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No, but I will tell you a friendly likable, popular guy graduating say from University of XYZ (Insert random decent state school here IE Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Georgia, etc.) will do better than a socially inept guy graduating from Yale or Harvard.

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Due to the way that admissions work at Harvard and Yale, only people who are well rounded (unless they are the children of very wealthy alumni) get in. Your premise, with regard to these institutions is highly flawed.

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My friend's younger brother is for all intents and purposes the sterotypical nerd he goes to Yale in high school all he did was study and debate and the kid looked like he'd never seen the light of day and couldn't catch a ball to save his life. He was not remotely well-rounded.

Note: A number of kids from my high school went Ivy League and they were well-rounded to some extent HOWEVER I merely used a Yale student as an example in my previous post.

That's just disgusting! Obviously the Yale admissions people totally forged the athleticism videos and on-the-spot ball catching tests for that guy. Must have been another one of those years when Yale was really hurting for applicants. To be fair, of course, once that huge error had been made, Yale might have felt that Connecticut laws prevented them from having the Yale University Police shoot him on sight. Gov'mint interference, that's what I call it! :)

You would think that at least the Yale faculty would weed him out -- don't they have a bunch of Nobel Prize winners, and isn't there a stringent ball catching requirement for all of the Nobel Prizes? Even if the school is desperate for warm bodies in its undergrad programs, certain standards must be upheld. :)

Aren't there theories that good social skills are a form of intelligence?

And during this whole entire discussion we never defined "success".

It's kinda like comparing apples and oranges. I see Bill Gates' success as quite different than the Bush family, Clinton, and Reagan (actually you might see him as successful in TWO areas...).

I've seen the "geeky" labelled people in my high school go to college and absolutely blossom into a totally different person (one guy majored in engineering, has a great job doing what he loves, married, and is very happy....is that not success?)....and the popular, charismatic people from high school change into someone not so charismatic anymore. It's all relative, I guess......

PsychTau

What an odd argument!

IQ is not a great predicator of success anymore. We are a little more systems oriented these days. We reward plodders now vs. sheer briliance.

We seem to be talking about IQ, "academic potential". And we are also talking about Educational Extra Experience, I dare say that freshmen calculus is the same at harvard or a community college but the contacts you CAN make at those types of schools is nothing to scoff at.

And then we are talking I guess about social IQ . . as expressed by Gardner in his theories of multiple intellegences .. .

So anyway . .. it looks like y'all are just arguing for the sake of arguing with little or no merit to your arguments.

Well I guess that depends on whether you have a high number ;)

I don't believe that IQ numbers are BS at all.;)

LOL you guys are so funny. Yeah when you don't have the best grades, the best standardized test scores, the best jobs, went to the best schools, don't have high IQ's...yeah keep saying it's all empty numbers and names LOL.

I know a guy who graduated from Harvard and doesn't have the best social skills actually. He started his own hedge fund called Citadel. Now the funny thing is that he's in his 30's and is worth over $500MM and everyone who works for him is a quant geek who never makes below $100K when he graduates college.

-Rudey
--Oh hilarious.

I honestly don't know what my IQ is because I don't give enough of a crap to test it. I know that I do well in school and enjoy learning and that seems like satisfaction enough for me without having some number to boost my self esteem and try to make others appear beneath me.

IQ tests may measure something, but that thing isn't true intelligence.

When I was younger my parents refused to allow me to see my IQ score, and now, I'm glad they didn't. I don't think I ever want to know.

Same thing happened to me. In 5th grade after testing they actually told my classmates their scores but called my father in for an interview about mine. I assume it wasn't super low because, him being mean, said he didn't want to tell me to avoid giving me a big head . . I think he was just being mean . . you would have to know him . . lol.

That being said, and since I just blew my own horn . . . I am sure that my subsequent lifestyle has diminished my score by an order of magnitude.

No one is really sure what it measures lol . . because there are different factors. Shrug. All they knew was that much like the SAT's there was a certain correlation between IQ and academic success. Probably your earliest IQ scores like in grade school are the most accurate indicators of "potential". But who knows? Its just something to do.

Well... I think I would have to agree it's only POTENTIAL because I got a VERY nice score on my SATs but I didn't get good grades AT all in high school some people are just better at taking tests...

it's like James said we reward plodders now.. really anyone can get good grades if they work hard enough it has NOTHING to do with how smart you are

Even if you have a challanging major like math, or physics?

To a certain degree i think . . . we have actually triued to have aclasses that buffer the fact that some people can't recall well enough for exams. . so for example: Homework being part of your grade? Attendance? Those are freebies for plodders . . .

Well, chances are it would have been tested for you in elementary school if they thought you were gifted or some such other issue. You were probably just an average student--the people for whom IQ isn't an indicator of much.

For what it's worth, I have no idea what mine is.

I know what my IQ is, but I am not telling. :p

Bill Gates said that technically he was still on a leave of absence from Harvard.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with being a geek.

i dont think that grades do people justice. I was really smart in high school, got a scholarship that covered the cost of the majority of my education, but majored in Engineering. I thought I wanted to do that, 2nd semester I messed up grade wise. Took some classes I couldn't handle and now have not so good grades. I worked my ass off and didn't do good, so I don't know if working hard always works. And I agree with Russell. Its not fair to compare a communications major (no offense) to an engineering major.

