Tag Archives: law-school

Quick correction to Obama’s IQ

12 Saturday Oct 2024

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After playing the decisive role in electing America’s first black President, America’s first multibillionaire black accepts her medal.

In a previous post I argued that Obama reportedly scored 43.5 on the LSAT, and that since the ratio of whites to blacks in this score range is about 99 to one, it can be deduced that his score equated to an IQ of 129, since that’s the expected ratio of whites to blacks in this IQ range.

However such ratios assume a perfectly normal curve in both races and in fact there might be more blacks with high IQs than the normal curve predicts, because like Obama, many black Americans are not only largely white genetically, but even their black ancestry is hyper-elite, descended from the most educated immigrants, and not from the slave trade.

Because these atypical blacks could skew the numbers, I decided to equate the 1980s LSAT to IQ using the same technique Ron Hoeflin used to equate Mega Test scores to IQ: score pairing.

Using data from nine people with reported scores on both the 1980s LSAT and tests with known IQ equivalencies (SAT/Mega Test), placing scores in rank order from highest to lowest and then equating scores of equal rank, I obtained the following formula for equating the tests:

IQ (U.S. norms) = [(LSAT – 41.5)/4.5](13) + 142

Applying this formula to Obama’s LSAT score of about 43.5 gives an astonishing IQ of 148 (U.S. norms); also 148 (white norms).

The notion that Obama has an IQ pushing 150 is consistent with what Lion of the Blogosphere has been arguing for years, which he based mostly on the fact that Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law. Though ironically, Obama’s LSAT IQ of 148 would actually have been below the Harvard Law average which at the time would have been about IQ 152.

However given that Harvard Law class was constructed to have an average IQ of 152, they would have regressed to the mean of all LSAT takers (IQ 116) and thus average IQ 138 (U.S. norms), and assuming Obama did not regress (since his score was a random sample of his ability and not an intrinsic property), or regressed to a much higher mean (the mean of self-made Harvard Law star Presidents who wrote first rate memoirs) he’d tower over his classmates intellectually.

However a self-proclaimed former CIA guy claims Obama scored IQ 128 on the WISC IQ test as a child, which after corrections for the Flynn effect, becomes 124. This too is a very high score, but nowhere near 148.

Assuming a 0.61 correlation between the LSAT and the Wechsler, then an LSAT IQ of 148 and a Wechsler IQ of 124 give a composite IQ of 140. Perhaps this is our single best guess.

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.