Tells you a little bit about the biases of the author of the study.

Lolita ranks the highest. Like, wow, you must be going to a really good school if students at your school like Lolita. But when you look at the data, of the 1352 schools which were included in this analysis, how many of them, do ya think, had Lolita among their students’ favourite books?

14.

Yale, Princeton, Brown, Williams College, Columbia, Reed, NYU, Wellesley, St. John’s College. Schools with realllllly bright students.

Smith College, Bennington, Marlboro, ok, still kinda good students.

School of the Museum of Fine Arts and CUNY: Queens College, well, at least you went to a college.

So, if Lolita is read, and loved, by a lot of students at your school, it could be one of the best schools in this country. Or a pretty good one. Or an average one.

The author of the page reminds us that correlation != causation, but there doesn’t even seem to be any correlation going on with this data.

(Sorry if this is disjointed, I have a fever. )

It’s not even correlation, because there are no data. It’s just a chart. Correlation is the linear relationship between two continuous variables. So not only can causation not be drawn, it’s not even a correlation!

A Caltech student, really? One would think that a student at a school like that would have more important things to do than conduct an observational study that a second grader could critique.

For the record, the books I have on my Facebook as favourites that are on this list are Brave New World, Animal Farm, Fight Club, 1984, The Lord of the Rings, and Dune. So make your guesses what my SAT score was, based on the data!

I do find the points raised above to be pretty valid, I think the scientific utility of this is pretty …non-existant. But hey it makes for a neat graph. According to the graph the mean student at my undergrad reads Freakonomics, 100 Years of Solitude, Lolita and Crimes and Punishment. Good for them. Too bad some of those folks who slacked off on the SAT read Atlas Shrugged.

This makes my undergrad look good, as compared to the undergrads at my current institution, who are apparently above the mean if they read the Bible.

Oh wait did this study make any distinction between different levels of education, or are PhD and BA students all lumped together as students of a college/university?

All criticism aside, I’d like to congratulate a Caltech student on collecting data from 1352 schools. Way to carry on the Caltech tradition of being a geek.

Mriana said,

What if you took the ACT? I didn’t take the SAT. Didn’t need to for this uni. I don’t know what the equivalents are for the ACT and SAT.

I was going to ask the exact same question! Although I wouldn’t say my school is a prestigious one, there are an awful lot of school that use the ACT, and like Mriana, I never took the SAT.
Also, the problem with facebook is that you can never really be sure if people are telling the truth. I’d be willing to bet that people going to “better” schools are more likely to lie and say they’ve read books that everyone else at the school says they’ve read (and then wikipedia it to get the plot points). And about the classics in the list – people might be reading these for class. Often, it’s a book they wouldn’t choose for themselves but then end up liking, and then they can say it’s a favorite (I guess that still counts, but it messes up the argument that “smarter” people are just more motivated to read
Also – what about those with private profiles? Most people I know don’t leave their profile unlocked and public, so does that change the results? Do only the really slow and the biggest show-offs leave their profiles public?
Basically, I wouldn’t trust college students to tell the truth. It’s kind of a crapshoot. Besides, some of us are just so busy reading voraciously that we don’t have time to list all the awesome books we’re reading.
…I just looked and he does also have average ACT scores listed. Not sure if he used those or SATS, though. Many of the schools listed don’t even have an average SAT score, and if they do, and generally take more ACT scores, wouldn’t that be a smaller pool of people that the average SAT score comes from?
I have officially spent too much time on this.
For the record, my favorite book is probably “Cat’s Eye” by Margaret Atwood.