Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

Check out Books that make you dumb, a ranking and comparison of books by correlation with college average SAT scores. Virgil took the laborious time to grab the top 10 books from thousands of college networks on Facebook and the SAT scores from the Collegeboard, and produced this beautiful clustered graph (truncated to religion):

Yes, apparently fans of the Bible have pretty terrible SAT scores. Draw what conclusions you will about the role of religion in modernity. Personally, the data just confirms the old suspicion that reason flourishes in the absence of superstition. Nonetheless, growing up in a conservative American household, I read the Bible a dozen times through, and it didn’t hurt me. It’s all in how you approach it, I suppose.

The other interesting data is what books are positively correlated with high SAT scores, and therefore intelligence. The top books correlated to 1100/1600 SAT score or better are as follows:

• Lolita
• 100 Years Of Solitude
• Crime And Punishment
• Freakonomics
• Catch 22
• Atlas Shrugged
• The Alchemist
• Cats Cradle
• Enders Game
• Life Of Pi
• Pride And Prejudice
• East Of Eden
• Jane Eyre
• The Great Gatsby
• The Kite Runner
• 1984
• Anna Karenina
• The Catcher In The Rye
• The Lord Of The Rings
• Quiet On The Western Front
• Shakespeare
• A Wrinkle In Time
• Alice In Wonderland

I’m not sure that this project is statistically sound, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Other commenters have noted that in addition to religion, African-American literature gets a low ranking. This probably has more to do with SAT score biases than anything.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is tagged with pi pride, african american literature, college average sat scores, anna karenina, facebook, pride and prejudice, great gatsby, time alice, years of solitude, collegeboard, alice in wonderland, cats cradle, kite runner, american household, life of pi, books from thousands, college networks, east of eden, enders game, average sat scores. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

One Response to 'Does reading the Bible make you dumb?'

1. 
   Danielle said:

   on January 26th, 2008 at 8:49 pm

   Well, when the average SAT score is 1017/1600, showing that a spread of christian books fall around this range doesn’t really prove much. And, of course, people who read things like Lolita probably have better critical reading skills…

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