SAT Predicts Life Achievement, IQ

Hat tip to Kevin of Intelligence Testing blog for pointing to a study by Vanderbilt University psychology researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow, along with Rose Mary Webb (Appalachian State University) and April Bleske-Rechek (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire), high SAT scores at young ages can reveal who will be the high achievers of the future. Lubinski and Benbow have been working on this project for decades now, and have substantiated their findings repeatedly.

The findings are reported in the article "Tracking Exceptional Human Capital Over Two Decades" in the March issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society).

The study compared 380 young SAT takers and 586 graduate students. Students under age 13 who scored in the top .01 percentile of their age group on the SAT in the early 1980s were considered having exceptional cognitive abilities; 20 years later (2003-2004), these students were surveyed on their education, career, success, and life satisfaction. Graduate students who had been enrolled in a top-ranked engineering, mathematics, or physical science program in 1992 also took the survey in 2003-2004.

....The results of this longitudinal study on the ability of the SAT to predict long-term achievement and life satisfaction come as other research is demonstrating the potential flexibility of the SAT to be an accurate measure of IQ.

The material in italics is extracted from a Science Blog report. Follow the link at the beginning of the italics for the full report. A word of caution on the Science Blog: I have caught them deleting comments that disagreed with the opinions of the author of individual reports. This is not illegal, but in the blog world, it is not considered ethical unless there is an excellent reason.

Update 2 March 2006: Ben Sullivan of the Science Blog offers a comment here, to clarify the phenomenon of "disappearing comments."

As I state in the followup comment, I would appreciate if any readers would notify me of any censorship of comments on any of the blogs that I link. Removing spam is one thing--we all hate spam. Censorship of ideas is something else, and it happens all too often on political blogs. It should certainly not be happening on science blogs, although sometimes it does.