NYC Prep: Taylor's college plans, and the kids' IQs

I watched the episode 1 bonus clip in which Taylor, the 15-year-old sophomore from Stuyvesant High School (that’s a public school) meets with her dad at the Skylight Diner. (I always wondered who would eat at the place across the street from B&H photo. Now I know.)

Taylor’s dad has a rounded stocky look about him, and some sort of lower-class accent, giving off a somewhat prolish impression. My guess is that he comes from a lower class background, and he went to a relatively non-competitive college, perhaps a state school, and now has a decent middle class job, but not one where he makes so much money that he can afford to send his daughter to a private school.

They are discussing Taylor’s report card, and apparently Taylor’s grades aren’t that great, because Taylor is defensive about them. But she says that she has an “intricate plan” to get into Stanford of Oxford. At least she’s smart enough to know the names of the elite colleges. Her dad sees through her double talk and tells her that her plan should be to work hard and get better grades. He seems like a solid good-intentioned dad, though I do detect a slight bit of middle-class naiveté regarding college admissions.

I’ve been trying to figure out which of the kids on NYC Prep are smart, and which ones aren’t. Camille and PC are the smartest, while Sebastian and Kelli definitely seem to be below average compared to typical prep-school kids. Jessie seems pretty smart, but I may be confusing maturity (she acts ten years older than her age) with intelligence. She’s smart enough to appreciate PC; if her IQ were much more than one standard deviation below PC’s, then I don’t think she’d have much in common with him and they wouldn’t be friends. I also think that Jessie is an Ashkenazi Jew, and Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ one standard deviation higher than the average gentile white IQ.

Taylor, on the surface, appears to be on the low end of the spectrum along with Kelli and Sebastian, but partially that’s due to Taylor’s immaturity. She acts like a 15-year-old girl (which is something that PC picked up on in the first episode). However, there are indications that Taylor is smarter than Kelli or Sebastian, because Taylor was admitted to Stuyvesant which has a competitive admissions test, although I suspect that Taylor barely scored high enough to get in with the help of a test prep class. Taylor also mentioned on her date with Sebastian that she was reading a book about philosophers, on her own and not for school. Reading a book about philosophers for the sake of intellectual curiosity puts her IQ at least a standard deviation above the norm. In contrast, from Sebastian’s reaction I got the impression that he doesn’t read anything unless he has to for school.

Comments

[A]

I've never seen that show, but I can't imagine any woman, no matter how smart, wanting to read philosophy for fun. She was probably trying to impress the cameras.

Smart women tend to be smart in typically female, not in typically male ways. They regard the use of their smarts in male-oriented domains as drudgery. For example, I've known a few female programmers, but I've never known a woman who was excited about computers the way nerdy guys can be excited about them. For a smart woman it's just another boring job.

Over time I've concluded that this is a general phenomenon. Smart women want to gossip in smarter ways than dumb women do, they don't want to read Kant. A smart woman will have a better taste in clothing than a dumb one, but she won't have anything interesting to tell you about politics or about any other area of knowledge in which a smart guy is likely to be interested. Smart women tend to have the same ironic tone of voice that smart guys have, but that's a very superficial similarity.

Philosophy is so abstract that it's unbelievably male-oriented. Quick, name a girl philosopher. I'm only coming up with Simone de Beauvoir, and I could probably name a hundred or so male ones.

[OneSTDV]

I don't watch the show, but Taylor got into Stuyvesant.

I believe the test to get in (you'd probably know better) is more of an achievement test than an aptitude test. Nonetheless, the standard is extremely high and anyone able to get accepted has an IQ AT LEAST one standard deviation above average. There are no backdoors into Stuyvesant, only the test score counts.

However I did meet a classmate in college who went there and he wasn't that impressive.

[gaiaguy]

These posts about the minutiae of NYC Prep are really uninteresting. I am trying to understand why you write about this show in such detail and so often. I assume that you are trying to tell us something about yourself with these NYC Prep posts.

