PrepScholar Blog

Average in statistics contains the following mean, median, mode, range and more. This (Not trying to be mean or saying you are trying to do this) pseudo-intelligent attack on average because they heard a cool attack on mean when it comes to income inequality isn't pertinent to speaking about above and bellow average.

Real world example: It is still an non-measurable skill set.

> so the distribution would still be skewed and the average would still be different from the median value

You also mixing up vocabulary your still taking average = mean BUT average also means median.

Here is real world ranking of skills (Math, Science, English and Reading) http://blog.prepscholar.com/act-percentiles-and-score-rankings

Once again what scores are you comparing? When I went to Graduate School I had to do GRE and MAT test and I needed to be over 70% percentile on the test just to be average in my field of study (Theology (highest of all fields of study while Education had one of the lowest scores which makes me laugh) This had HUGE implications on my later PhD program acceptance. I couldn't say I was above average in my field because I scored really high. I had to be better then well over 75% of the people taking the test in my field of study. Just because there are a ton of beginners that start and leave that doesn't mean that there isn't a middle and that middle ground will have great skills above the learners. I counter the argument on this paper discounting average developers…

> I'm sorry if I don't put much trust in third hand stories like this, it's easy for them to be blown out of proportion.

Fair enough, but consider the new SAT "Adversity" score[1]. Is that not essentially the same thing, but on a larger scale? It's still reducing the "vector" that oppression is supposed to be (from an intersectionality perspective) to a "scalar" value that is useful for sorting people into a hierarchy.

With regard to my first point, consider the NYT opinion piece arguing against the Adversity score[2]. The author spends the first two paragraphs establishing his own adversity/lack of privilege before he begins to actually make an argument. I don't think there's anything wrong with him doing so, and I think it's rhetorically effective, but do you think his opinion would be given a platform if he did not have that adversity score?

> My experiences, as a cis-het-white-affluent person would disagree. ;)

Perhaps because you benefit from (in Paul Graham's words) "orthodox privilege"? That is, your ideas are not questioned on the basis of your identity because they are the "right" opinions[3]. For someone to question the orthodoxy, they must first establish their own adversity or risk being discounted (or worse).

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[1]https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-adversity-score Curiously, a '0' means "most hardship" and a "100" means "least hardship", which is the inverse of what you would…

> cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain

What? Most of the SAT is evaluating high school-level math, writing, and reading skills. It's not like they're asking you to memorize historical dates or names or poems or formulas. Maybe the relatively narrow part of the test on vocabulary falls into this category, but even those words are almost entirely things you'll just pick up if you like reading books. And, now that I'm looking into it, only 10 out of 52 questions in the reading section are even about vocabulary [1]. You can skip 9 of them and still get a 700 on reading/writing [2]. Assuming you get an 800 on math, that's a 98th percentile total score and a 90th percentile on reading/writing alone [3], with almost no vocabulary prep.

I agree about the high pressure aspect, there doesn't seem to be a good way around that.

[1] https://www.kaptest.com/study/sat/whats-tested-on-the-sat-vocabulary/

[2] https://blog.prepscholar.com/how-many-questions-can-you-skip-for-a-good-sat-score

[3] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings

You can often tell someone's age by whether or not they know analogies in this format. It used to be a staple of standardized testing on logical deduction.

A : B :: C : D

Is read as

A is to B as C is to D. The reader is meant to understand the relationship between A and B and how it's similar to the relationship between C and D.

An easy one might be,

basketball : hoop :: hockey puck : net

But they can get quite challenging. And with multiple choice answers present in standardized testing, you often have to understand the complex relationships between many abstract concepts, and evaluate that the abstractions are of a similar type or degree.

They're actually kind of fun.

Here's an example taken from [1] (the source also has excellent discussion as to why they were removed) :

PALTRY : SIGNIFICANCE ::

A. redundant : discussion
B. austere : landscape
C. opulent : wealth
D. oblique : familiarity
E. banal : originality

Pick the correct answer A-E.

[1] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-analogies-and-comparisons-why-removed-what-replaced-them

As a native english speaker, the earlier phrase ("tantivy is to toshi as lucene is to elastic search") is easier for me to understand. I find your phrase a bit harder to understand, but it looks like just the kind of reorganization other languages do structure wise -- I don't know how to express it in proper grammatical terms, but the way the prepositions are swapped around makes it seem like native english words but with a non-english structure.

It might have to do with the use of Analogy questions in the SAT (a standardized test all but required for high school students wanting to attend good colleges in America), though it looks like they've been removed?[0].

"_____ is to ___ as ____ is to ______" was the verbatim format of those test questions.

[0]: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-analogies-and-comparisons-why-removed-what-replaced-them

> Things got tense over the years when they realized we did it faster / better than they did.

Having lived most of my life in the Midwest, and about six years in Silicon Valley, I had to agree with this. There are smart people everywhere, but I've found above-average intelligence is somehow common in the Twin Cities area. (I know that's mathematically problematic.) There are a lot of unusually smart people living in the Twin Cities. I didn't know that was weird until I lived elsewhere.

EDIT:

A source with some imperfect data: https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-by-state-most-recent

And this, which puts Minnesota's average IQ at #5 and North Dakota at #3 among the 50 states: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-by-state