The article at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/11/14/indian-companys-skills-test-college-graduates indicates that he is using tests given at the time of employment application, not test scores from several years ago when the applicant was a high school student, like what advocates of using SAT scores for hiring decisions would use. In addition, the tests described in the article are those intended for evaluating employment applicants, not high school students.
The use of SAT scores in hiring is putting the focus on the (college) admission process, not on the finished products (college graduates or students about to graduate from college).
I’m sure owner of testing company would love to break into US market. But I think he’d be the only beneficiary of this testing as the company is creating some gotta have it demand for something that is of marginal, if any value. It’s kinda like Apple Company or USNWR. I think it’d be great for employers to know upfront if an applicant is worth hiring. But in my experience as an employer it’s often not whether new employee has the skills or can be trained, but whether they fit in with team which often is learned after the hiring. I also guess that the company places some disclaimer that its testing offers no guarantees. And as a former employer I already had a great tool for discovering that an applicant is not right for job, it’s called termination.
In quite a few fields it is quite common for US employers to test employees prior to hiring, but through interview questions related to the knowledge and skills required for the job, rather than general standardized testing that does not focus on major or job position. For example, after college, I interviewed with many tech companies. Some were well known ones that often get praised on this forum, and some were lesser known smaller ones, such as startups. None of the companies asked for my SAT or GRE scores, but every one of them asked me a series of technical questions during the interviews to gauge what I learned about my field during college and via experience. With some interviewers, this testing was essentially the full interview. One interviewer didn’t even bother saying “hi” to me or discuss my resume , and instead just walked in and started asking me technical questions. Some questions were longer, complex questions that might take 15+ minutes to complete, rather quick/basic type of questions that tend to appear on standardized tests. Sometimes questions related to the actual issues that the team was currently working on and trying to solve/improve and/or had recently resolved. It was common to need to write out my solutions on a whiteboard and explain my process as I went along, which also differs from typical standardized tests.
@Data10 - My engineering grad tells me that this has been typical for job interviews, not for college lab jobs or co-ops, but as a new grad and later. Both well-known companies and start-ups. These interviews take hours. New grads will be quizzed on their senior projects, MS thesis, or PhD dissertation. Presentation skills are crucial and in this economy, there are sometimes dozens of applicants chasing a job that pays less than the median wage in the industry.
However, some well-known companies have also required online standardized testing - both aptitude and personality testing - before even scheduling a phone interview.
My recent grad (not engineering) found that unless a specific skill was sought (and sometimes even then), on-campus recruiters who accepted resumes from “any major” screened by GPA and standardized test scores (SAT, ACT, GRE, etc.) about as often as not, and that the requested GPA/test scores were not that different from those usually required for professional school admissions.
^^They are wise. We know standardized test of general cognitive ability is “the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience”.
@ucbalumnus SAT scores taken at age 13 can predict future performance not just in school but in the real world too. The difference in achievement of the top quarter of one percent vs. the bottom quarter of the top one percent is startling, 25 years out.
The beauty of it all is that we do not need to test for specific skills. That is what we have learned from decades of work in occupational psychology. Counter-intuitive, isn’t it?
I personally can not think of a better way of comparing student performance across schools and across majors. Here is the grading system I am more familiar with:
The problem here is that there still is no control over the quality of an A from school to school and from major to major. You may also find the comments here about our grading system thought-provoking:
Is your business only interested in people who scored above 99.75 people but not the people who score above 99% and does it believe that such rankings allow to cull people who aren’t interesting enough, creative enough, charismatic enough, original enough, hard working enough…
(I find that idea repulsive, honestly. But I’m clearly not working in your business and from your screenhandle I guess you’re not American. I did think Canadian society was more equalitarian-minded than American society but you may be an “original” in your culture as much as you may be reflecting a norm. In addition, you seem to see tests as, basically, fate, which isn’t very typically American. So I understand that my reaction may be as culturally-induced as yours.)
The article about the U of Toronto is interesting, but please note that 1° Ontario grading, even in HS , is considered to be -5 to -10 compared to American grading in high school (ie. “if the last person to get in had an 80” would be, in the US, “if the lowest admit’s GPA was an A-”) and 2° UToronto is notorious for its grade deflation.
In other words, it’s not an example, it’s an outlier. It also indicates that grades are mostly social signifier - an 89 at UT is not the same value as an 89 at a low performing high school in the US and is not the same as an 89 in an American college. It works for UToronto because it thrives on its outlier status - they actually consider this a superiority to Harvard, which I guess they see as their peer.
Note that even there, which is considered extreme in the US, the average grade is B-/C+ says one person, C says another. So, the OP would indicate the students’ perception that grades in class are an extreme situation wouldn’t be false, even if the grades do reflect their achievement and their rank.
