Hacker News Reader

Comment by mesaframe | Hacker News Reader

> MIT students are far stronger than average and can generally skip certain elided steps that other students cannot.

They are stronger at what?

Either they know things already or they don't. If they know things already then they can skip steps and if not then they can't or can use guesswork. And that's what any other human being will do.

View on HN

They are stronger at thinking -- higher IQ for pattern matching, problem solving, and creativity. Better ability to remember something after just one or few exposures, and recognize it when it is hinted at indirectly. Better ability to visualize without being given illustrations. More able and willing to spend time and paper on working out missing details. Any or all of the above.

Source citing any or all of above properties?

http://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/MIT-SAT-scores-GPA

(First google result, I didn’t verify further)

It is admittedly only a proxy, but the entrance SAT math scores for MIT students are 770 for the 25th percentile and 800 at the 75th percentile.

Put another way: the test that is a helpful differentiator of intellectual ability of the general college population is not a good differentiator for the MIT population because a large proportion max out the scale.

Raven's progressive matrices and similar are differentiator of intellectual ability. SAT scores correspond to time spent on chair doing homework.

Wow! You really need sources to prove to yourself that MIT students are smarter on average than a typical first-year student chosen at random from any University or Community College in the US?

Not in my experience. I've met numerous MIT grads, and invariably they're smarter than the average grad from a less demanding school. Obviously that also applies to Caltech, Chicago, most Ivies, etc. But part of that equation is that the MIT alum learned not only how to survive that greater workload, but they learned more because of it. So they have a head start on several counts.

> They are stronger at what?

Lifting heavy books, of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com