[sudosysgen]

Standardized national exams on proficiency in math, languages, science, etc... are very different from IQ tests and only somewhat correlated with IQ, being instead much more strongly correlated with consciensciousness, and generally how good of a student you are and will be.

[whack]

It is shocking that the above comment is being downvoted, but not the comment it is responding to. Proficiency exams in specific subjects like Math/Biology/History/Literature etc are most certainly not IQ tests. Just because something rewards intelligence to some extent, doesn't make it an IQ test. Calling the GCSE History exam an IQ test would be like calling the YC application process an IQ test.

[exolymph]

Conscientiousness itself correlates with IQ.

[sudosysgen]

Yes? And? General grades still correlate more strongly with consciensciousness than IQ.

And consciensciousness is actually negatively correlated with IQ.

[thaumasiotes]

Grades show a strong influence from conscientiousness, but exam scores do not.

> And consciensciousness is actually negatively correlated with IQ.

In the same way that SAT math scores are negatively correlated with SAT verbal scores, which is to say only in thresholded samples.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.paid.2014.06.014

[sudosysgen]

Which exam scores are we talking about? Grades themselves are generally by preponderance the result of exams.

In non-thresholded samples there is still a small negative correlation, or no correlation at all. If you could show me a study thay shows big, positive correlations between intelligence and consciensciousness without thresholding I'd be interested.

[thaumasiotes]

This is completely untrue.

[sudosysgen]

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10212-011-0099-9

Personality traits are much more strongly correlated with academic aptitude than IQ is. If you disagree, you should provide a source.

[thaumasiotes]

What are you trying to illustrate with your link? There is no standardized national exam among the measures.

[sudosysgen]

Standardized national exams are normally very highly correlated to academic ability as represented by grades by the same teacher. Actually, where I live, this is essentially the explicit goal of the national exams - they then generate a score that normalizes the difficulty of each teacher and use it both for selection and to evaluate the accuracy of the exam and update it next year.

The data from which I learnt this isn't public AFAIK, but I'm sure similar studies exist for other countries.

[thaumasiotes]

The published literature doesn't support your claims, but that's OK because you have private data which you find more palatable? This is a fun combination with your posture of

> If you disagree, you should provide a source.

[sudosysgen]

Well, I did five minutes of googling, and found a public article on the subject : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2333-8504....

>One index of that result was an augmentation in the correlation between the NELS Test and high school grade average from .62 to a multiple correlation of .90 based on the test plus 31 additional variables and corrections for unreliability and grading variations (see p. 72) [p. 105]

Here you go : test scores have a correlation of .9 with grades once you account for the grading difficulty of individual teachers and their unreliability (which is done by multiple national exams in the final synthetic grade). This means that they are excellent as a proxy for academic achievement, which can be restated as the following hypothetical : "what would be the grade of the students if they were to all be graded by the same, reliable teacher?"

Generally I think that the burden of proof on the statement "are exams better at predicting grades than IQ tests" lies on the negative, for the obvious reason that grades are generally composed of exams.

Also, the really cool thing with this is that you can also the reverse - after the teacher has had all of his students graded on the exam, you have all of the variables and can predict exam scores with a correlation of .9 (and thus general academic achievement with a correlation of .81), which means that you can avoid dispensing national exams at every level of schooling and simply use grades. You can even use this data later in college to evaluate how harshly a college professor is grading, and use that to generate much better grades in college!