Are readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez smarter than fans of Nicholas Sparks? If you loved Lolita, does that mean you’ve got more going on upstairs than someone whose favorite book is He’s Just Not That Into You? We book nerds want to believe the answer’s a resounding “yes” (though, if pressed, we’ll admit that one can lead a fulfilling life without being able to name five characters from Pride and Prejudice) and now, we have been vindicated. Sort of.

Virgil Griffith, a graduate student (tell me you didn’t see that coming) in Computation and Neural Systems at Cal Tech, has tracked the correlation between reading habits and intellect – or, more precisely, between one’s favorite book and one’s SAT scores. After determining the top ten favorite books of students at 1,352 colleges (as posted on Facebook), he then determined the average SAT score of students attending each college, crunched the numbers, and came up with the nifty graph below:

Griffith’s methodology may not hold up to scientific scrutiny–and, in fact, he doesn’t intend it to, having done this for a hobby–but it’s yielded some interesting results. Books That Make You Dumb has been posted on BoingBoing, Jezebel, and Sociological Images, in part because of his startling finding that preferring certain African American authors is linked to lower SAT scores. (I’d argue that this is because African Americans, who presumably might favor authors from their own ethnic groups, have historically attended sub-par public schools which don’t prepare them well for standardized tests like the SATs. But this is clearly an issue with many facets: please do click the links above to follow the discussion.)

But one thing I find interesting about this data is the fact that you don’t know how much posturing is going on. People craft their Facebook personas carefully, and a lot of the “favorite” choices sound suspiciously highbrow. I’m skeptical of the people who just picked “Shakespeare,” for instance. He’s an author, not a book—does anybody seriously enjoy all the man’s plays that much, or did they just figure an affinity for the Bard made them sound smart?

But that’s the big picture. When you start looking at individual schools, the top book choices sound a lot less forced. Here are the students’ reading preferences in a few, uh, not-so-randomly selected schools:

It’s a mix of popular, readable stuff—Harry Potter, Dan Brown, Ender’s Game—and, well, books people read in high school—Gatsby, 1984, To Kill A Mockingbird. The latter finding is rather depressing: it seems students will either only read if some teacher makes them do it (though they may find a book they really like that way), or, in making their choices, they won’t venture far from the bestseller lists. The big exception is Brown, which may mean that the high schools Brownies attended assign stuff like Lolita and Catch 22, or simply that Brown kids are more pretentious. (I’m going with the latter. Heh.)

The most heartening finding? The popularity of Pride and Prejudice. If you need any proof as to the superiority of UNC to Dook and State, here it is.