In addition, what SAT results indicate, mostly, is parental income. When you take a school where the average score is 17 and a school where the average score is 26 (ie., low-performing and high-performing) you don’t have a school full of idiots and a school full of smart kids. You have one school where kids have received fewer advantages (nutritional, material, psychological, or intellectual) early in life, poor support and learning environments, suffer daily traumas in their daily life, and where everything’s stacked against their succeeding. The “average” kid is no less “average” than the kid at the high-performing school
So, will the super smart rich kid have different success than others? Well, duh.
That you would say “the beauty of it all” indicates it’s something you find positive and perhaps awe-inspiring.
I guess we have a different view of what schools are for and what an ideal society would look like.
(Have you read Divergent?)
The study you linked doesn't have your quote. Instead it found that among the measured criteria, the best predictor of job performance was "work sample tests.". For job training (not job performance), they did not evaluate work sample tests, which would likely have been highest. Of the criteria they did evaluate, GMA test was highest.
Of course in the real world, employers don’t just look at one criteria in hiring decisions and focus on job performance success, rather than job training success. Employers generally look for persons with relevant experience who do not need extensive training to perform the job. . For example, as a small Internet company owner, I’ve hired persons for the following positions in recent years — website graphic design, web programming (specialty programming that was beyond what I could do well myself), and sales (arranging affiliate deals, often through networking connections). I didn’t want to train them to be a graphic designer, do specialty web programming, or sales. Instead I wanted persons who had existing ability in those positions beyond what I could train.
Do you think I’d get the best performance results by focusing on SAT score? Or would I get better results by focusing more on graphic designers who have portfolios showing they can do stellar graphic designs, web programmers who have knowledge of the specialty programming areas I need as determined through interview type questions/experience check, and sales who has special networking connections with the affiliate companies that I want?
Time constraints prevent me from reading all 288 prior comments in this thread, but:
I DO remember getting a 42% on a 400-level chemistry exam approximately one month into my first semester at State U, after two years at a smaller college with a 3.85 GPA. It was about the class average, so that made it a C, but no less devastating.
I was in tears for about two hours. Then I got mad. I got tutoring (the prof was generally acknowledged to be a research star but a horrible teacher, and the textbook was worse), studied harder, wasn’t sure how I had done on the final, but swung by the prof’s office to check posted grades before going home for Christmas, and had gotten a B in the course - and a 3.3 for the semester.
By the time I was registering for the second semester of this chemistry course, I had picked up the word on the street about who the easier professor was. This material had some relevance to my major, but the courses were not in my major, and not in the engineering college at all, so when a chem major pal stated that the course as taught by the easier professor was “not rigorous enough,” I felt the risk was low. Worked as hard as I had to in there to get the A, which was less than I had to do in the first semester to get the B.
Done, and I lived to tell the story. No complaining to the professor or anyone else. I owned the challenge and I prevailed.
I really wonder how some of these students are going to perform at work in the real world. The early indications I see from some of my employer’s Gen Y hires aren’t too promising.
This is tangential to the topic but seems to speak to the change in expectations of adolescents/young adults and/or their parents. For the second time in as many weeks we got a request from someone in the neighborhood doing a community service project of some kind. The first request came on the parents neighborhood Facebook page. Today’s was a flier in the mailbox (yay, that took a little more effort). In each case they wanted people to donate items ( today’s request was for higher end items: older tablets, laptops, cellphones, etc) . They wanted us, the neighbors, to drop off the items in a box their parent put outside their garage door. Really? What happened to the kid putting in the effort to do their own collections? They expect the neighbors to drop off their electronics with not a finger lifted by the kid doing the project? Sorry. If you want my old technology, after we wipe it clean, come get it. How lazy.
None of your links supports your assertions about the value of SAT testing (at age 13 or otherwise) for future performance in non-school aspects. The apa.org links lead to abstracts that refer to “general mental ability” (GMA) but do not describe how it is measured (and it is probably not by SAT testing at age 13, since few people do that).
Of course, performance on the SAT is affected by the quality of the school that one attends, in terms of how well it teaches academic skills that are measured on the SAT. So the SAT does not isolate “general mental ability” or whatever from school quality variation.
290: I suspect confirmation (or at least observation) bias. Just because you aren't noticing (or perhaps even seeing) young people putting effort into doing good, that does not mean that there aren't many of them actually doing so.
@Data10 Your position is perfectly reasonable. I do not disagree.
My mistake, that was a quote from the Slate Magazine article by David Z. Hambrick and Christopher Chabris.
