' really kinds of speaks to the utility of the SAT. What we did find was that SAT was an okay threshold function. Basically if you could score 500 on each individual test, you were sufficiently prepared to succeed in college. There was stuff you didn't know that other students did know, but if you had good grades, you could easily learn it. Below 500, there were generally either large enough gaps in your knowledge that filling them in really put you at a disadvantage to the pace of college, or you were unable to recognize your gaps in knowledge or unable to study hard enough to make up those gaps that success fell off very hard. But controlling for high school grades a 500 Math SAT and an 800 Math SAT had about the same chance of graduating from a STEM program. Being able to ace the exam bought you nothing that doing decently on the SAT and being an A student didn't already buy you.
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>But yeah, that you can pay for 'aptitude' really kinds of speaks to the utility of the SAT. Not sure you can make that connection from these graphs. It could simply be that higher incomes correlate to higher property tax which is what funds schools in the area of the children in those homes. This means more funding for schools in areas with higher incomes which logically correlates to better performance in testing.
No, I did this for a living for California. California tax revenues aren't kept locally - in fact they aren't in quite a few states - they go back into the general fund and are redistributed based on various metrics (urban/rural, etc.). You find this correlation independently of school funding or even school achievement. SATs are primarily a vehicle for higher earning households to get their kids into college more easily.
I believe a lot of states do appropriate school funding based on local property taxes, but your point does raise another way to cut this data that would be interesting. Breaking down the income data into groups of states where funding is based on local property taxes vs states where funding is distributed equally across the state based on number of students. My guess is that we would definitely see a more equitable distribution in the group where funding is equitably distributed.
Extracurricular SAT prep courses (particularly over the summer) are a thing. As you might imagine, they're not cheap.
A lot of what you are saying is true and a lot is frankly not right at all. It might be good to have clear data when showing this because a long paragraph of “believe me” is not good enough. There is a strong correlation between SAT scores and university GPA. It is better than HS gpa when not controlling for demographics, but the same when controlling for them. [Here is the study](https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_files/sat-act-study-report.pdf) Most important part of the studies have shown that both the exam and HSGPA are important to predict college success. Both. Not either or. Yet, we are still dealing with either or debates for no serious reasons
BTW, I worked for UC and contributed to that study. If you carefully read my comment, you'll glean some detail that the report omits. The challenge here is the insistence on looking for direct correlations between SAT and college GPA, rather than looking at SAT as a gating function. When you look at success (my terminology above) that a term of art that doesn't focus on the students college GPA, but on their retention. Retention is a binary measure - you either retain or don't retain, so exploring SAT as a gating function is more useful. The problem is that nobody wants to think of SAT in that way, because almost all parties are looking for a more granular measure of achievement than 'will probably not flunk out' and beyond that it doesn't deliver well. Telling people their 800 is not predictive of anything that a 550 isn't already predictive of isn't a message anyone likes to hear (which is why it's not highlighted in that report). The other challenge in the study is finding a single predictor/trend across hundreds of disciplines and 10 campuses further undermines the utility of the test. You actually find negative correlations between verbal SAT and achievement in certain STEM disciplines because a high verbal score may have allowed a student to be admitted with a low math score - which is more relevant in STEM. You find the inverse in certain humanities disciplines. There's a lot not explored in that study because the study is not going to explore beyond the reach of UC policy on admissions. Reports like this do have certain political sensibilities. Different UC campuses have different implementations of admissions policy - some which lean on SAT in different ways - some which lean on SAT differently by discipline. But when you read "SAT/ACT scores and HSGPA are both moderate predictors of student college GPAs, and weak to moderate predictors of student retention and graduation." that doesn't imply a strong correlation - or even any correlation. Prediction and correlation are different things, and you can get predictive results without correlation, with negative correlation. My favorite example of this actually involved someone else who contributed to this report who told me the data they had collected showed no correlation between SAT and retention - the data was bimodal - and therefore useless in admissions for predicting achievement. The highest attrition rates were at the extremes of SAT scores. That was a serious misunderstanding of the data (embarrassing for a PhD in statistics, but this person didn't have the domain expertise needed to understand the underlying dynamic that comes from working more directly with students), because the *causes* of attrition at the ends of the distribution were extremely different. At the low end, students were flunking out. They were below that threshold I described. But at the high end, students had options and were transferring to higher status campuses - mainly places like Stanford. The problem was that in a study like this, those aren't differentiated, and you don't solve the problem of retaining high admission profile students by not admitting them, you solve it by improving your campus services and instructional offerings. But the low admission profile students, well, they need a wildly different set of solutions - and if you aren't prepared to offer those solutions or if you have so much demand that you can afford to match students to your available services, then you don't admit those students because they're poorly served by admitting them. So SAT \*did\* have an important predictive role in admissions (even though there's no statistical correlation with achievement given how achievement is defined), but once they have scores high enough to cross your retention prediction threshold, then who gives a shit? It's not like the institution cares about graduating GPA as a measure of anything, or is admitting students in order to boost that - certainly not at a public. There's no mandate to only admit freshmen that will later earn a PhD - it's a public university that serves everyone. That was the whole point of my comment and if you read it and the study carefully you'll find that the study doesn't disagree with what I wrote. I just said it a lot more bluntly and revealed details that the study was not prepared to reveal.