So a 48Q in the US is 96th Percentile for quant (or was, whatever)... data is old from 07-09 so some things may be a bit depressed but pretty interesting tool nonetheless
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China > .
Wow, very interesting tool. Look at the comparison between the USA Quant and any Asia country's Quant. A 44Q in the US is an 87% while in China it is a 21%!!! Incredible!
How do you access the data? It is prompting me for a password and username.
Consider the relative self-selectedness of the populations - but yeah. We're fucked.
There has to be some element of selection bias in this data, right? As in only the cream of the crop take the GMAT in China?
Even so - the average Chinese applicant is superior to the average PhD applicant. That is absolutely mindboggling. You'd need to see aggregate numbers of each for it to make sense though.
If China has such super engineers why are their bullet trains flying off bridges and other shit melting down haha.
But yeah, their quant scores fuck normal Americans. Pretty silly considering an MBA is not very quantitative.
ANT, people said similar things about Japan & South Korea. Now both of those countries dwarf the USA in patents per capita. Of the top 10 patent generating companies in the world only two are US (IBM/Microsoft). The rest are Asian (Japan/South Korean).
We can talk shit now, but I suspect that will change relatively quickly (10-15 years).
And of course, the difference between South Korea & Japan is that their total population is only 165 million. China is 1.2-1.3 billion. The amount of economic turmoil that will end up happening when their GDP per capita increases will be unlike anything we've ever seen.
I wasn't really talking shit, just saying that China might destroy the quant section on the GMAT, but that doesn't mean they are infallible. Japan and S. Korea are also heavily influenced by the USA and we all benefit from this relationship.
The USA is also 2nd in total so I wouldn't worry too much. As long as we welcome immigrants we can take the best talent from around the world.
Welcome high skill immigrants. Welcoming illiterate peasants isn't a good way to win the patent game.
Well I agree. Put up a fence between the US and Mexico and start the deportations. Last thing we need is more uneducated people in this country. Indian and Chinese people tend not to commit crime either.
except for the virginia tech guy who killed all the kids.
but yeah back to the topic i thought it was interesting, the data is a bit old and im SURE that the data is self selecting a bit but its interesting to see the divergence in the quant scores and all that.. i joked about my 48q 38v being a chinaman score but it really is lol
Something has to be going on that explains China's distribution better than "being Asian"
http://www.chineseorjapanese.com/asians-good-at-math/
From the article:
As English speakers, we may be unaware, but the English language is perhaps the most odd and irrational language around. Particularly with numbers, in English, after ten the teens each have an unique name and each tenth following that gets their own name. In fact, one would need to learn 28 unique words to count up to 100 in English while in any Chinese dialect, Japanese, or Korean, one only needs to learn 11 – one through ten and one hundred.
In Asian languages like Chinese, numbers after ten follow a precise logic. Eleven in Mandarin is shi yi or ten-one, twelve is ten-two, thirteen is ten-three, and so forth. When we get to fifty-nine, the logic continues, five-ten-nine. Five tens and a nine, 59. The internal logic in counting numbers with Asian languages results in kids who speak Asian languages are able to count beyond a hundred before English speakers can even count to 40. But the Asian language advantage doesn’t stop in counting. Remember those dreaded fractions? In English we would read 3/4 as three-fourths. But for languages like Chinese, 3/4 is literally translated, “out of 4 parts, take 3″.
When you think how much more sense math makes for Asian-language speakers and considering how many frustrated 3rd graders go home with there hands crossed because multiplication doesn’t make sense. How much fun would math had been if it did make sense? Wouldn’t you do more homework? In turn wouldn’t you pick up new concepts – in which case math heavily depends on learning piece by piece – easier.
It's probably a combination of the language advantage, extreme work ethic, and cultural preference for math. Asian countries in general also have a different educational system that is more focused on rote learning than the Western system. I'm not saying that is a good thing or a bad thing overall, but it's not hard to imagine how that could give someone an advantage in math, which at most levels (excluding really high-end stuff) is more rote / drill-based than other topics in education (say, writing). I think it's a fine line between generalizing and being racist, but my experience is that a lot of Asians from Asia are fantastic at drill type exercises within a finite range of material (such as you would find in GMAT quant -- there's only so many ways that test can hit you) than they would be in assignments requiring more "creative" application of skills. A balanced approach is probably best.
I think its more heavily influenced by selection bias than most people here think. No one in China takes the GMAT to with hopes of going to Appalachin State Graduate School of Business. People in China leave to go to top tier programs mostly, so there is a massive selection bias going on. Average or median Chinese b-school aspirants don't come to the US for school and so don't take the GMAT.
