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?