It may well be true that very high SAT scores tend to correlate with the other kinds of impressive achievements that super-selective colleges like Harvard like to see. This could mean, of course, that Harvard is not all that interested in kids with high scores but no impressive other achievements.
I suspect that it’s true though, that other things being equal, having a 2400 SAT is better in terms of admissions than having a 2200. However, other things are probably not equal very often–unless you are a kid from a good high school with good grades and very few ECs outside the school. Then they might be pretty equal.
“This could mean, of course, that Harvard is not all that interested in kids with high scores but no impressive other achievements.”
These are very tough clients for me. The valedictorian with a 35 and not much to say is likely to have parents who expect Penn to be his safety. Managing expectations with the families is a hard row to hoe.
Hannah: I feel for those kids. Some simply have to work incredibly hard to get those grades and perhaps have parents that don’t understand the need to outside activities. But others may simply not have the personality to say a lot or to be really active or to attract the attention of teachers. The latter may really do well in college, however, so sort of shame for them that they may be overlooked.
Overlooked? Is it a national tragedy that a kid who gets rejected from Harvard ends up Carnegie Mellon or Northwestern?
What are you talking about- which kids are you feeling for, and what exactly is the terrible outcome you anticipate for them? Digging ditches in the snow because they didn’t have extra curriculars in HS?
Exactly. These kids may not get into one of 8 schools that unsophisticated and easily-impressed parents stupidly believe are the be-all-end-all only way to Life Happiness and a career beyond ditch digging, but if they’re smart, they’ll do FINE.
Lani thinks the “books are cooked” because admissions procedures are designed to benefit rich white people. Where some of us thinks she goes astray is in thinking that the SAT is a major part of this at schools like Harvard.
I am very busy right now, but I think it is important for me to answer some posters here, out of courtesy if nothing else.
@Data10, @Mastadon, @mackinaw and others. Standardized testing is the crown jewel of the social sciences. No other branch has such predictability, reliability, or consistency. Econometrics attracts extremely bright students, but can their mathematical models predict anything? No economic theory was able to see the fall in oil price, or the market crash of 2009 ahead of time. Yet psychometric is able to anticipate the productiveness of precocious children with a 2 hour test given at age 13, even separating those scoring in the top quarter of one percent from those who scored in the bottom quarter of one percent. If the other branches of social science have to live up to the standards critics set for psychometric, they would all cease to exist.
Most of the critics are from outside the field. The exception is Sternberg but even he admitted he is not convincing experts in the field. The other critics I have seen have not been impressive, speaking generally of course. I find most simply lack the mathematics to do so. One that comes to mind is Stephen Jay Gould (who turned out to be a fraud, btw). I remember Jensen responded to his criticism with this “brutal” reply: http://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html
In this article from the other side of the pond, the journalist is showing the ambivalence we all experienced. The field is moving on, however, from behaviour genetics to molecular genetics. I suspect the picture will be clearer within a decade. I guess we just have to let the truth set us free, however unpleasant. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8970941/sorry-but-intelligence-really-is-in-the-genes/
That article (from the Economist) is reasonable enough until it jumps from discussing colleges to recommending more early childhood education, for which there is more than ample proof that it works, and then leaps to recommending, baldly and without any proof, dismantling teachers’ unions and diverting money to charter schools–neither of which have been shown to be useful in improving education. Charter schools, in fact, have mostly been failures, especially when they are for-profit or ideologically based. The article goes on to, essentially, advocate making elementary education a free market–again, an approach that has never succeeded, no matter how much it appeals to economists. School choice and vouchers are bandaids, and they blandly ignore the fact that in that scenario, “good” schools succeed and “bad” schools fail–at the cost of good education for the kids in the bad schools. We wouldn’t conduct a medical experiment for cancer which gave medicine to one group and left the other group to die; you give the best medicine you have to the control group, and conduct your trial of a new drug on the other. I’m tired of non-educators prescribing “reform” when they have no understanding of the problems that are really facing teachers.
The Economist article --which is not a view from the other side of the pond but a localized article for US consumption-- has been discussed elsewhere on CC.
Fwiw, I could not disagree more about which school “overhaul” has been a bandaid. Considering how Al Shanker, the feisty union leader endorsed charter schools, one can only begin to understand why that was! In so many words, the charter school movement all but killed any meaningful reform that might have broken down the monopolistic control of our education system. Adding charters to the “choice” but maintaining the tight leash on the schools via short term “charter” contracts and funding impediment was the bandaid by excellence, and one akin to place it on wooden leg.