Read about the language advantage in first year psychology and then again in Malcolm Gladwell's book. Any idea how to give your average white kid the same advantage without learning Mandarin?
The data shows a couple of interesting points. In no particular order:
thank god for old people. They severely underperform on the quant (40+ group), great for the rest of us. Never discourage your uncles and aunts from doing an EMBA!
The United States is the absolute WORST performer in math amongst industrialized and emerging nations, according to that survey. The northern neighbor, Canada, is similar but still slightly better.
Europe's greatest industrial countries perform better than North America in math but not as well as Asia. France is slightly better than Germany. Those countries retain a heavy engineering bias, so while that helps, it is not the quick fix some might think it is.
In Asia, there is a fairly tight cluster around India, Japan and Taiwan, all performing at similar levels. In two of these cases, the base-10 linguistic structure exists, with one country being more capitalistic than China and speaking the same language. China's overachievement cannot be reduced solely to culture and language.
South Korea is a distant number two to China's staggering number one. That said, they're the top two: one is capitalist and industrialized, the other is a market-manipulating dictatorship nominally under the stewardship of the Communist party. They speak different languages but both have a base-10 structure.
On the one hand, this confirms what I thought for a long time: the 80/80 rule, coined close to 10 years ago (when Far East Asian applicants were a smaller portion of the applicant pool), is now dangerously obsolete. A quant 45 is 89th percentile in America, and would've passed Wharton's shit-test in say 2005, but now it doesn't. Schools (and admissions consultants) need to reassess their understanding of the scores, which have been thrown way off kilter. If they want to stay as competitive as possible, that's one thing. But if they feel that quant 43 folks aren't actually capable of handling the coursework, well, they were admitting throngs of those guys 5 years ago, except back then, that same ability put you in the 80th percentile range.
On the other hand, the loss of quantitative competitiveness in the United States (and perhaps the West as a whole) is real, though in relative terms there will always be a cultural bias in the East towards numeracy. Without better engineers, in the West we're going to produce less Newtons, Graham-Bells, Edisons, and Steve Wozniaks. But the West not being a society that exclusively rewards number crunchers is also why we have Greco-Roman mythology, Leonardo da Vinci, Bach, Hitchcock, Paco de Lucía, George Orwell and Steve Jobs.
Thanks man. da Vinci was an all-around bad-ass Renaissance man.
haha true. Just checked his wiki page. Seems like everything he touched was golden:
"Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull, and he outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics... some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics."
No wonder the French suck at math.
98 in French = 4*20+10+8
Seriously. Ninety-eight in French is Quatre-Vingt-Dix-Huit (literally four 20's plus 18).
Hahah, what? Didn't know that.
In Italian its 1 to 10, then a structure fro 11-20, and a structure from 20 to infinte. So I guess they are a little bit better off...
In my mother tongue (east european) there's a similar pattern, although the third structure is a little bit more intuitive (in italian its first syllabe of the tens + units, in my mother tongue it's tens+units)
Why does it say that a 760 is the 98th percentile. Surely the percentiles haven't dropped in the past two years. I don't think a 760 has ever been less than the 99th percentile.
How difficult is the GMAT relative to the SAT?
harder
Is that because of the questions, curve, or both?
Both, plus the pool tends to be of a higher caliber - SAT is for high schoolers trying to get into college, whereas the GMAT is usually motivated, professionally-driven college graduates trying to get into grad school. The curve has become even harder on the math side because Asia's best and brightest have joined the race in VERY large numbers.
M Friedman, that is really interesting regarding Mandarin. I did not know that, thanks for sharing!
Males vs. Females: not equal.
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That's not really true though. There are a ton of Indian and Chinese students at 2nd and 3rd tier b-schools, both that stay in the US and go back to their home countries. If you look at a lot of public Chinese companies, almost no one has a top MBA, and many have MBAs you have never heard of. Granted, a lot of those companies are (apparently) scams, but it does show that many Chinese professionals go to lesser known US schools.
I really think it's not true that Chinese people are somehow gifted at math. I think it's more that the top Chinese students grow up in an environment that stresses quantitative subject. In China, there's no 'nerd' stigma attached to being excellent at quantitative subjects. In fact that's what Chinese students strive for. Completely different than in America where you're a loser if you're into math and science. And honestly, Chinese parents just straight up push their kids way harder than American parents do. But I don't think it's genetic.
If you don't inherently recognize the importance of math at a young age, then you are in fact the loser.
