Advantage Asia?

If there is no dark and dogged will, there will be no shining accomplishment; if there is no dull and determined effort, there will be no brilliant achievement – Chinese saying

Here are some statistics that should serve to concentrate the minds of people of European descent.

@ In 1966, Chinese Americans who were senior in High school were 67 percent more likely to take the SAT than were European Americans. Despite being much less highly selected, the Chinese American scored very close to European American on average.

@ In 1980 – when they were thirty-two years old – the same Chinese Americans from the “class of ‘66” were 62 percent more likely to be in professional, managerial, or technical fields than were European Americans.

@ In the late 1980s, the children of Indochinese boat people constituted 20 percent of the population of Garden Grove in Orange County, California, but claimed twelve of fourteen high school valedictorians.

@ In 1999, U.S eight-graders scored between .75 and 1.0 SD below Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong in math and between .33 and .50 SD below those countries in science as indicated by the Third International Mathematics and Science study.

@ Although Asian Americans constitute only 2 percent of the population, all five of the Westinghouse Science Fair winners in 2008 were Asian Americans.

@ Asian and Asian American students now constitute 20 percent of students at Harvard and 45 percent at Berkeley

So, European Americans might as well throw in the towel. Asian are just plain smarter.

Actually, probably not. At least not as indicated by traditional IQ tests. Herrnstein and Murray, Rushton and Jensen, Philip Vernon, Richard Lynn, and others have reported that there are IQ differences favoring Asians, but Flynn has shown that such reports are due in good part to the failure of the researchers to report Asian IQs based on contemporary IQ test norms rather than on outmoded norms and so using small and unrepresentative samples. Basing scores on outmoded norms has the effect of erroneously raising Asian IQs. Flynn reviewed sixteen different studies, the result of which were fairly consistent with one another. Most showed that East Asians had slightly lower IQs the Americans.

What is not is dispute is that Asian Americans achieve at a level far in excess of what their measured IQ suggests they would be likely to attain. Asian intellectual accomplishment is due more to sweat than to exceptional gray matter.

Harold Stevenson and his coworkers studied the intellectual abilities and social achievement of children in three different cities chosen to be highly similar socioeconomically: Sendai in Japan, Taipei in Taiwan, and Minneapolis in the United States. ……. In the first grade, the American outperformed the Japanese and the Chinese on most intelligence tests. The authors attributed this to the grater effort of American parents to stimulate their preschool kids intellectually. Whatever the reason for the high American performance in the first grade, by the fifth grade the superiority of American children in IQ was gone. From these sets of facts we learn that regardless of who was smarter than whom in the first grade, the American had lost considerable ground to the Asian children by the fifth grade.

But the truly remarkable finding of this study was the math achievement of the Asian students was leagues beyond that of U.S students. The identical problems were given to Japanese, Taiwanese, and American children. Bu the fifth grade, Taiwanese children scored almost I SD better in mathematics than American children, and the Japanese scored 1.30 SDs better than American children. Even more astonishing, in a more extended study, Stevenson and his coworkers looked at the math performance of fifty-grades in many different schools in China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Unitd States. There wasn’t a lot of differences among the Asian countries. Schools in all three countries performed at about the same level. There was more variability among the U.S schools. But the very best performance by American school was equal to the worst performance of any of the Asian schools!

IQ is not the point: something about Asian schools or the motivation of Asian children differs greatly from American schools or American children’s motivation. Excerpt from page 153 to 155 (Intelligence & How to Get it)