[ExI] you'll never see this again

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat



 

Feel free to trawl through the data on the SAT site to confirm, but the actual top states are:

 

#1 Minnesota: 1295

#2 Wisconsin: 1291

#3 Iowa: 1275

#4 Missouri: 1271

#5 Kansas: 1260

#6 North Dakota: 1256

#7 Nebraska: 1253

#8 Kentucky: 1247

#9 Mississippi: 1242

#10 Utah: 1238

#11 Wyoming: 1230

#12 Tennessee: 1228

#13 South Dakota: 1216

#14 Arkansas: 1208

#15 Colorado: 1201

And just for fun, #16 Louisiana: 1198

 

 

 

Hi SR,

 

This is the 2019 result:

 


State

EBRW

Math

Total


Minnesota

636

648

1284


Wisconsin

635

648

1283


South Dakota

633

635

1268


North Dakota

627

636

1263


Nebraska

628

631

1260


Iowa

622

622

1244


Kansas

618

623

1241


Wyoming

623

615

1238


Mississippi

628

608

1237


Missouri

622

615

1236


Kentucky

620

612

1232


Utah

614

615

1230


Tennessee

618

602

1220


Louisiana

610

591

1200


Montana

603

596

1199

 

Minnesota did even better last year but Wisconsin is right on their tails.  Louisiana moved up a notch from 16th to 15th.  Florida dropped to 46th ranked (so I feel really dumb) but I was born in Kentucky which held at number 11. 



 

 

>…There seems to be something odd going on. A form of self-selection bias, where in states with poor educational attainment, lower level students don’t take the SAT, because they have no dreams of college…

 

>…I would be very amused by someone with a firm grasp of stats finding the correlation between various factors in the above data. Or even I might do it (badly) and share some graphs with y’all. 

 

>…SR Ballard

 

I recall now that there is lower spending per student on education in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Montana.  If you compensate for that, those four states always top the list in education per dollar.  Compensating for dollars per student drives the spendy states such as California even lower than the already pathetic 33rd place (California does not have mandatory participation in SAT (oh dear, we are so dumb.))  On the other hand… I would stack California’s elite students against any state’s elite students.  Cool a competition.  Play ball! 

 

It occurred to me we need to take into account the ACT, which is pretty similar to the SAT.  Some states use that for college admissions instead of SAT.

 

The different levels of participation is important.  It isn’t clear how to compensate for that, but I might suggest just taking the top 1% of scorers in each state and comparing elite students in each state.  If a state has only 4% of its students participating, it must put up a quarter of those who tested to get us their top 1%.

 

Here’s a thought for you.  Imagine we temporarily abandon objective measures of student performance and use the imagination.  Some correlations will be easy: high money areas will have high performing students.  That was easy.  

 

Now let’s think about population density.  The super-densely populated areas are not conducive to optimal education: inner city schools have inner city problems.  They don’t produce the most or the best scholars.  The extremely sparse areas don’t either: students have fewer opportunities because their schools are smaller, fewer classes available and so on.  So… I am theorizing (without data) that there is some optimal population density for best educational outcome.  We don’t know what that density is, but I would be interested in your speculations.

 

My best guess is the most optimal educational arrangement with regard to population density is a typical suburban neighborhood, with single-family homes but not a lot of space between them, such as one finds in any typical American suburban area.

 

Ideas please?

 

spike

 

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