Books that {high/low} SAT scorers read
 High SAT books |
Someone at CalTech looked at correlations between the most popular books at various colleges (according to Facebook) and then looked at the average SAT score at that college to see which books are correlated with high SATs and which books are correlated with low SATs . The high SAT books are on the left. The low SAT books are on the right. The results are from here. |
 Low SAT books |
One of the first things I noticed on these lists was that reading "The Holy Bible" indicates that you aren't very bright. In fact, if you look at the data closer (not here but on the original site) it appears that calling the Bible, "The Holy Bible," indicates you aren't at a place with high SAT scores. If instead, you call the Bible, "the Bible" , then it is likely that your institution has much higher SAT scores. Furthermore, in the full list there are a number of Biblical exigeses that also correlate with high SAT scores.
So an interpretation that is a little bit of a stretch would be: people who read the Bible and don't do much to try and understand it tend to have lower SAT scores. But if you think about that for a second, that really has nothing to do with the Bible. If you don't try and understand things you're never going to get smarter.
But the real question is how many have *I* read. On the left I've read "Freakanomics" and "Catch 22". "Atlas Shrugged" is on my pile of to-read books. On the right I've read "Fahrenheit 451" and I suppose, "The Holy Bible".
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