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No, you understand incorrectly. I'm not making any statement about the primary driver. I'm not sure if it's even possible to do the research to figure out what the primary driver is, so I'm not sure how you're concluding that social factors rather than general intelligence or something else altogether is a bigger driver. I'm just saying that, due to the filtering effect of honors classes, they're generally going to consist of students who are higher in general intelligence than the broader student population at the given school and grade. Teachers aren't perfect at gauging a student's potential ability to make use of honors classes, but I believe they're better than chance.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I appreciate your points. All I have is my intuitive sense of why people choose honors classes. It sounds like my intuitive model of those people is different than yours. That's fine.
Edit: actually this wasn't your initial post, it was someone else. Apologies.
I went and re-read your initial post. My claim was that:
I went to American (US) public high school, and my recollection is that the main differentiator for the honors classes was that there was more schoolwork (more note-taking in english, more books to read) and the kids who took the classes were "better." Maybe that's not true across all high schools. I think that maybe International Baccalaureate (IB) or Advanced Placement (AP) would be better examples of places where true high-performers go.
I'm inclined to agree, as long as you're saying that the average intelligence is higher. Maybe that's too much of a nitpick, but certainly there would be overlap in the distributions of general intelligence in honors and regular classes.
I'd rather use standardized tests for this, wouldn't you? Or a combination of standardized tests and nomination by teachers of students with merit? Teachers have all kinds of biases, and some teachers are terrible (many teachers awesome).
Edit: clarification in last paragraph
100% agreed, and I don't think you're nitpicking at all, only clarifying. I probably should have written it out like that myself, but I generally take it for granted, because generally it's taken as a given when talking about intelligence - or more broadly any sort of traits with differences between groups - that the claim is only about differences in averages, with almost always large overlap between groups. It's not bad to write it out explicitly, though.
Also 100% agreed. Teachers are better than nothing, but that's a low bar. Standardized tests certainly have their own issues as well, but IMHO those issues are typically lesser than the issues with teachers and their biases (and/or plain incompetence), and schooling in general would be improved with a greater emphasis on standardized testing for figuring out where to place students.
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