What is everyone advocating in this thread? Sounds dystopian.
It’s true that study found little predictive power to SAT scores for estimating cumulative GPAs, after controlling for HSGPA. To take that a step forward, is there any admission factor that significantly adds to R^2 for cumulative GPA, after controlling for HSGPA? Could admissions be based on HSGPA alone?
@roethlisburger I doubt that could happen, as it’s much easier to get A’s in some schools than others. However, the UK system – and I believe Canada’s too? – are more purely numbers-based and they seem to be doing just fine.
And we shouldn’t forget the left-hand wing and tail of the distribution either: our education system does a horrible job of matching the cognitively challenged with an appropriate education that could actually help them through life. When you consider that there are approximately 11 million children in the US right now who would have been classified as “mentally ■■■■■■■■” under the standards in effect until 1973, you can see the problem. The overwhelming majority of these kids are being funneled into classrooms in which the Common Core and similarly silly “one size fits all” approaches will terrorize them - and ultimately alienate them permanently from a useful education.
At both ends of the spectrum, our stubborn refusal to accept that people have fundamental differences in their abilities to learn is causing huge deadweight losses. The attempts to get rid of the SAT - which no one believes is a perfect test (although it was much better before the mid-1990s) - constitute just another step along this path.
I don’t know for I fact but I suspect success in standardized tests is closely correlated with wealth. I also don’t know but I suspect there is a cottage industry in gaming the test through extra time especially these days where any edge in admissions is to be seized upon. On that last point make candidates take the test with no time constraint (within reason) then it no longer becomes, in part, a speed reading exercise.
When you have a massive country - geographically and population - it becomes very unwieldy in its attempts to offer opportunity to all on a national scale. Constantly comparing ourselves to smaller countries (or smaller regions in countries that act more independently than do our states, such as the Canada example) is a fool’s errand. It just doesn’t scale. If colleges want to admit students from places far and wide (beyond state borders, for instance), they need some benchmarks in order to compare applicants in an efficient manner - an A is not an A is not an A, and most don’t have the bandwidth to spend hours holistically evaluating each of 1,000’s of applications. If it’s not the SAT/ACT, it will be something else, guaranteed.
One issue with the study is looking at graduation rates. Suppose you get to college unprepared in math and science, but want to major in STEM. You might get bad grades for a semester or two, before being advised to switch to some easier major. Unless you’re totally unprepared for college, you should be able to find some major where you can at least scrape by enough to graduate.
I suspect what you meant to say is that standardized test scores are correlated to parental income, rather than wealth. While true, remember that correlation does not automatically imply causation.
Part of the reason that standardized test scores are correlated with parental income is because intelligence (a causative factor) is correlated with income, and a child’s intelligence is correlated with that of the parents. To understand what remaining effect there is due to parental income, you would need to control for intelligence when performing the study.
Agreed. I believe we need an educational system where it is based on merit and intelligence rather than a single test.
I recall the book from the JFK era “The Best and the Brightest” describing a group of top government officials of the time. What they had in common was a very fast reading speed and constant consumption of thick books. Processing speed matters.
Beyond just college grades, standardized test scores may provide additional predictive ability for graduate school entry (including scores on GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) and success in the non-classroom side of life. Colleges want graduates who will go on to be very successful and contribute large amounts to the alumni fund. They realize that a lot of this depends on the raw material they take in, and they can only add so much value during four years. A standardized test, as close as possible to an IQ test, may provide a better prediction of success than excellent adaptation and continuous near-flawless performance in high school classroom settings.
The article about the Hiss study has this near the end: "“We need thousands of students going through higher ed. Optional testing is one of the ways that that could happen. Optional testing is a potential route to getting many more students through higher education who normally would not be admitted or would not apply in first place,” Hiss said. "
Well now does that mean Bates, Wesleyan etc. are going to build a lot of new dorm space? Yale just opened some new dorm space, but I don’t see a general trend to increase the number of places at most selective schools. Every kid they accept on one basis generally replaces another kid they would have accepted on another basis. I don’t see how Bates going test-optional helps to increase the number of kids in higher education.
(It must also be said that maybe we need some of those kids in higher education, those having difficulty or those pursuing non-marketable degrees, in vocational training instead. Maybe this is mainly a fight by the higher-education-industrial-complex to maintain its bloated size.)
“Higher education” starts with the freshman and sophomore years, and those are available on a low-cost easily accessible basis, no testing required, almost everywhere at community college. Those who are successful there seem to have little difficulty transferring to suitable four-year schools as juniors.
Maybe standardized tests only show how well one takes a standardized test.
No offense to anyone, but…
I can see how colleges or future employers will take their chances with kids who score ACT C34+ or SAT 1500+ than kids who score ACT C20 or SAT 1000.
You must live in California. 
The most serious community college in my area (within an hour’s commute) has articulation agreements with a few 4 year colleges, but they’re mostly for students who have earned specified AA’s, such as nursing or paralegal degrees. The college offers only two physics classes that aren’t for specific jobs (radiography or fire sciences), no Mandarin, one geology course, one philosophy course, one astronomy course. Want to study dental hygiene? It’s a good school. Want to take a math course beyond linear algebra? Not so good. IOW, it concentrates on vocational training, not prepping kids for 4 year colleges, although some students do continue at other schools.
