Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
&gt; “A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a good match for that particular test at that point in time,” says Matthews.<p>If Matthews is correct that scores are transient, then we&#x27;d expect test scores to have little to no predictive ability. In other words, we&#x27;d expect the rate of career achievement among high test takers to be approximately equal to the rate of achievement among low test takers.<p>But this claim is directly contradicted by actual evidence:<p>&gt; Follow-up surveys—at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48—backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.