I was going through the GEEKEND blog's newest entries and came across this little jewel by Jay Gamon. Jay found an article that was written by students at CalTech which purports to corelate your SATs to your favorite books. As Jay puts it:
Here is an insipid little chart published by a CalTech student that purports to correlate SAT scores with favorite books, effectively determining which are the books for the "dumb" kids, and which tomes are hallmarks of the "smart" students. Our friends at SFSignal have pared down the list to include just the sci-fi and fantasy entries. Get ready to be insulted.
Oh my, Jay rips into this like a starvin dog into a can of alpo. Really, I thought that reading the words of say Dr. Asimov and his pals went well towards improving my iq.... The article is really worth a read. Give em hell Jay!
Here is an insipid little chart published by a CalTech student that purports to correlate SAT scores with favorite books, effectively determining which are the books for the "dumb" kids, and which tomes are hallmarks of the "smart" students. Our friends at SFSignal have pared down the list to include just the sci-fi and fantasy entries. Get ready to be insulted.
Oh my, Jay rips into this like a starvin dog into a can of alpo. Really, I thought that reading the words of say Dr. Asimov and his pals went well towards improving my iq.... The article is really worth a read. Give em hell Jay!
4 comments:
Obviously, the students who wrote the original garbage never studied (or passed) introductory research methodology...
Amen Shaun! The methodology is rather humorous. Sadly it was not a group of freshmen but a Caltech graduate student in Computation and Neural Systems who came up with this "study". Demonstrating how meaninglessly his studies are, his "Music that Makes You Dumb" list finds listening to Beethoven correlates to a mean SAT of 1371 but "classical" music averages 978.
I am with you both on this piece of crap. I honestly first thought it was an underclassman prank, but now it appears a re-wrap of phrenology and touted by modern day bigots. I have little use for elitism, however, it doesn't take much of a stretch to know I am a far better person than anyone that bought into this. I'm sorry... no....no I am not, I know anyone that reads is a brighter and far more agile thinker than one that does not.
Wolfkahn,
A grad student???
In 'Computation & Neural Systems'
Oh my...
(I wonder what the mean SAT of students in that discipline area are?)
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