I went to school that was extremely international, and based on the people I met, Persians were absolutely insanely good at high school math, followed by mainland chinese, the taiwanese, eastern europeans/russians, then latins/us/canadians/western europeans
Then me. I got an 82% on senior math, but I was in the bottom 20% of the class. top 20% all got 99%
Persian, Chinese secondary education in math > other far east countries > eastern europe, russia > the western world.
That is a ridiculous generalization.
Iran might be better than Arab countries, but on population wide levels it doesn't compete with the West - at all. There is a reason that the West has ruled for ~500 years.
really interesting that Canada does the best in AWA and Verbal... compared to all categories (i.e. countries,degrees,sex, etc.)
I know all Asians look alike to you guys, but...
Anyways. I would chalk the difference in GMAT scores up to a couple of things:
We would then, however, also have to wonder why students in so many Asian countries other than China, who use other scripts or count in different manners, also score so well on the GMATs. Which leads me to my next point...
Self-selection. As so many people have pointed out, an individual in the USA is more likely to take the GMAT than an individual of similar socio-economic status in Asia. The individuals in places like China and India who are taking the GMAT are more likely to be within the very top echelons of society, which naturally means that they'd score better, on average, than a US- or UK-based test-taker.
Test-taking. It's a bit of stereotype, but one that nevertheless holds a lot of weight; after all, stereotypes do exist for a reason. Many Asians are great at taking tests, and this may have translated into them rocking the GMATs.
Heavy focus on quantitative skills, as noted by Thurnis Haley. In the West, there is less of a societal bias in favour of individuals who do well at quantitative subjects, even going so far as to cause discrimination against all of these math & science "nerds". In Asia, however, if you score well, everyone else just wants to be you. It's almost like the scholars are the jocks. Except that they don't go around stuffing people in lockers, because they're too busy studying for shit like that.
those smart asians!
It's really quite simple.
In China (and just about anywhere in Asia), the math/science curriculum starting from elementary school is far more intensive than in the west, especially compared to the US (which is probably the worst).
So when you compare a 25-year old Chinese vs. a 25 year old American writing the GMAT, the Chinese person has probably done twice as much math/science cumulatively over 10-15 years (in terms of time spent studying the subject and the level of difficulty) and therefore has a huge advantage just based on exposure and experience alone. That's why even if the Chinese person hates math, thinks it's geeky, is lazy about studying, etc. he/she still has a far bigger advantage compared to the American student who tries his/her best at the subject.
It's as simple as the curriculum and time spent on the subject. It's no different than any other activity. If you were forced to play basketball 4x a week for 15 years and you had to play against another kid who played 2x a week over the same period, it doesn't matter whether you even like the sport or not - you will likely school the other player simply because you've spent twice as much time over the same period (in your formative years as a kid no less) learning and playing the sport.
In fact, what this distribution can suggest is how far behind the US is compared to just about any industrialized country when it comes to math/science in our K-12 schools (or at least confirms other more direct studies of how far the US has fallen behind) because these results are a byproduct of that cumulative lagging behind which you simply can't just "catch up" in college.
not really...I went to a British high school and the SAT Maths (and SAT II Maths) I took were significantly easier than the British equivalent.
also the average student at my school got into the (roughly) 70th percentile for A Level (UK final high school exams) Maths, but did better at both SAT and SAT II Maths...plus you have to take into account the fact that we were studying the UK curriculum several hours a week while the SAT was extra work on the side.
Not to mention in the quantative courses at the (US) college I now go to I get into higher percentiles than in the non-quant courses (even though the 90th to 100th percentiles in quant courses are DOMINATED by Far East Asians and Indians)...and I used to think I was slightly better at writing essays/analysis than maths.
agree with Alex, Asians do more maths in general.
Also, self selection bias. Everybody in the MBA has heard of MBAs, so any random guy can apply and try. In China or Korea and even Japan, MBAs are reserved for a certain "elite". In China not many people can afford it, only the kids that are either rich or very successful, and they are either smarter or have more resource to spend on tuitions and preparation. For Japan and Korea, its more that only really really ambitious people want to shoot for an MBA, and there are very few people from those countries who are not sponsored from their corporates (because of the corporate culture and because people are naturally risk averse), so there is already a form of "preselection". Also a big portion of Asians that live in the US apply and those are the cream of the crop in their countries.
Finally - they prepare much more. There is a stigma associated with waste and failure in those countries, so they will only take the exam after they are quite confident that they can get a decent score.
Reading comprehension, folks.
The tool doesn't isolate for race.
It isolates for country.