Oh, definitely.

Of course it depends a little bit on how smart you are.

But from my ex-boyfriends who are math and engineering majors, I've seen that advanced math/physics topics aren't that hard to understand. It's all there in the book, a logical progression from step A to step B to step C . . . What's tough is remembering how to apply all of these steps in the right order and then keeping them all straight in your head. That just takes a LOT of studying and practice -- not a genius.

And as for the easy major/hard major, I don't think they exist. I couldn't pass an art class anymore than I could pass an advanced physics class. My engineer ex-boyfriend couldn't write a decent short story (my major!) to save his life. It's just that so many people have math/science blocks that they think math and science classes are very hard when they really would just take a lot of work to get past your math/science block.

Neither would my parents. They had me tested in Elementary School for gifted. It was high enough to get me into the gifted program. :) Throughout high school, I'd ask my parents what I scored and they wouldn't tell me. I look back and I'm glad that I didn't know. I really believe it's just a number just like your SAT score. You can have a high IQ and no motivation to do anything with it. Like many others have stated, I don't think IQ alone can determine how successful you are. Social skills and ambition are are a huge factor. Sometimes having a high IQ can work against you. Look at Jeffrey Dahmer and many other serial killers. They were socially inept but had IQs that were off the charts. There have been studies done that show a correlation between high IQ scores and social problems although this certainly isn't always the case.

SAT scores are linked to success your first year in college I believe. And I'd really like to know who it is that's not smart but has great social abilities to get where they are. I don't mean the people who pretty much inherit money, success, and fame/notoriety but the ones that end up making it. What do people consider a measure of intelligence? I think this is funny but maybe not really a topic for greeklife. Who knows.

And mathematical and science texts aren't just logical steps. If they are, you're taking joke classes. If I don't see another frigging proof for years I'll be happy because they pretty much tell you 1+1=2 and give you one defining statement at the end and expect you to come up with all the steps in between.

-Rudey
--And before you laugh, proving 1+1=2 was actually a page long assignment.

You're right -- the SAT is supposed to correlate with first year college grades. But it doesn't correlate with college grades in general. (If anybody is an example of that it's me! . . . but we won't get into that.)

I kinda doubt that the ex who was taking linear algebra in high school is now, as a junior in college, taking "joke classes." ;)

Granted I never got past calculus, but it seemed pretty clear that math is based on logical applications. It's a little bit intuitive but mostly just requires enough practice to know when to apply which steps. And the boys have backed me up on this. I also asked the engineer if he thought most people could do well in his classes if they studied enough and he said that most of them could, though it would take a lot of studying for a few of them (this coming from a kid who already studies too much).

This is because the current conception of intelligence isn't based on who gets the answer, it's based on who gets the answer fastest. That's why IQ tests are timed -- they they weren't, the person who finishes in 30 minutes and the person who finishes in 2 hours could easily get the same score. The faster you can figure something out the higher your IQ generally is -- but that doesn't mean that people with low IQs are too stupid to figure the same questions out. It just takes them longer.

As for whoever said that IQ scores as a young child would be the most accurate prediction of intelligence -- actually, IQ scores don't stabilize until your late teen years, so it wouldn't be out of the question for someone to score 100 on an IQ test when you were 8, 160 when you were 12, and even out at 130 by the time you were 18. Usually the variations are a little less drastic than that, though ;) -- but they still exist.

For that reason most people don't advocate IQ tests for kids because they're probably going to be pretty inaccurate in the long run.

God, the things I remember from AP psych . . .

i definitely think iq is an indicator of something. i went to a high school where admission was only based on a standardized test. if the theory held that they weren't important in success my school would definitely dispute that. beyond the usual measures of high SAT scores and college admission i was blown out the water by some of my classmates accomplishments during and after high school (i only graduated 3 1/2 years ago) . published authors, actors, paid and influential political consultants, musicians, dancers, models, math and science geniuses, international competitive magicians (yes there was more than one!) etc. i am not sure if there intelligence was a cause or affect but there was definitely a connection.

and sat's probably are an indicator. its not like if there low you'll never succeed but considering college is often a string of tests if you're good at them you'll have an easier time.

That would make sense. I mentioned grade school because at that point everyone is pretty much on "lock step" still when it comes to what they are studying. It might be a better indicator of just ability.

As you get older there become more variables and IQ will be influenced more by individual experiences . . .

Well I guess I take back what I said ... I would now argue that in High school it's a HELL of a lot easier to be a "plodder", do REALLY well grade wise, but not necessarily be that "smart" than in college. In college they generally don't have the daily homework/participation points as many classes in high school do... so yeah college is more about true "smartness" as it were...
But plodding can still get you somewhere even in college.
Because even though I am (well, was, I just graduated) a broadcast/communications major... I still had to take Chem. and I did end up taking Calculus... and although it was hard for me.. (Trust me I'm NOT a math person) if you plod... (go to office hours, seek out tutoring help provided on campus) you can end up doing well in the class.