/snerk/

…yep.

Witzelsucht, it’s been really fun having you drop in and manfully explain things to women who are at least as–if not more–intelligent as you. But the conversation is over.

ETA: It’s ironic that you’d accuse us of oversensitivity when you came here looking for a lifetime achievement award from the Internet League for the Defense of Larry Summers.

Baraqiel, your “wah-waaah” is making my day. I keep saying it to myself and giggling. Some good has come of this, is my point.

Baraqiel, several hours from now I will answer all of your points and errors.

BeckySharper, I hope you’ll have some answer as to why fewer males than females are in college, other than because of the obvious: anti-male gender bias.

SarahMC, as Sharper said, please don’t flash your SATs at me. I don’t care at all to know them.

Besides, we’d just be accused of “emoting”. He is clearly the kind of man who, when faced with an entirely logical argument from a woman, resorts to chauvinist stereotypes to save face.

And yet, I still disagree with you! How shocking!

Financial success: also a perfect indicator of intelligence. I’m so glad that no really smart people died poor, like Nikola Tesla.

“The College Board doesn’t necessarily always tell the truth about why they do things. They are doing an inherently political job so can’t be completely straightforward.”

From your link: “But in 1990, because of uncertainty about the SAT’s ability to function as an intelligence test, the name was changed to Scholastic Assessment Test. In 1993 the name was changed to SAT I: Reasoning Test (with the letters not standing for anything) to distinguish it from the SAT II: Subject Tests.[24]”

“But they keep insisting that people take them, and get very high scores:”

When I was applying to college, I read several books about the admissions process, such as The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg, which explores in detail what elite colleges and universities are thinking when they design their admissions procedures. One element of that process is attracting a high number of applicants but being able to disqualify many of those applicants quickly because they don’t have enough time to read all applications in detail. The SAT is helpful in this. Top colleges and universities get enough applicants with high SAT scores that they can make their classes up entirely from that group, and their rankings and prestige go up because they have a lot of applicants that they reject. The SAT acts like a disqualifier, not a qualifier: having a good SAT score won’t overcome a bad transcript, bad rec letters, or a bad essay. It is the least important thing they look at. It just acts to reduce the number of applications they consider carefully.

You seem really invested, however, in proving that the SAT is correlated with intelligence. Clearly this is in dispute. Do you have any other evidence to promote your claim that the intelligence of men has a wider variability than the intelligence of women? The link you provided cites “conventional wisdom” (not evidence) and then more test scores without ever proving that these test scores correlate exactly with intelligence, perhaps because “intelligence” is not a simple, fixed, measurable quantity.