By Steve Sailer
08/07/2023
From Human Varieties
A remarkable correlation between IQ and SAT scores across ethnic groups
Chuck recently published the IQ estimates for almost 30 ethnic groups/subgroups in the ABCD of the 10-year old US children.
I’ve been writing about the 10,000+ sample size Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study for a few years, such as here and here and here. We are headed into a new dark age where this kind of data will only be available to researchers who swear to only find politically correct results in it, so we might as well get all the mileage out of the ABCD that we can. Here’s Chuck’s table I posted in Taki’s Magazine a while ago:
The post was an astounding hit. However, a few commenters complained that the sample sizes of some subgroups were small. I responded that if one could replicate the values and the rank order, one would have more confidence in these estimates. And this is exactly what we did here (full result available).
To replicate the ABCD analysis, we investigated the SAT data from the NPSAS:UG by using the NCES datalab.
The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study looks into college students every few years. Thus, these SAT and/or ACT average scores are just for people in college in 2016 and 2020, not for everybody who took an admissions test in high school or a nationally representative sample of young people. So, it’s higher skewed than the ABCD, which attempts to be a nationally representative sample of 10-year-olds.
But Meng Hu sets both so that the non-Hispanic white average is 100 with a standard deviation of 15, like with IQ scores.
Two years were available for ethnicity comparisons, 2016 and 2020. Total sample sizes for SAT-2016 and SAT-2020 are, respectively, 122,030 and 145,490. …
The sample was restricted to US born students. The SAT variable is a composite of the math and reading-writing sections. The SAT scores are converted into an IQ scale by using the SD of the total group (the only estimate that was available). The table below displays IQ estimates from SAT scores and IQ scores from the ABCD NIH Toolbox battery as well as their differences.
| Averaged SAT | ABCD IQ | SAT-ABCD IQ Difference | |||||
| IQ-metric | N-est. | NIH-IQ | N | SAT-2016 | SAT-2020 | SAT-average | |
| White & Asian Indian | 109.42 | 323 | 109.62 | 44 | -0.20 | -0.20 | |
| Chinese | 108.55 | 2469 | 111.32 | 81 | -3.80 | -1.81 | -2.77 |
| White & Chinese | 108.16 | 804 | 105.16 | 77 | 5.06 | 1.99 | 3.00 |
| Korean & Japanese | 107.52 | 1198 | 110.05 | 33 | -2.57 | -2.50 | -2.53 |
| Asian Indian | 107.11 | 1742 | 102.42 | 53 | 3.44 | 5.55 | 4.69 |
| Mixed Asian | 104.92 | 1208 | |||||
| White & Korean/Japanese | 104.28 | 1435 | 106.65 | 78 | 0.25 | -3.57 | -2.37 |
| White & Vietnamese | 102.02 | 295 | |||||
| Vietnamese | 101.57 | 1473 | 98.69 | 24 | -0.90 | 6.00 | 2.88 |
| White & Filipino | 100.96 | 921 | 105.07 | 60 | -3.74 | -4.27 | -4.11 |
| White | 100.00 | 131370 | 100.00 | 5858 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Filipino | 98.88 | 1447 | 103.53 | 51 | -2.05 | -7.12 | -4.65 |
| White & Pacific Islander | 98.45 | 1491 | 99.66 | 25 | 0.81 | -2.09 | -1.21 |
| Other Asian | 98.41 | 2137 | 102.46 | 52 | -4.68 | -3.48 | -4.05 |
| White & Native American | 96.74 | 3360 | 95.63 | 144 | 3.11 | 0.12 | 1.11 |
| White Cuban | 95.79 | 993 | 91.67 | 151 | 5.24 | 2.47 | 4.12 |
| NH Black & White | 94.68 | 6033 | 91.63 | 418 | 4.46 | 2.37 | 3.05 |
| White Puerto Rican | 94.37 | 3415 | 90.98 | 133 | 3.90 | 2.78 | 3.39 |
| Other Hispanic | 93.14 | 10567 | 91.29 | 518 | 1.79 | 1.91 | 1.85 |
| Pacific Islander | 92.96 | 912 | 96.06 | 17 | -3.61 | -2.76 | -3.10 |
| Mixed Hispanic | 92.30 | 4750 | |||||
| White Mexican | 91.90 | 19596 | 91.78 | 775 | 0.32 | -0.10 | 0.12 |
| Native American | 91.47 | 1802 | 89.22 | 39 | 2.99 | 1.50 | 2.25 |
| Other Cuban | 90.91 | 170 | 89.69 | 30 | 1.80 | 0.12 | 1.22 |
| Black & Other Puerto R. | 90.85 | 1273 | 87.69 | 90 | 3.55 | 2.82 | 3.16 |
| Black immigrant | 90.46 | 5824 | 89.74 | -0.14 | 1.96 | 0.72 | |
| Other Mexican | 90.39 | 3763 | 88.79 | 460 | 1.43 | 1.80 | 1.60 |
| USA Black | 89.16 | 23974 | 82.98 | 1499 | 6.05 | 6.37 | 6.18 |
In general, the ABCD nationally representative sample of 10-year-olds has greater ethnic dispersion of scores because the undergraduate sample has more restriction of range: the SAT scores of non-undergraduates aren’t measured.
Thus the big difference between the two data sources is that USA Black (i.e., non-Hispanic, non-immigrant plain vanilla black Americans) average 10.8 points less as undergraduates than white undergraduates, but 17 points less among the nationally representative sample than the whites in the ABCD sample.
This suggests a simple explanation for why college-educated white Americans tend to underestimate the importance of the white-black IQ gap. It’s bigger on the streets than on the campuses.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.