"120% worth it" doesn't make any sense! Good job, prepme.com.

Well, worth it is a binary construct any way - either it's worth it or its not. He could mean that it gives 120 % return - your learning value is 120 % that of the financial cost.

He must not have studied it all that well..
>> ^Fusionaut:

"120% worth it" doesn't make any sense! Good job, prepme.com.

Directed by Sam Kauffmann, faculty in the college of communication at Boston University.

How much you want to bet that this video is going into his daughter's college application packet?

Moving this video to GeeSussFreeK's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

All school and jail = unfair.

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 5:48am PDT - promote requested by longde.

@GeeSussFreeK
"The claim of "blue states smarter than red states" is more a racist claim if it is based on SAT results as red states also contain a higher % of minorities."

If that claim were based on SAT scores, then it would be an invalid claim because SAT scores reflect your household income, not your intelligence. It wouldn't be racist.

But it's based on IQ scores: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v377/andrewallison/us-elections.jpg. IQ scores themselves aren't reflective of much except how academically inclined you are, as they were designed by academics to test how much like them everybody else is.

I only took two/three SATs and a lot of PSATs (did very bad on my first one!).

*teens *money

Adding video to channels (Money, Teens) - requested by ant.

@messenger

So wait, I think that is a round about way of saying you still agree with me (as the poor are less likely to be academically inclined in the same way they are less likely to take SAT prep-courses)!

I actually tested higher in the English portion than the maths, and I KNOW I am much stronger in maths than englishesss'ses

I have a feeling that deep down I agree with you on the fundamentals of this issue, but not with those words. The poor are no less likely to be academically inclined, (and by inclined, I mean, have a natural affinity or aptitude for it). They'll have less opportunity and probably less encouragement from their family and friends and so there's less chance they'll succeed or even try, but they'll have no less inclination.

Standardized tests mostly test a student's ability to take standardized tests, which, ironically, after their SATs, they'll probably never have to do again in their lives. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

So wait, I think that is a round about way of saying you still agree with me (as the poor are less likely to be academically inclined in the same way they are less likely to take SAT prep-courses)!
I actually tested higher in the English portion than the maths, and I KNOW I am much stronger in maths than englishesss'ses

On second viewing, I have to take issue with some of the statistics because it is claimed that there is a perfect linear correlation both between household income and SAT score, and between length of essay and SAT score.

First, any claims of linear correlation between any two items is highly suspect. Almost nothing is ever linear. An 'S' curve is far more probable. This would imply that billionaire students outperform millionaire students by the same factor millionaire students outperform completely broke students.

Second, since these two "linear" correlations both correlate to the same factor, SAT score, this means that there must also be a linear correlation between them as well. That's to say, there's a perfect linear correlation between household income and how long your essay is. So, the richer you are, the longer you like to write your essays. That's highly unlikely.

Being all into numbers, I put the numbers in the video into my own spreadsheet and discovered that the graph for the number of words/SAT score is of course not linear. They appear very much correlated, but not linear like the graphic showed. That's the fault of the video editor, not the MIT professor, because he never says anything about linear correlation.

As long as at least one of the factors doesn't correlate linearly (and I think we know that neither do), it's possible there is still a correlation between income and length of essay, but not necessarily a causative relationship. It's more likely that buried in the income statistic is the level of the student's English -- the poorer you are, the more likely it is your first language isn't English, so the more likely you are to write a shorter essay, and drag your economic demographic down.