Bates and Wesleyan don’t need to build more dorms if other schools admit smart, high achieving kids with lousy test scores. While I agree with you that some kids really should take the vocational route, there are plenty of kids who have proven themselves academically in HS but whose scores are a mismatch with their achievement.
I’d love to see the SAT made twice or three times as hard. This is CC after all, so let’s spread out the top kids to see who is really smart across the board. The problem will be with the moderately intelligent “rich” kids. They would see the biggest dropoff. My kids fit that profile for the verbal. Its hard to game the test, when the test isn’t easy.
For my kids, they would still get 800 in Math (they might even miss a question or two), but their verbal would drop precipitously if we were to return to the 1970s- early 1980s verbal portion. I still have bad memories of the analogy questions.
^Analogy questions were always going to be the most highly correlated with innate ability, and the most difficult to game. (This is because it requires the test taker to deduce a rule, and then apply it.) Both the verbal analogies and math comparisons disappeared in 2005, well after any adjustments were made to address the alleged “cultural biases” that existed decades earlier (which were always exaggerated anyway - the infamous “regatta” question, lol - just how many children of any race had any exposure to sailing?). Vocabulary questions were said to have favored kids who attended schools that taught vocabulary lists, but of course the world even back then contained no dearth of reading material.
The 1995 SAT recentering basically added 70 points to all the verbal scores (80 points in the 300-400 range). Every score above 720 was compressed into 800. On math, it generally added 20 points to above 750, subtracted about 10 points below 670 down to around 620, and then started adding points in an increasing fashion down to the 300-400 range, over which 40-60 points were added. A very strange adjustment to say the least. To some degree, especially with math, the new distributions represented an adjustment to reflect the different demographics of college bound kids in the late 1980s versus the 1940s cohort against which the original test had been normed.
If we normed the mathematics distribution against today’s cohort, it would need to go up to at least 900 or a 1000.
Agreed that the standardized tests are way too easy today to make meaningful distinctions among the upper five percent or so of ability (the traditional group targeted by “top” colleges).
I found this tidbit in Michelle Hernandez’s *A is for Admissions/i:
Lots of interesting data in there to mine. Personally, I find it interesting that roughly 67% of the kids with perfect scores applied to Harvard. Of course, even though the SAT today is even easier in many ways than the 1996 test (much easier to game for lesser ability kids), there are still only about 600 “perfect” scores I think a year (if anyone has the most recent data, please post). I wonder if the ease of applying today to multiple schools implies that Harvard (and other tippy top) places gets a higher percentage of prefect score applicants.
Anyway, it does give the lie to the common meme on CC that colleges get “thousands” of perfect score + 4.0 GPA candidates. Impossible, even in today’s more relaxed standards world.
The SAT is far too easy for many, many top students. This means that top schools have no statistical basis to sort the very good from the top notch who can do the work at major colleges. I keep seeing all who score high can do the work, not true, if you are amongst the very best in the world ( math at MIT/Caltech) and you are 97% you are going to be drowning. Likewise, someone in the 95% in verbal is not going to hold his/her own in a writing program with others who are the best in the nation.
Of course the SAT is too easy. But note, in the above data from Hernandez, that in 1996 Harvard accepted 200/365 = 55% of the perfect scorers. I think that around this time, the overall acceptance rate was approximately 10-12% (could anyone confirm or correct me here). So, there was a significant advantage to the perfect score, an approximately 500% advantage as compared to the people who tested in range (actually, there was a significant advantage to being smart enough to test “off the scale,” which was likely reflected throughout the application).
For people who go on and on about how test scores do not matter much for admissions beyond a certain “threshold” (in other words, do not correlate with the qualities top schools are looking for), the above numbers should give some pause.
Today, I suppose that there are far more perfect math scores than verbal, so verbal will still act as the “gate”. I doubt the admittance rate for composite perfect scores is 55% today, especially as there are so many 36 composite scores on the very coachable ACT, but I also doubt it’s only 15 or 20% either. It has to be a very significant advantage. No wonder people who can’t score very high want to eliminate the SAT!
@SatchelSF – as one of the people who go on and on about test scores, I don’t think the obsession with test scores is healthy. IMHO, what the “top” schools are looking for are sure things for college – a combination of top scores and ECs in HS. I think that @data10 has the best grasp of the situation.
Yep SAT scores are taken waaay to serious in our communities. I’d recommend anybody to read my most influencial book The Millionaire Mind by Joe Stanley. The author interviewed about 1200 millionaires and the average GPA of all of them was a 2.9. Also there was an opposite correlation with wealth and SAT scores. The higher SAT scores of those millionaires made less money. If you’d like to create your own business someday, do you really think your GPA or SAT scores determine how you succeed in your business? Also the author had the millionaires rank what they found important to their success and nearly 80% of them ranked good grades as not important to their success. Now of the ones that ranked their good grades important were either Doctors, lawyers, or high up leaders in high tech and science industries, which makes sense because you have to get good grades to get into medical and law school. There was even a person from a country (i forgot which one) that came to america because they needed free thinkers and creators even though their country had the highest SAT scores. The person said, so what, it’s just a test, i need creative people! Don’t let SATs and GPAs hold you down and predict your future, especially if you’re in a more social degree!