@MYOS1634 In the University of Minnesota study, the correlation between high school SAT and college GPA was virtually unchanged after the researchers statistically controlled for the influence of SES. If SAT scores were just a proxy for privilege, then putting SES into the mix should have removed, or at least dramatically decreased, the association between the SAT and college performance. @Data10 Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers. @ohiovalley16 Psychologists have known for many decades that certain personality traits also have an impact. One is conscientiousness, which reflects a person’s self-control, discipline, and thoroughness. People who are high in conscientiousness delay gratification to get their work done, finish tasks that they start, and are careful in their work, whereas people who are low in conscientiousness are impulsive, undependable, and careless (compare Lisa and Bart Simpson).
However, the results of meta-analyses, which are more telling than the results of any individual study, indicate that these factors do not have a larger effect than IQ does on measures of academic achievement and job performance. So, while it seems clear that factors like conscientiousness—not to mention social skill, creativity, interest, and motivation—do influence success, they cannot take the place of IQ.
What does standardized test measure (2:43), Real world application too? (5:20), job performance (5:55), relationship with creativity and leadership (6:40), effect leveling off beyond a certain level?(8:55), testing at 13 of the truly gifted (9:35), @MYOS1634 social class(11:15), @dfbdfb (comparing to gpa) effect on diversity(13:00).
To me, the most interesting comment comes at the end of the talk(13:45), which dovetails with this quote from the Slate article:
The SAT may be the bane of upper-middle-class parents trying to launch their children on a path to success. But sometimes one person’s obstacle is another person’s springboard. I am the daughter of a single, immigrant father who never attended college, and a good SAT score was one of the achievements that catapulted me into my state’s flagship university and, from there, on to medical school. Flawed though it is, the SAT afforded me, as it has thousands of others, a way to prove that a poor, public-school kid who never had any test prep can do just as well as, if not better than, her better-off peers.
Is holistic admission designed to help the poor, or really there to help the well-off? I think it is the latter.
My original question still has not been answered. If not standardized testing, how else can you quantify student learning in a fair and equitable way?
I’m encountering this situation with my ninth grade son right now. On the recent biology exam, the average score was a high D-low C. He studied for a very long time for this test, but only got a 70. I’m waiting back to hear the teacher’s explanation for why so many of her students did poorly. After reviewing the study guide that she provided the students on the biochem unit versus others I have seen online, I clearly see that she did a poor job in organizing the material and presenting it in a way that allowed students to learn the core concepts so that they can later build on that knowledge. Her study guide was jumbled, chaotic, and unclear. I strongly feel that the low scores reflect on her failure to present the material effectively to the class. Her solution is to allow the students to take a re-test but I feel she is now penalizing students to have to re- study for this due to her teaching failure. She should grade this test on a bell curve and move on realizing that she needs to improve her presentation of these concepts.
@chloeparent while I would be equally upset if my child got a 70 in her biology test (BTDT), I would check with my child to see how well she understood the material. Then I would try to figure out a way she could more effectively learn the material, regardless of teaching quality. This may sound like a defeatist attitude but really, my job as I see it, is to make sure my child learns what she needs to learn, not evaluate the review material (except to see what’s missing).
One of the best things I did was hire a public high teacher to tutor my child in biology (he worked in a different school district). He not only worked with her on substance, he taught her what teachers wanted to see and how to work with teachers to get more out of them. In other words, how to deal with a “bad” teacher.
Unfortunately, this will probably not be your child’s only encounter with a less than stellar teacher… If you are in a public school system, depending on policy, the teacher may not be able to grade on a curve and move on. She may not even have an option on the study guide.
Upset with a 70? We were lucky if the high score was a 70 and that was often with hundreds of students. How hard can an exam be if students get nearly all of them right?
SlackerMomMD, that’s a good idea to hire a bio teacher to tutor. I spent hours myself sifting through online sites about basic biochem trying to figure out where this test went wrong. I think the teacher focused too much on having them learn minutiae when she should have stuck to larger core concepts that would provide the main base of knowledge to build on going forward. Also, she asked too many questions that required higher level thinking about biochem and inherent in the questions were assumptions that students understood ALL of the sub-concepts in the questions which they did not. She didn’t teach or present with them those concepts. I combed through all of his notes, and then had to spend a lot of extra time researching with him all of these sub concepts that he had no info on. It was sloppy and lazy teaching, and it appeared to me that she didn’t have a good grasp on the subject and that’s why she made those mistakes. She should have used more visuals to teach these concepts, but it was all verbal presentation to notes, and with minimal examples of how the concepts apply to actual real life LIFE to make it less insanely abstract. It was all this confusing bs that they just had to figure out a way to memorize. It’s been a good lesson for my son to see how he can’t assume it was always his fault as the teacher may simply be incompetent, and unwilling to admit their teaching weaknesses in the class’s very low scores.