Suprise Acceptance Stories?

briansteffy
Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:18:04 +0000

Before he entered Presidential politics, Ralph Nader wa zeroing-in on the SAT. I wish he would have sustained the work. As I have joked elsewhere, 100 years from now people will chuckle at our obsession with such pseudo-science, much the same way that we now chuckle at those, a century ago, who thought that they could predict intelligence by the contour of the skull. The SAT has little predictive validity; it, however, has ‘utility’ (as this term is used by both economists and psychometricians). The family pays for it, and colleges have a near no-cost device to rationalize and justify decisions. But this does not mean that the decisions are correct. Not only are there issues re: who can afford to take the prep classes or who has the time to study for it, but it presumes a very narrow construct definition of aptitude. That career decisions are made with this device borders on corruption. Further, as you state, the extent to which it correlates with college GPA may be largely explained away as ‘common methods variance’; some perform well on tests and some do not, which begs the obvious question, to what exactly do the tests constructed by profs, upon which the GPA is derived, adequately measure knowledge acquisition. The ‘science’ is dismal. But it’s better than random selection - that’s it, a bit better than random selection. And, of course, it is a very efficient, low-cost selection tool, required by an institution not blessed with slack resources. The more radical voice in my head argues that the collective work of the SAT, GRE, LSAT, etc. has done much to systematically sort-out the ‘best and brightest’ (if defined as multi-dimensional - tacit sense, leadership, wisdom, interdisciplinary thinking, etc.) from the professions, partially explaining the dismal state of legal, medical, and business practice today. This is not to condemn those who test well and ‘make the grades’, but to condemn a dismal science of selection that produces so many false-negative decisions.
Imagine a college that sincerely pursues rigorous education (I mean seriously) with high expectations regarding everyday residential life. The college is small, or it is a large university disagregated into small collegiate sub-institutions (though on the same campus) Say the college RANDOMLY accepts students, with some minimal criteria (SAT=1000; 2.5 GPA; passion in one EC). I would rather send my kid to this school, rather than one crowded with 1400-plus SAT’s and 3.85 GPAs, but where the profs are largely focused on their research (lots of it a waste of intellectual capital, but required to get a promotion and a decent merit adjustment in pay), and ‘student life’ is largely ignored, which is often the case (the lowest priority and the lowest paid salaries on campus). I would hope that employers would gravitate to this hypothetical college.