Famous (or infamous) hacker and WikiScanner creator, Virgil Griffith, completed an interesting project mapping out a correlation between SAT scores and Music preference. Albeit not the most scientific of studies, Virgil creatively aggregated students’ self-reported music preferences on Facebook, and plotted them against their schools’ average SAT scores.
Even more interesting than his methodology, are his results. Virgil scientifically (well, sort of) established a link between Lil Wayne and Pitbull’s mind numbing music and actual mind numbing. According to his data, students who listed Lil Wayne as a favorite musician score the worst on the SAT – roughly in the 30th percentile (that’s below 900 using only Critical Reading & Math scores). Soca and Nickleback listeners don’t perform much better with average scores hovering around 900 and 996 respectively. I guess Nickleback’s lead vocalist, Chad Kroeger, wasn’t kidding when he whined “I never made it as a wise man”. Musicians that top the list are Counting Crows, Radiohead, and Sufjan Stevens (no huge surprise considering his tendency to pepper lyrics with words like eminent and futile).
Of course these findings may be completely correlative and not causative, but it probably doesn’t hurt to occasionally forego the Lil Wayne in favor of some Sufjan Stephens or Counting Crows to get those synapses firing before test day. Plus a cool chart is a cool chart, as my grandmother always used to say.
Check out where your musical preferences place your SAT scores after the break!