Accepted... now what?

[coase]

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The College Board studies are clear - SATs are weakly predictive of first-year college performance for non-minorities. Past that, not even the College Board (which sells the product) will make any claims.</p>

<p>The students don’t succeed “despite their low SAT scores.” The SAT scores are simply irrelevant.

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<p>The Oregon study, “Data Mining the University: College GPA Predictions from SAT Scores,” looked at upper-division, within-major GPA and found that “the best predictor of GPA is a roughly equally weighted sum of SAT and high school GPA, measured in standard deviation units.” Of course there are selection problems inherent in such studies (matriculants are a selected sample), but the impact of selection is ambiguous. </p>

<p>Here is the abstract from another study: </p>

<p>

The degree to which SAT scores and high school grade-point average (GPA) predicted first-year college GPA (FGPA) and college graduation was examined for four groups: Hispanic students whose first language was Spanish and Hispanic, Black, and White students whose first language was English. The percentage of variance in FGPA jointly explained by high school GPA and SAT score varied from 7% to 20% across groups. Survival analyses showed that high school GPA had a statistically significant influence on graduation in the White/English group; SAT had a significant effect in the Hispanic/English and White/English groups. The regression and survival analyses revealed interesting differences in achievement patterns between the Hispanic/Spanish and Hispanic/English groups, demonstrating the value of taking language background into consideration in educational research.

<a href=“http://education.ucsb.edu/rzwick/3185_02_Zwick.pdf[/url]”>http://education.ucsb.edu/rzwick/3185_02_Zwick.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>GPA is such a deficient measure of performance that it is not clear why we obsess over it anyway. Even if it is a good ordinal measure (i.e., it ranks students appropriately), it may not be a good cardinal measure (i.e., the absolute level of GPA may not be meaningful), yet the GPA is typically used in regressions. In addition, there are many factors affecting GPA that not directly related to education. Students who pick their classes and teachers to maximize GPA in HS will do the same in college. Students who ingratiate themselves to teachers in HS will do the same in college. Students whose aim in HS is to maximize GPA rather than learn will have the same aim in college. Nonetheless, these two studies hardly suggest that the SAT is irrelevant as a predictor of GPA or graduation rates.</p>