So acknowledging I just outed myself as not entirely neutral on this subject–why do you think that a person who changes their major to something they are much better at would not count as a success story for a college like Dartmouth?
Like, the professors in my new department seemed happy to have me in classes. My fancy college got a data point about placing a graduate in a fancy PhD program (and then a fancy law school, although by that time I was probably outside most relevant reporting windows). That did not happen in my original field, but was that really a dealbreaker?
In fact, we know there are some majors and tracks with large drop out rates even at very good colleges. While they may want to make sure enough people stick with it, it would seem to me rather smart to be consciously looking for the kids like that who will then really make the most of Plan B.
I don’t particularly have an issue with people switching majors. I’m just trying to say that the SAT’s supposed lack of predictive power post-1st year is a deceptive statistic that gets muddied by student self-selection. The Dartmouth authors probably understood how self-selection can muddy up their variables so they consciously decided to look only at 1st year GPA. They didn’t do it for nefarious reasons like I suspect some people are trying to imply.
I feel obligated to note that most SLACs actually do natural sciences and mathematics, these days likely CS too, and Dartmouth actually does have engineering.
In fact, according to NCES College Navigator, 429 of 1050 primary majors at Dartmouth in the last dataset (about 41%) were STEM.
Of course it was 216 of 218 at Caltech (99%). So not the same sort of school overall, but I do think people sometimes forget about a good chunk of what SLACs and MLACs actually do.
Oh, I know – but for a U, Dartmouth seems fairly undergrad- and SS/Hum oriented… one of the greater bastions of intellectualism, probably, among universities.
They do have Engineering, but it’s a 3+2 program – the kids have to finish at another school.
We are all just speculating, but when you look at the bigger picture of what Dartmouth has said about its admissions, I actually think they do ultimately place more weight, much more weight, on highly individualized looks at transcripts when determining who they actually want to admit. Because they do in fact care about the whole college track, supporting an exploratory model, and so on.
So while I don’t think it was “nefarious” of Dartmouth to present this data, I think in context it really fits with what they have said before, which is they think that sometimes test scores are helpful for initial screening purposes.
And for that initial screening purpose, I can see why (modestly) predicting first year grades would make something one of many factors you would want to potentially consider. And yet I also can see why if that is really all it did, that particular factor would then not be all that important past the initial screen phase.
I do think transcripts offer more value than the SAT assuming that the student succeeded in rigorous courses. In that case, that student should have no problems doing well on the SAT, so there’s no harm in forcing said student to sit for the exam just in case.
The SAT’s value is in identifying gifted students in the 99% of high schools that are just terrible. Dartmouth and its peers want talented students of all backgrounds, not just those from Stuyvesant or TJHS.
That’s my point. SAT scores cannot predict success in any of the activities that you enumerate, and even the students who scored the lowest on the SATs had the academic stuff covered.
As you brought up gender and math heavy majors, a good friend of mine got her PhD in math at Stanford. She told me there were professors there that refused to start class until “the real students showed up” (i.e. the men). Sadly, this isn’t as long ago as we might wish it was.
So Dartmouth is relatively undegrad focused, but in terms of academic mix, that same model often exists in the form of a Liberal Arts and Sciences college/school/subdivision in many universities. Like, Penn CAS, Michigan LSA, and so on.
ONLY having that sort of college is less common, but not specifically among Ivies and Ivy+. Like, using the same method, Chicago was 623/1746 STEM (35.7%). Yale was 587/1420 (41.3%). And so on.
Again I am not trying to suggest these colleges are much like Caltech, but I think they ARE worried about, say, making sure enough people stick with their STEM majors. But not everyone, not necessarily.
Based on their paper, it was way less than 99%. But I agree Dartmouth made a case for why they would be useful for Dartmouth when kids were coming out of secondary schools with grades Dartmouth didn’t trust.
Just an anecdote, but the SAT is actually highly predictive of work performance at my company. I might not know the exact score of my coworkers and direct reports, but I have a fairly good idea based on the college they went to.
I notice those who went to top colleges have better working memory and can pick things up faster. There’s probably a good reason why Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos wanted to know a candidate’s SAT score back when things were less PC.
We had a long discussion of this at least a couple times before. Studies have usually found general tests like the SAT have relatively little utility in predicting job performance, and employers are typically much better off designing their own tests.
