Vocabulary correlates with IQ about as strongly as SAT score, yet vocabulary can clearly be hugley improved with practice. Even if correlation with IQ somehow

Vocabulary correlates with IQ about as strongly as SAT score, yet vocabulary can clearly be hugley improved with practice. Even if correlation with IQ somehow proved score durability, a correlation of 0.76 or even .8 is low enough to allow for huge swings away from IQ in a very large percentage of the population. A big chunk of students practicing and increasing their scores 200-300 points could easily be hiding in that 0.76 correlation. >As far as algorithms and vocabulary go, most people have limited ability to follow complex algorithms because that requires a lot of working memory, which correlates with... Intelligence! Most algorithms at that level are designed to be written out step by step explicitly to reduce working memory requirements. Part of SAT prep is learning algorithms for solving word problems that reduce working memory load by memorizing patterns in the questions and writing down the components in a standardized form. You said >As far as algorithms and vocabulary go And then never mentioned vocabulary. It has nothing to do with working memory and most definitely can be improved dramatically with practice. One more thing. The SAT was rewritten in 2016 to be far more content based, so the correlation with IQ will likely fall even further.