The same can be said for the US version of school choice and vouchers, which are poor examples of a free and open system such is known in the country that had the intelligence and fortitude to protect school choice (free in all terms of the word) through their constitution. And it should be noted that this protection did NOT stop the same type of corrupt forces that have undermined the US system for six decades to attempt to eliminate the choices that brought better and more competitive schools (look up Belgium Flanders) to its citizens. Contrary to what my esteemed poster above intimated, there are free “markets” that work, and some work very well. They do, however, require a level playing field and not one that is seeded with determined time bombs. The US few examples were designed to … fail, and that includes the abomination that is represented by the charter schools that simply rebranded a system with similar actors.
Before we can allow to have “good” and “bad” schools flourish, we need to allow them to compete on the same playing field. Most of the dialogue is a canard of epic proportions that is based solely on the desire to “protect” the deadwood in the system, namely overpaid administrators that benefit from union support, bad teachers who are able to rely on tenure and an obnoxious anti-firing mechanism, and most importantly, the VERY poor teachers who are culled from the worst colleges and are starting unprepared and untrained for the job and are … paid accordingly. The current system rewards nothing else than utter mediocrity. We need to let bad schools fail and assume that many teachers should not find similar employment for the only reason they have been there a long time!
The reality is that, for its amount of spending, our country deserves MUCH better schools and an adaptive system that correctly recognizes the needs from both the advanced students and the unfortunate who suffer from handicaps. Our one size fits all has been an unmitigated disaster that is only analyzed through the lens of an ostrich.
There is a place for unions in this new education system, but it should not be in its current cancerous form. The unions should be open to different ideas and not be one that presents a lockstep ideology. Their role should be the mere one of a trade union and they should have no say on the organization of the system nor be allowed to control the schools and school boards through their massive amount of raised (read extorted) money. There are no other party that are as directly responsible for the poor state of education in our public high school. They have been given the chance to run our schools by the abject abandonment of our politicians’ duties, and they have failed miserably as unions have no interest in the families or the students, except their own.
Lastly, the diversion of money is one of the dumbest and unsupported argument ever. As much as it is the weapon of choice for many opposed to market reform, the math simply does not support. But cooked books are the domain of academia. Too bad that dear Lani looked at the wrong side of our education system. Rather than focus on Harvard, she should have stuck to issues where she made her mark.
Xiggi, I don’t always agree with you but your last line really resonates- there are millions of kids in America getting shortchanged every single day in their K-12 educations. I find it crazy the amount of ink and angst that people are prepared to expend criticizing Harvard…
Sure, Harvard could be less “Harvard” (whatever that means). But every calorie that a well intended ed reformer or social scientist expends worrying about Harvard is a calorie not spent figuring out how to rescue a kid in Camden or Newark NJ (among the HIGHEST spending districts in the country, btw) who is stuck in an 8th grade classroom reading at a 4th grade level.
Charter schools are not a monolithic operation, Xiggi. Differences in quality, outcome, philosophy, and mission exist – a fact about which you are apparently unaware. I have taught in several and been a policy-maker in one of them. Some of them have been and still are very successful and are not at all in step with teacher unions.
The study I linked earlier found the following predictive validities for life outcomes using the same sample group described in your link. The correlation is more than 0, but generally quite weak. I’d expect the army test used in your link had greater correlations due to sample bias. An army vocational test is going to be more predictive of life outcomes among a biased sample that is mostly persons applying to the army than among the general population in a similar way that MCAT score would be more predictive of life outcomes among a biased sample that is mostly persons applying to med school than among the general population.
Earnings at Age 35 – 0.04
Incarceration at Age 35 – <0.02
Welfare at Age 35 – <0.02
Depression --<0.02
I’m not familiar with the algorithms used for predicting the fall in oil price or market crash, but I expect that they used a variety of sources of information to improve their prediction instead of just looking at a single stat. It’s a similar idea with colleges, applying for a job, or just about any other group that has other useful information about the sample group available to them. College use a variety of measures to predict success including high school grades, high school curriculum, LORs, essays, achievements outside of the classroom, etc instead of just looking at a single test score. So the question isn’t whether a particular test scores has a more than 0 correlation with life outcome, it’s more what that test score adds to the prediction beyond the other criteria used in evaluation of applicants.