Tag Archives: Harvard

Harvard Law > Harvard undergrad IQ gap in the 1980s/90s

08 Tuesday Oct 2024

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I’ve blogged about this before but I wanted to revisit it now that I have better data.

Harvard undergrads 1991: SAT IQ 147; expected WAIS IQ 129

Harvard undergrads from the class of 1995 (and thus took their SATs around 1991, had a mean SAT score of 1390. National norm studies suggest that if all American 17-year-olds, not just the college-bound elite, had taken the SAT in this era, the mean would have been 787 with a standard deviation (SD) of 193. Thus by general population standards, 1390 was +3.12 or IQ 147 (U.S. norms); 147 (white norms).

However because Harvard students were selected by SAT scores, they were selected in part for SAT overperformance. We saw this with Dartmouth students who scored only about 61% as well on the WAIS IQ test as they did on the SAT. Assuming the same would have happened to Harvard students circa 1991, instead of scoring 47 points above the U.S. mean, on the WAIS they’d score 47(0.61) = 29, so IQ 129 (U.S. norms); IQ 128 (white norms). Indeed a study by Harvard scholar Shelley H Carson found that in the early 21st century, Harvard students averaged around 130 IQ on the abbreviated WAIS-R and that was BEFORE deductions for inflated norms.

Harvard Law students 1980s: LSAT IQ 152; Expected WAIS IQ 137

I could not find the mean LSAT scores of Harvard Law students from the same era, but I did find a source (see table 7 of this paper) that the top 19 law schools in the 1980s had mean LSAT scores of 40 to 45 out of 48. It is likely that Harvard Law was the law school with a 45 point mean. My own preliminary research suggests that a 45 out of 48 on the 1980s LSAT equated to an IQ of 152 (U.S. norms); IQ 152 (white norms).

They too would regress to the mean except instead of regressing to the general U.S. mean of 100, LSAT takers are pre-selected by university so they would have regressed to the much higher mean of LSAT takers which would have been 116.

  • Average Harvard Law student WAIS IQ = (LSAT IQ – 116)(0.61) + 116
  • Average Harvard Law student WAIS IQ = (152 – 116)(0.61) + 116
  • Average Harvard Law student WAIS IQ = (36)(0.61) + 116
  • Average Harvard Law student WAIS IQ = 138 (U.S. noms); 137 (white norms)

Some readers might argue that if the WAIS-SAT correlation is 0.61, the WAIS-LSAT correlation should be lower, given it’s a more restricted sample, however surprisingly, people who take graduate school admission tests appear to be at least as variable as the general population.

Some readers may wonder why I regress Harvard Law students to the LSAT population when I don’t regress Harvard undergrads to the SAT population but rather the general population. The reason is, above about the top 1%, all members of the general population took the SAT, so regressing them to the SAT population would have been redundant.

Conclusion

Even though the Harvard Law > Harvard undergrad IQ gap was only 5 points when measured by the tests used to select them respectively (LSAT IQ 152 vs SAT IQ 147); the gap should nearly double if they were given a test independent of the admission process (WAIS IQ 137 vs WAIS IQ 128). This is a reminder that we should never measure the IQ of a group by the test used to select them and consistent with the general rule that law students are about 10 IQ points smarter than undergrads, though unlike Harvard, at a typical university circa 1990, the respective scores would have been around 120 vs 110.

More data on Bill Gates’s social IQ

17 Sunday Nov 2019

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For years this blog has has discussed Gates’s spectacular verbal and math IQ. But what about other parts of his intelligence?

Evidence of Gate’s social IQ can be gleaned from his performance at poker (a game involving bluffing and reading people). The late Paul Allen writes:

I spent more time with Bill at Currier House before his nightly Poker games with the local cardsharps. He was getting some costly lessons in bluffing; he’d win three hundred dollars one night and lose six hundred the next. As Bill dropped thousands that fall, he kept telling me, “I’m getting better”. I knew what he was thinking: I’m smarter than those guys.

From pages 71-72 of Idea Man by Paul Allen

Were the other players letting Gates win the first night so he would bet double the next night, or was he legitimately winning only half as often as he lost? Let’s assume the latter, in which case was likely a worse poker player than 2/3rds of the Harvard poker club.

On an abbreviated version of the WAIS-R, a sample of 86 Harvard students averaged IQ 128. Commenters Swank and pumpkinhead have argued this is an underestimate because the sample may not have been representative. On the other hand the WAIS-R norms were 25 years old, so the Flynn effect predicts IQ 128 would have been an overestimate. Error in both directions likely cancels each-other out, making 128 perhaps a plausible estimate.

Now if we assume Poker skill (like other measures of Theory of Mind) only correlates 0.43 with conventional measures of IQ, the Harvard poker club like averaged 28(0.43) + 100 = 112 in Poker IQ, and if Gates was worse than 2/3rds of them, his “Poker IQ” was likely only 107 (assuming similar practice, or assuming all had enough practice to reach diminishing returns).

So now we have two very rough estimates of Gates’s social IQ. “Fashion IQ” was 84 and “poker IQ” was 107. Both measures are of highly questionable validity, so unlikely correlate more than 0.5, thus a composite measure of his social IQ might be very crudely estimated at 95 which is extremely low compared to his his verbal and math IQ, but only slightly below the U.S. mean of 100.