Excel on the SAT, Excel in Life

Personally, I know what a Harvard or Ivy League education can do for a person: it opens doors – heaps of them.

I have plenty of anecdotes and I share them in education seminars all the time.  However, many people like pure, concrete statistics and I was on the look out for them earlier today.  While searching though, I landed on (Harvard) Professor Steven Pinker‘s article in the New Republic titled “The Trouble with Harvard: The Ivy League is Broken and only  Standardized Tests can fix it.”   It was an interesting read and had more esoteric vocabulary than I’ve seen in a single article in a long time.  Thus, a quizlet list dedicated to it.

Half way through the read though, I found a very interesting find for anyone in the Test Preparation industry:

Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have tracked a large sample of precocious teenagers identified solely by high performance on the SAT, and found that when they grew up, they not only excelled in academia, technology, medicine, and business, but won outsize recognition for their novels, plays, poems, paintings, sculptures, and productions in dance, music, and theater. A comparison to a Harvard freshman class would be like a match between the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals.

Does that mean if you get a 2400 that you’ll become one of the world’s richest on Forbes or win a Nobel Peace prize?  Well, it’s not guaranteed, but your chances are definitely higher according to Benbow and Lubinski.

Frankly, in my time in the field, I have definitely found that students who are able to break through and learn what it takes to score well in the 4 hour test are definitely talented students. They are achieving this while simultaneously surviving at some of the world’s top schools in many cases.  Hence, this little quote taken from Pinker’s essay definitely seems rational.

I have not doubt that many of my students will lead the world some day.

By the way, another great excerpt from the same article shows that Harvard actually wants these “leaders” and not some students who excel at a test or in school:

At an orientation session for new faculty, we were told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world,” and that “We want to read about our student in Newsweek 20 years hence”…