99.9% of the test-takers in China, Japan, India and South Korea are going to be locals of Han or Desi ethnicity.
Test-takers in the United States are of any race - they just happen to be in the US.
As a result, this isn't a racial comparison.
Non-white test-takers in France are more likely to be of North African ethnicity, so French plus North African doesn't make for a good like-for-like with the US, where there will be White, Africa, Asian, Hispanic and Native-Americans taking the test.
This isn't about race, it's about the educational system (first and foremost) and secondly the language and socioeconomic demographics. If it were purely about race and language, then China and Taiwan would have the exact same performance.
I'm a little disappointed.
Reading comprehension, folks.
The tool doesn't isolate for race.
It isolates for country.
99.9% of the test-takers in China, Japan, India and South Korea are going to be locals of Han or Desi ethnicity.
Test-takers in the United States are of any race - they just happen to be in the US.
As a result, this isn't a racial comparison.
Non-white test-takers in France are more likely to be of North African ethnicity, so French plus North African doesn't make for a good like-for-like with the US, where there will be White, Africa, Asian, Hispanic and Native-Americans taking the test.
This isn't about race, it's about the educational system (first and foremost) and secondly the language and socioeconomic demographics. If it were purely about race and language, then China and Taiwan would have the exact same performance.
I'm a little disappointed.
How is what you just said not about race?
Uh, the previous poster said that he was isolating for race.
That's a category error. The data isolates by location of test-takers.
Further, there's the erroneous assumption that the US is somehow "white", as would be France. Hence driving the "isolating by race". It's wrong on two levels.
Re-read.
The real question is: Does enhanced quantitative ability equal financial prosperity (or any other form of success that isn't academic)?
id say theres probably a correlation , dunno how strong it is -- if youre quant youre gonna tend to go towards the more quant jobs which are generally higher paying?
The fact that Chinese students destroy the quantitative section means very little to me. My research partner at UCLA was Chinese and she scored 800 GRE Q, 800 SAT Q whereas I scored 49Q on GMAT. So technically she is "better." But what people don't understand is that Asian students are simply very good at SYMBOLIC MANIPULATION and fraction memorization. Took the same upper-division math courses with her (Real Analysis, Abstract Algebra, Math Stats) and I got A's and she got C+'s mostly. The GMAT or whatever does not test abstract reasoning.
I'm still somewhat stunned that my 44Q is 87 percentile in US and only 21st for China. To me, the selection bias doesn't make up for that large of a discrepancy. I feel somewhat dumb now, thanks.
Yes, it is annoying that the curve is so skewed to the right by international students -- as someone else said, maybe they should drop the 80/80 rule. I scored 49Q but had to work pretty hard to get there, and probably could have handled the quant work in b-school with a 44. I didn't actually go to b-school, so that is just conjecture, but if we're talking about stats, accounting and finance I'm sure a 44 is just fine, yet you probably wouldn't get into a top program with a 44.
I know this is going to offend people, but here's the theory I adhere to: The Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans etc) are more evolved than other races. Whites evolved from Blacks, and Asians evolved from Whites, so it stands to reason that the evolved group will be superior to the group it evolved from.
Superiority in this case means higher IQ and less testosterone. All the data ever accumulated proves this to be true. So Asians>Whites>Blacks.
We didn't actually evolve. There's plenty of evidence that we were created by the Annunaki - aliens that came to Earth thousands of years ago. They needed workers to dig up gold because their planet had problems retaining oxygen in the atmosphere and gold was needed to stop the process. So the Annunaki found our planet and inserted their genes in the monkeys that were here. And that's how they created Homo Sapiens. It's all written by the ancient Sumerians. We are just genetically modified hybrids. I think we are actually devolving because our ancestors had bigger dicks and also these days most males dress and behave like pussies.
No worries, Mayans figured the Annunaki are coming back this year so everything will be sorted out.
Sounds like ridiculous racism to me.
Testosterone levels between whites and blacks do not differ according to a nationally representative study done in 2007, so how is it your theory survives? Mexicans had higher testosterone levels than both whites and blacks.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17456570
There is also no evidence Asians "evolved" from whites either.
This is the first time I have heard some racial supremacy of Asians before lol. So let me understand something. Asians are more evolved hence better math scores? So evolution is all about mathematics now?
I've read some silly shit on this site, but this might take the cake.
Are you seriously going to tell me you've never heard of the intellectual superiority of Asians before?? Dude, on almost every IQ test and other standardized tests Asians outperform other groups. It has nothing to do with culture or environment, IQ is largely heritable and Asians and some other groups like Ashkenazi Jews have just evolved to be smarter. Read "The Bell Curve" its by Charles Murray who has a PhD from MIT.
