Nov 03 2006 10:48 PM
="Nymr83"]
high school graduation rates. i havent seen a study of college rates |
seeing as how its been a requirement until very crecently that they only take recruits with a HS diploma or GED, i'd be surprised if the high school graduation rate for our men in uniform weren't near 100%.
so the floor doesn't go as low as the general population. that's fine. i already concede that point.
(yancy's point about graduation rates not being an indication of smartness still holds true. plenty of people fail to graduate high school for reasons other than lack of smarts. those same reasons probably would make them poor soldier recruits. graduation rate, imo, is a very poor means of comparing intelligence, especially since its a pass/fail measure, and the floor of the military population is higher. it gives no indication as to where the average lies for either.)
if you can point me to any information about that test whereupon the general population averages a 50, but soldiers average a 60, i'd love to see it. i suspect it's more of a soldier aptitude test than a smartness test, but that's fine. i've personally neither heard of it nor taken it. is it administered in school, or would i have to walk to the recruiters' office to take it.
i would still hold that if we're to argue the smartness of the members of our military, it should be on a scorecard that is accessible to a statistically viable portion of the general population.
since the majority of the military are high school graduates, perhaps we could compare them against other high school graduates (and non graduates alike - toss them into the population!) and look at HS GPAs.
i've no idea where to find that data, but i'm sure its out there.
i really do hate to be a pain in the ass about all this. its just that i've been finding myself in more and more of a situation where i'm esxposed to statistical analyses and its really getting to irritate me when they are ill applied and ill understood.
edit: here's what i'm saying...
(god, i am such a geek. and loser. but mostly geek)
at best, all you're telling me is that i can chop off the lower tail on this plot, which assumes that the intelligence of the population is normally distributed, and use that to describe the intelligence of the military population. and if the folks in the military were exactly the same, smartwise, as everyone else in teh country, but didn't include the dumbest, then they'd have a distribution like the green curve. however, you're claiming that the blue curve really shows the true case - that the military population is smarter than the average american population. but, it could also be like the red curve, where they're not as dumb as dumb can be, but they're still dumber than average.
does that all make sense? (i think it does.) does anyone care? (prolly not.)
look, all i'm saying is that what you're trying to do with the graduation rate - setting a floor - is like me looking at the houston astros, saying they had only three position players with lower than 0.200 batting averages, but the mets had 6 position players with lower than 0.200 batting averages, therefore, the astros had a better offense. and that data doesn't support the conclusion.