From Isis: "Can we all agree that Tierny pulled this completely out of his ass? Someone who scores in the top 99.9% of an aptitude test is more likely to get tenure than someone who scores in the top 99.1% in the seventh grade? Really?"
Actually, Tierney isn't necessarily wrong here- he's almost certainly right and Isis wrong on this one. JHU, like Duke, has decades of 7th grade data and there's strong evidence that the top 99.99%ile is significantly more likely to earn a doctorate and get tenure than the top 99.5%ile(I forget which journal the paper was in, but it can probably be found online by searching for "CTY" or "SET" or "Study of Exceptional Talent"). It seems probable that the same applies to 99.9% vs. 99.1%, though the differences would be less stark.
The more interesting studies are, of course, the ones which compare male and female students in countries where gender norms are less rigid.
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chiming
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Date: 2010-06-12 08:43 am (UTC)From:Actually, Tierney isn't necessarily wrong here- he's almost certainly right and Isis wrong on this one. JHU, like Duke, has decades of 7th grade data and there's strong evidence that the top 99.99%ile is significantly more likely to earn a doctorate and get tenure than the top 99.5%ile(I forget which journal the paper was in, but it can probably be found online by searching for "CTY" or "SET" or "Study of Exceptional Talent"). It seems probable that the same applies to 99.9% vs. 99.1%, though the differences would be less stark.
The more interesting studies are, of course, the ones which compare male and female students in countries where gender norms are less rigid.