Culture is driven by genetics, an entire culture doesn't just wake up one day and say they want to be doctors, scientists, engineers etc Asians and other groups are high IQ so they're pre-disposed to more intellectual pursuits than other groups.
well, if nothing else this makes me prouder of my q51 ;)
I don't think it's genetics, it's not at all about genetics. Indians or Chinease excel at math because of cultural and socio political factors.
Just take the case of India - the only good colleges here are engineering colleges, so you are grommed to be an engineer since childhood, that's why math is always on focus. Moreover, engineering is a highly respected career here, irrespective of income. Secondly, government focuses mostly on engineering education, budgets allocated to engineering colleges far outstrips the budgets allocated to other streams, average salaries from top 20th or 30th engineering college are same (if not more than) the salaries at top ranked arts/commerce college.
If you look at Arts colleges or commerce colleges in India, even the best arts or commerce college in India is mediocore at best. I think the reason for this disparity (and ignorance from government) is that Indian business never needed business or arts graduates, business or arts skills were always considered heriditery or god given or gained through mentorship of someone well accomplished in these fields, but not something that study can hone, that's why extreme nepotism in business and arts in India is generally accepted here. Going to arts or commerce college means you couldn't find anything better in life, that's the perspective here.
So, if you are a bright student, you have no other choice than to pursue Engineering, at least in India. That's the only reason about math skills of Indians. I am an engineering graduate in computer science from the top ranked engineering institute in India, but frankly speaking I was never interested in engineering, sadly I didn't had any other choice. I guess other Asian countries share something common with India in terms of such cultural and socio political factors.
How about this. You are in a dirt poor developing nation and education is your only shot at a decent life. Are you going to study womens lit or engineering. China needs to build shit so they squirt out engineers.
When Starbucks heavily expands in China there will finally be a demand for liberal arts grads. Until that day you better study something that allows you to build things.
Why have Japan/Korea/Taiwan been able to achieve rapid industrialization and technical capabilities and a huge number of countries haven't. I'm not expecting South American or Africa to be a technological powerhouse in my lifetime, but I certain expect that China will be reasonably first world in 50 years. Why does this future seem plausible/probable?
How about because the countries you mentioned are unified and politically stable whereas in Africa/MidEast there is tribal and religious warfare that impedes significant progress in education and infrastructure. Some parts of Africa you have peoples speaking their respective tribal languages, of which there are thousands. As for South America, great progress is being made, especially in Brazil. If you really think your argument of inherent intelligence is going to be won based on how well your country is doing you must be delusional. It is a simple fact that European imperialism did not affect the East like it did Africa.
asians have tiny peckers :>
The man you mentioned also happens to be a racist ideologue, just like you covertly are. Thus the reason you mentioned MIT and PhD, but neglect to mention that his is in political science, not psychology. A clever attempt to mislead but no cigar.
As infants Asian Americans are indistinguishable in terms of ability from other groups (in fact they're a little behind). The a prori assumption is that, if Asians are genetically superior as a group they should test higher than others as soon as they develop the functions to do so, just as is the case with human babies relative to other animals at the same stage of development. That this is not the case suggests Asians are not inherently "more intelligent" than other groups.
I have never seen any evidence for Jews being genetically smarter than anyone else, so I won't bother making any argument.
One group scoring higher than another on a test, in or between groups (rich versus poor; asian versus..), does not presuppose genetic advantages either. The former does not follow from the latter. There are many confounding variables. This is simple logic that only confirmation bias could confuse for strict evidence of causation. The rest of your post and the "facts" mentioned are plainly untrue or unproven.
Charles Murray is such a racist ideologue he married a non-white? Interesting position.
He is married to an Asian. Your attempt at mislead people into believing it would be a case of cognitive dissonance (and thus improbable) for him to hate another minority because he is married to one (implying a black or a Hispanic) is laughable. It is perfectly possible for him to like Asians while hating blacks as long as one compartmentalizes them as you and others do.
Racists can be complex. Stormfront spends 99% of its time disparaging and dehumanizing blacks while leaving Asians alone. Some racists only harbor enmity towards certain groups, some despise all equally but their own group, some despise all on a scale of degrees (except their own group).
How about you fucks just get the scores you need to get into the school you want and let the other racial groups do whatever the fuck they want with those chopsticks of the theirs.
Is Keile the only sentient being here?
No wonder Wall Street's future is in question.
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