[toots]

There was actually some recent study that found that the people who are the most clueless are also the most clueless about their own lack of ability. That is, the more competent someone is, the less confident they are in their abilities, because they better understand the limits to their own abilities.

As for SATs predicting intelligence... well far be it for me to equate intelligence to IQ, but as it happens, I helped conduct a study at a private university where we tested 10% of the student population, administering a full WAIS-III to each of them (all subtests, all optional items), and we had access to their SAT, and where applicable, ACT scores.

The usefulness of this study was limited by the subject selection - being at a mid-tier private college, there was an obvious bracketing of the IQ and SAT scores we saw (lower scores probably didn't get in to this college, higher scores probably went elsewhere).

The correlation between the various IQ scores (as the WAIS-III produces three major scales - verbal IQ, performance IQ and composite "Full Scale" IQ - as well as four other indexes) and the SAT and ACT scores were significant, but not hugely so. I ought to dig them out again to refresh my own memory.

Anyway, I seem to recall ACT scores actually being a better predictor than SAT.

But, the thing about SATs are that they're just supposed to predict performance in college, and in specific, the first year performance in college. Historically, they've tended to fail to some degree in this area in that they fail to predict the fact that on the average, women do better than men in their first year in college, although I attribute that factoid to amount of partying.

I'll see what I can find.