I think you mentioned that you attended this Stuyvesant school. Wouldn't it be more efficient to simply tell us that you were admitted to a school which has a competitive admissions test and you believe that your IQ is at least one standard deviation above the norm? You could do that in one brief post.

[Jack]

I actually don't think any of them are dumb; I think you overrate Jessie a bit and underrate Sebastian a bit. Don't know how smart Kelli is but she's the kind of girl I would have been into at 16-18 or so.

[Jim]

I don't get it - why is recommending working harder and getting better grades "middle class naiveté"? Sure, good grades aren't themselves sufficient to get into a good school, but they are certainly necessary for a non-NAM non-athlete?

[Me Like 'em Long]

gaiaguy,

Come on, you remember the Bruce Springsteen song Glory Days, right? Life has been downhill for HS after high school, and he's just trying to capture a little of that. The non-prole version of Glory days - instead of sitting around a bar drinking domestic swill, he is in his cramped apartment in Manhattan nursing his overpriced wine while watching a crappy reality show on an HDTV. But the tears are real. Cut him some slack.

[dev]

"I've never seen that show, but I can't imagine any woman, no matter how smart, wanting to read philosophy for fun."

I take it you didn't attend the University of Chicago.

[Peter A]

"I can't imagine any woman, no matter how smart, wanting to read philosophy for fun"

Susan Sontag, certainly. Much feminist writing probably counts as philosophy broadly speaking - bullshit it may be, but it's still philosophy. I suppose you could argue that left wing philosophy is less abstract in a sense because it's always focused on a particular group - women, the poor, blacks, etc. Maybe that's one reason very high IQ women tend to gravitate towards the left rather than the more abstract idealistic philosophies common on the right. I've known many neurotic high IQ Jewish women who probably do read philosophy for fun.

[asd]

"Life has been downhill for HS after high school, and he's just trying to capture a little of that."

LOL, no. Half Sigma was a poor nerd in High School and was never part of the NYC Prep social group. He went to UPenn and thought he could join that social group after becoming a bigshot lawyer, but that never worked out (he made the mistake of going to University of Arizona Law School). He's been obsessed with these people forever, but always as an outsider.

[Brutus]

I also think that Jessie is an Ashkenazi Jew, and Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ one standard deviation higher than the average gentile white IQ.--Siggie

Source? My sources say about 5 points. And how many pure Ashkenazis are there in Manhattan?

[Brutus]

There are no backdoors into Stuyvesant, only the test score counts.--One

Wrong! They have an aggressive affirmative action program that they brilliantly have hidden from the public. When I was a kin, Brooklyn Tech was a great school--not anymore--been dumbed down by NAM students and NAM administrators--it's truly NAMalicious

[Lover of Wisdom]

I just checked some stats, and women make up about 19% of the faculty at the top-twenty analytic philosophy departments.

[Brutus]

let's not forget Ayn Rand

[Jim]

Brutus -

Please, let's.

[Sheila Tone]

"I've never seen that show, but I can't imagine any woman, no matter how smart, wanting to read philosophy for fun"

You must not know many women. You shouldn't need to imagine. Any pretentious environment squirms with them. It's hard to envision a more stereotypical (and typical) female area of academic interest, except maybe psychology.

Venn diagram of chicks who read philosophy has big overlap with Venn diagram of chicks who dye their hair black.

[Jack]

I know she's 17, but I wanna bang Jessie, I really do.

[DaveinHackensack]

"It's hard to envision a more stereotypical (and typical) female area of academic interest, except maybe psychology."

I guess it depends on what sort of philosophy you are talking about. Do women flock to, say, the study of 17th century rationalists? I took enough classes in philosophy to minor in it in college, and women were pretty scarce in most of the classes (e.g., logic, senior-level classes on Aristotle, Spinoza, etc.). The one exception was a philosophy of science class, which a handful of women were required to take as part of their nursing Ph.D. program.

[Ellen]

"middle-class naiveté"?

