How favorite music correlates with SAT scores

The average SAT score as a function of the student's favorite band

Yeah, that's not a socio-economic skew at all.  It's about as unbiased as the SAT itself.

The "makes you stupid" things are taken from Facebook -- it's not the student's actual score, but the average score of the school where they attend.  It's a self-selecting population and it's fairly worthless other than as a tool for ego-stroking or examining socio-economic trends in cultural consumption (but that's a fairly weak case).  Doug and I had an argument about that site the other day ;P

The first thing I noted was Guster. I'm sure a disproportionate number of them go to Tufts, their alma mater, a school with high SAT scores.

Correlation is not causation

I should hope that nobody actually thinks that listening to a band makes your SAT scores go up or down. Unless of course the band is ABBA. They chose the name because that's how far they got in the alphabet before they gave up.

What about Graduate School?

And, yes I agree with Misch, having taken a Research Methods class, that correlation does not imply causation.