This post is a quick update on my in-depth review of group differences in the SAT, occasioned by the publication of the College Board’s reports on the SAT scores of the 2023 high school graduate cohort. Using national-level test data as well as data from selected states, I will examine how the most recent results relate to the trends that I previously identified.
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Category: Hispanic-White IQ Gap (Page 1 of 3)
This article reports racial gaps in the LSAT scores for Canada (2019-2023). By using the threshold method designed by La Griffe du Lion (2007), the standardized effect sizes are computed from the proportions of members of each groups who attain specific score ranges. Results are compared with U.S. gaps in the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores. Details of the analysis (with 2025 update) are available here.
(The data link has been updated by adding years 2024 and 2025. Moreover, the update now contains the results for LSAT gaps in 2021-2025 for the US.)
We recently published the IQ scores for major ethnic groups, based on the broadly representative Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development sample. These ethnic averages correlated very strongly (r = .90 to .94) with scholastic aptitude scores (SAT or ACT scores) based on nationally representative samples of American-born college students between the years 2012 and 2020. The aptitude scores came from the NPSAS surveys, which, unfortunately, have a limited number of ethnic classifications.
As Dalliard noted, understanding racial/ethnic differences in aptitude tests is important since it is a guide to the composition of the USA’s future cognitive elite. Since different ethnic groups have different political interests, which, in turn, shape policy, understanding the cognitive capital of ethnic groups is essential to predicting the trajectory of the USA in the coming century.
Chuck recently published the IQ estimates for almost 30 ethnic groups/subgroups in the ABCD of the 10-year old US children. 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).
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The SAT is the most popular standardized test used for college admissions in the United States. In principle, SAT scores offer a good way to gauge racial and ethnic differences in cognitive ability. This is because, psychometrically, the SAT is just another IQ test–that is, it is a set of items the responses to which can be objectively marked as correct or incorrect.[Note 1] Unsurprisingly, SAT scores correlate strongly with scores from other IQ tests (Frey & Detterman, 2004). It is also advantageous that SAT-takers are generally motivated to get good scores, and that large numbers of young people from all backgrounds take the test each year, enabling precise estimation of population means.
However, the SAT has at least two major limitations when used for group comparisons. Firstly, it is a high-stakes college entrance test, which means that it is a target for intense test preparation activities in ways that conventional IQ tests are not, potentially jeopardizing its validity as a measure of cognitive ability. Secondly, taking the SAT is voluntary, which means that the participant sample is not representative but rather consists of people who tend to be smarter and more motivated than the average.
This post will attempt to address these shortcomings. I will investigate whether racial and ethnic gaps in the SAT are best understood as cognitive ability gaps, or if other factors make a significant contribution, too. An important method here is to compare the SAT to other tests that are not subject to extraneous influences such as test prepping. Another goal of the post is to come up with estimates of racial/ethnic gaps in the test that are minimally affected by selection bias. This can be done with data from states where entire high school graduate cohorts take the SAT. Other topics that will receive some attention in the post include ceiling effects, predictive validity, and measurement invariance.
Because racial/ethnic gaps in the SAT have changed over time, an essential part of the analysis is understanding these temporal trends. In particular, Asian-Americans have performed extraordinarily well in the test in recent years. Getting a better handle on that phenomenon was a major motivation for the post. Comparisons of trends in the national and state-level results turned out to be informative with respect to this question.
The post is multipronged and somewhat sprawling. This is because the (publicly available) SAT data do not yield straightforward answers to many important questions about racial and ethnic differences. The only way to get some clarity on these issues is to examine them from multiple angles, none of which alone supplies definitive answers, but which together, hopefully, paint a reasonably clear picture. I have relegated many technical details of the statistical methods used, as well as many ancillary analyses, to footnotes so as make the main text less heavy-going. The data and R code needed to reproduce all the calculations, tables, and graphs in this post are included at the end of each chapter, or, in the case of some ancillary analyses, in the footnotes.
Transracial adoption studies, especially ones which examine the performance of adopted blacks, are lacking since the prominent Minnesota Transracial Study of Black adoptees (Weinberg et al., 1992, Table 2). To fill this gap I analyzed the HSLS data, and found that the math abilities of transracial adoptees do not depend on the adoptive parents’ race.
It’s been almost 50 years now that the famous study of Willerman et al. (1974) has been published. This study is regularly cited as one of the most convincing evidence against the hereditarian hypothesis, despite strong emphasis by hereditarians on the failure of experimental efforts to raise IQ (more specifically, g) and population differences magnifying during adolescence or adulthood due to increasing heritability with age (Jensen, 1998, pp. 333-344, 359, 474; See Malloy [2013] for a case of a stability model with respect to the Black-White gap). Caution about this study is now vindicated. The data used by Willerman also revealed a pattern: the IQ deficits related to having a Black mother seem to vanish over time (Hu, 2022). Continue reading
Given the central role that testing plays in the American educational system, most datasets that we have on racial and ethnic differences in cognitive ability include only children, adolescents, or young adults. Most of the economic and social effects of cognitive differences are, however, produced by the working age population, so it would be useful to have test scores from older adults as well. The PIAAC survey of adult skills conducted by the OECD provides excellent data for this purpose. Continue reading
Kirkegaard, E. O. W. & Fuerst, J. (2016). Inequality in the United States: Ethnicity, Racial Admixture and Environmental Causes. Mankind Quarterly 56(4).
Previously, we looked at the association between overall state-level biogeographic ancestry (BGA) and overall state-level outcomes. It was found that European BGA relative to African and Amerindian BGA was associated with better outcomes. In this paper, the analysis is extended by looking at the state-level ancestry-outcome associations individually for black and Hispanic self-identified race-ethnicity (SIRE) groups. General socioeconomic factor (S) scores were calculated for US states by SIRE groups based on three indicators. The S factor loadings were generally stable across subgroup analyses and the factor scores were stable across factor analytic extraction methods (for the latter, almost all r’s ≈ 1). For Whites, Blacks and Hispanics, there were strong correlations between cognitive ability scores and S factor scores across states (r = .55 to .78; N = 28-50). This pattern also held when all data were analyzed together (r = .86, N = 115). Furthermore, the size of the Hispanic-White and Black-White S and cognitive ability gaps strongly correlated across states (r = .62 to .69; N = 36-37). Lastly, parasite prevalence did not plausibly explain SIRE gaps in cognitive ability because gaps were smaller in more parasite-rich states (combined analysis r = -.17, N = 91). We found that climatic and geospatial variables did not correlate strongly with cognitive ability and S scores when scores were decomposed by SIRE group, but did so at the total state level, even after statistically controlling for SIRE composition.
The PDF and data file are available at Open Behavioral Genetics. You can also read the article below the cut.
Published: September 15, 2014
John Fuerst [1]
Dalliard
Abstract: The authors conducted a meta-analysis of interactions between behavioral genetic variance components (ACE) and race/ethnicity for cognitive ability. The differences between the variance components for Black and White Americans were small, despite the large average test score differences. More substantial differences were found between Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites, though results were based on only two studies. A biometric re-analysis of the CNLSY survey was then conducted and new meta-analytic results were provided. Results were discussed in light of the bio-ecological model which proposes that when the scores of subgroups are environmentally depressed, heritabilities will be likewise.
Keywords: Race, Ethnicity, Heritability, IQ, Environment, ACE model, bio-ecological model
