March 5, 2008
More on Books and Music and Their Connection to SAT Scores
Though the statistics on Virgil Griffith’s Booksthatmakeyoudumb, which, as Wired Campus reported yesterday, correlates colleges’ average SAT scores with college students’ “favorite book” preferences on Facebook, can be humorous and provocative, it’s interesting to look at how arbitrary the rankings seem.
For example: Ray Bradbury’s dystopian book-burning tome Fahrenheit 451 ranks 96 (average SAT: 893) on the list, falling below another high-school reading-list classic, Of Mice and Men (1007), or just not reading at all (968).
Mr. Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, has released yet another iteration of Facebook number crunching with Musicthatmakesyoudumb. Here’s a look at where some of college students’ favorite bands fall on the SAT spectrum.
- Beethoven (presumably the composer) ranks first in the list with an average score of 1371.
- Rapper Lil Wayne (889) ranks the lowest.
- Linkin Park (1073), Nirvana (1083), Outkast, and Frank Sinatra (1104) all lie just above the average SAT score.
- Justin Timberlake (989) is on the low end, but Britney Spears didn’t even make the list.—Hurley Goodall
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I was interested— and pleased— that Beethoven scored so high on the music site. I was astonished not to see Mozart at all and the rest of Classical Music on the low end.
Not that I take this seriously; I’m amused, just as Griffith intended ….
— Lloyd Daub Mar 5, 05:01 PM #
where are the stones?
— Lowest Apr 12, 10:14 AM #