Hacker News Reader

Comment by parsecs | Hacker News Reader

Just wondering, as someone currently preparing for SAT - why is it so easy to drastically improve one's performance on standardized tests if they predict IQ? My score was pretty mediocre (due to a year of slacking off during COVID) but after some practice I improved it significantly - does that mean my IQ is greatly increasing as well?

I know of some very, very clever people who do not perform well, and the opposite too.

View on HN

"SAT scores are predictive of IQ" is not the same as saying "if an individual gets a higher SAT score than another person they have a higher IQ than that person". If however you had a group of 100 people that had a fairly higher score, it is very likely they would have a higher mean IQ than a group of 100 people with a lower score. Nor is it the same as saying "the SAT is a perfect IQ test". A perfect IQ test, one that gives an individual the same score every time, and ranks everyone along an unquestioned scale, is likely impossible.

> why is it so easy to drastically improve one's performance on standardized tests

I'm going to guess you're gains plateau or you get to a near-perfect score pretty quickly. The gains you're seeing are just familiarity with the test.

How can some people keep improving year after year on these tests, though? They don't fit into your possible options.

Do you mean the same person gets better year over year? They learned and matured as a student.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com