 Here's an interesting project. One person went to Facebook, downloaded the top 10 most frequent "favorite books" at various colleges, then went to CollegeBoard, and downloaded the average SAT scores for each of the colleges.
An average score was assigned to each book by finding all the colleges on whose "favorite book" list it appeared, adding up the average SAT/ACT scores, and dividing by the number of lists. Books that appeared on too few lists to be significant were discarded.
They were then plotted on a graph, with their place on the horizontal axis representing frequency of mention on the list (the more frequently mentioned a books was, the closer to the top it was placed), and the vertical axis representing the average SAT/ACT score range calculated for the book.
The results are at Books That Make You Dumb. Take special note of where Atlas Shrugged wound up.
As the author points out, correlation doesn't equal causation, but it is interesting to see the results nonetheless.
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