Are you referring to the fact that he can't afford to bribe the Deans and buy a building to get his daughter in? Because the only way for middle and lower class kids to get into the top colleges is to be lucky and work your ass off and that's exactly what he's telling his daughter to do.

And whoever made that first comment about women clearly has trouble meeting women and getting to know them. His coworkers are probably too bored with him and so they don't show any enthusiasm when he's around. As a complete computer nerd and comic book fanatic who does research in neuroscience and has done brain surgery, I can say that I am just as passionate about these fields as any man.

Also, as an alum from Bronx Science (Stuy's rival)with a sister in Stuy and another in Hunter(another elite nyc public school, there are no backdoors into these schools. It's your test grade and that's that. They don't need to have diversification because it's already pretty diverse. My school even had a majority of Asians for a few years. As a student in a prominent liberal arts college in New England, I met the first people of my age that had attended private school and I became great friends with them. However, money and class were always a struggle because most people at my school had no sense of the stress I was constantly other because I needed to manage my finances on my own and I didn't have many resources. This is not something you will learn about by watching reality tv. People that watch reality tv and fool themselves into thinking they will learn about the real world are wasting their time. Like another person commented previously, you need to go out and spend time with real people. Volunteer at a homeless shelter or even to just tutor kids from public schools. In the one hour you spend with them, you'll learn a thousand fold more than you will from an entire season wasted on trying to glean something from reality tv.

PS: I am not against reality tv for entertainment. I also must admit that I'm completely biased because I can't stand the fact that everyone is making assumptions about class, public schools, and private schools based on this show and Bravo's choice of student representatives. Taylor isn't even a typical stuy student. I'm pretty sure it's currently more than 50% Asian American and most of them are probably trying to be as gangsta as possible and hating on the prep kids.

[Michael]

Camille stated that she scored in the top percentile. Unless she was saying that just for camera, I'm going to assume that she scored 99 percentile for each SAT.

However -- a little side note. I question the reality of that scene ever taking place. SAT Scores are online at 4:55 AM in the morning. If any student was excited about them, as she makes herself out to be, then she would have checked them either by waking up early (I woke up at 3:30 and endured the agonizing wait) or stay up all night. More so - it's annoying to check the SAT scores from a Blackberry. As another SAT Addict, I set up my Blackberry Browser so all I had to do was Refresh in the morning and get my scores. But, ugh. I had to change a few settings on my browser to get the damn thing to load. So, unless Camille went through her browser settings and adjusted everything to CollegeBoard and even got past the error message saying that we are using a browser too old and that CB will not work - the scene was completely made up.

But - anyway, you can still score within the 99th percentile with a 2250 (740, 750 and 7600. Can she get a perfect from that? Maybe. Critical Reading is going to be hard - those last few questions are the real hard ones. And with all the vocab (which usually gets the kids in the 700s), it'll be no walk in the park. Math? Sure. But, the same applies. There are always one or two problems that just completely throw people for a loop. Including the smartest. And will send her score down 30-40 points. And Writing, she can definitely get an 800 in.

As for the others -- Taylor is probably a B student. PC and Jessie are probably A students (funny how none of them go to Dalton, which is the only IB prep school). Sebastian is probably a C to B student. And Kelli is probably the same. Camille - A to A+.

[Danielle]

I didn't believe Taylor at all when she said she was reading that book for fun. She was smirking like she was trying to pull something over him, and I had to read a whole bunch of philosophy books when I attended Stuyvesant (and took a course on philosophy, I might add). Also, the way Taylor reacts to the love triangle makes her seem like a very young 15. I really believe she is making so-called "smart" (ie Stuy) students look really, really bad.

I have to point out that just because Camille and PC don't go to Stuyvesant doesn't mean they couldn't get in (or even that they DIDN'T get in). The prep school world in NYC is very different from the public school world, but both worlds know about Stuyvesant. It is very possible the other kids on the show took the test and placed and just chose NOT to go, to instead attend private school. It's also very possible that since they've been in private school their whole life, they didn't want to break out of that now.