For example, there is a famous case study of the Navy trying to use the Wonderlic to predict training crashes for its aviators. That didn’t work, but they evolved their own tests they use to this day.
As someone who got an 800 M, 730 R and 700 W on the old SAT, I would be very suspicious of anyone with a high GPA but a low test score. There’s just no way it can happen unless something extraordinary happened.
The math section is algebra 1 at most with a few light curveballs that test your ability to adapt to novel situations.
The reading section is just a vocab, reading comprehension and working memory test.
All of the aptitude needed to do well on the SAT (Problem-solving, working memory, and reading comprehension) is the bare minimum you would need to succeed in a rigorous high school or college course. The only explanation outside of an unusual life circumstance is that the high GPA student studies a lot but is unable to truly understand the material and think beyond what is taught to him.
Depends on the job. The more cognitively-demanding the job is, the more SAT will be predictive of performance. It’s not unusual in my job to deal with new spreadsheets and models that have 25+ tabs in them. Someone with a good working memory as measured by the SAT reading section will have an easier time working with them.
The SAT is relatively crude in terms of actual content, but it has a relatively high pace of work. Lots and lots of studies have shown that a high pace of work and the ability to understand complex concepts and perform complex reasoning are two different things such that they should be measured separately.
OK, so if you happen to be good at understanding complex concepts and performing complexing reasoning but have a slow pace of work, you are likely not to do very well in tests like the SAT. Given enough time, you might well get just as many answers right as very high scorers, but because of your slow pace of work you do not have enough time.
Pace of work is like most things where there is a distribution and most people will be in a range of middling. The scoring on the tests is de facto normed to people with a middling pace of work, indeed the pace of work is artificially high in order to provide enough discrimination with what is otherwise a crude test substantively.
But some people have an unusually high pace of work and therefore find these sorts of tests very easy to master, and some people have an unusually slow pace of work and never get to the point they reflect their understanding and reasoning abilities accurately.
Yes, but the pace of work issue will always insert a lot of unnecessary noise, and again it will almost always be dominated by a better test specific to the job.
Like being a naval aviator is definitely cognitive-demanding, but among other things it is specifically demanding with respect to various aspects of spatial reasoning. The SAT isn’t going to test that at all.
Being able to read and analyze a truly complex, dense text well is not the same thing as being able to read a lot of pretty lightly-written texts very fast.
If you reduce something, as you’re doing, to having been “covered” to an overly simplistic, and completely lacking in nuance single data point like “GPA” then sure. But as my prior comments indicate, no, they absolutely, positively do not.
Moving on from this.
It’s worth noting, I think, that many people on CC seem stunned to learn that there are companies IRL that require SAT scores in job applications even for those applicants with years of experience in the field. They claim this is not the case, and yet DE Shaw and the like exist. (I recognize that they’re statistically a drop in the bucket, meaning a handful among zillions of companies)
FWIW, typically it’s the ACT that’s considered the ‘easier material but more time sensitive’ test as compared to the SAT. At least in these parts.
Not true. Very smart 4.0 Ivy classmate of mine had a crappy SAT score. Reason was she was a methodical meticulous rule follower, who worked slowly and steadily through standardized tests, would not guess, or look at the answers and work backwards.
There are instances where bright high achievers have low SAT scores.
Both of the tests are time-pressured tests, but it is true the ACT is even more so than the SAT.
Among other things, that is why my S24 started (and as it turns out ended) with the ACT. We knew he had a natural high pace of work, and it was easy for him to bang out a high ACT score with minimal preparation (would have been a notch higher if he had actually reviewed some old-to-him math like I told him to, but I digress).
I don’t find this explanation convincing. There is nothing on the SAT that is intellectually rigorous enough to warrant deep thought. At least, a “hard” SAT math problem may ask you to create a nexus between subtraction and distance, but a good student should know this intuitively.
The reading section has no creative questions or curve balls. It’s all comprehending semi-complicated text and one’s ability to hold information in your head while answering questions. It’s not a philosophy paper.
In the real world, people are regularly under tight deadlines and you don’t have infinite time to submit your work. The SAT is a good solution to filter out people who won’t be a good fit in high-paced colleges.