All of your points merely disappear if students are “normalized by SAT score”. So a black student, an asian student and a white student with a 1500 should all have the same likelihood of admission.
As should a presbyerian, a jewish and buddhist student all with the same 1500.
Meritocracy!!! right? Long live the SAT right?
Unless Buddhists are just generally better people than presbyterians right?
Except that has not been happening has it?
Your earlier post didn’t say “normalized by SAT score”, and that doesn’t relate to the first point of it not being a simple relationship where “SAT = success.” Regardless, SAT is just one of many considerations in admission. There are other admission factors besides SAT score, which are not equally prevalent in all groups. For example, some groups are more likely to have high course rigor, with many AP classes than other groups. Such differences remain, when controlling for SAT score.
Not how it works. They are comparing students not test scores.
Unfortunately, there might be no library (or equivalent educational opportunity) for a given kid. Or they might not be able to go there. Or they might not have had the earlier education that would be needed to take advantage of such a library. It would have been a lot harder for me to get value from the library if I wasn’t already reading well (and this might have been because I had a lot of books and fully literate adults around when I was small).
Just because a kid is inherently high-aptitude doesn’t mean that the universe is going to cooperate by giving them what they need to learn and grow in the way that they potentially could.
The great T/O experiment is over. The collapse is accelerating. Only in California will it hang on—ideology over evidence
I wonder if the CA publics might just be slow-moving compared with smaller more nimble schools, and also hindered more by CA courts. We see these problems with CA publics trying to build housing for their students, for example.
I would not be surprised if there are internal study groups continuing to look into this at the CA publics.
A small handful of Ivy+ colleges being test required does not mean test optional is over.
According to Fairtest, there are over 1850 test optional 4 year colleges. Some, such as Bowdoin, have been test optional for as long as 50 years. To my knowledge none of the 1000+ colleges that chose to be test optional prior to COVID, rather than being forced by COVID, have switched back to test required. And many of these colleges have posted evidence, which has been previously linked in this thread. It’s more than just only hanging on in California.
The experiment to which I referred occurred during and after COVID The schools who were previously T/O will continue as before. Now that the Ivys are moving back to tests other schools who went T/O will join the club because that’s where the cool gang hangs out.
That is a bad comparison, especially when you consider how testing was central to a long list of pseudo-scientific studies with devastating results.
People LOVE talking about how holistic admissions was used to keep hundreds of Jews out of the Ivies.
What they seem to forget is that standardized testing of immigrants was responsible in a very large part for the keeping hundreds of thousands of Jews trapped in Europe.
Whereas the worse case scenario for applicants rejected because of holistic admissions was attending a college that may, arguably, have been “lesser” in terms of opportunities after graduation, The worst case scenario for the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Jews who were trapped in Germany and Eastern Europe because “standardized testing” “proved” that they were all below average in intelligence was infinitely more horrible. The low quotas for Jews from Eastern Europe stayed in place even after the Holocaust. The survivors were stuck in DP camps in Europe for years after the war because those quotas stayed in place.
The supreme irony was that the million + Jews who arrived before testing almost all ended up doing very well. In fact, that is why the holistic admissions was established, because Eastern European Jews, who scored uniformly low on Standardized Tests, were outcompeting the kids of the Wealthy White Christians of Northern and Western European descent .
So I’m sorry, but the belief in the infallibility of standardized testing has been deadly. I don’t even know how to begin with saying how wrong it is to equate skepticism of this historically biased and murderous evaluation method with flat earthers.
BTW, the difference between the performance of Jews from Eastern Europe on the standardized test administered on Ellis Island and the entry tests for places like Harvard was directly related to conditions in which they were tested and their educational backgrounds. That is what moved test results for “below average” to “top percentiles”. So this is very strong proof that environment and test conditions have an enormous effect on test scores. Ignoring those effects, and repeating continuing to insist that these tests are meaningful out of context goes in face of this and a large body of research.
Standardized testing in context can be valuable. But it pays to see what happened the last time people started believing that the newest type of standardized testing provided a Scientifically Proven, Unbiased, Accurate Measure of A Person’s Intelligence.
Wow. Just wow.
We are Nazis if we think tests make sense for college?
ACT/SAT for all: A cheap, effective way to narrow income gaps in college | Brookings
I must have missed all the posts proclaiming that the SATs should be taken alone without context. Every post I have seen advocating for their use says that they should be taken in context along with other factors.
I agree with basically everything you wrote, and I recommend Evan Kindley’s social history of questionnaires and other forms (including standardized intelligence tests), which has a whole section on Galton and other eugenicists: Questionnaire, by Evan Kindley – n+1 Shop
By far, the thing I am the least comfortable about / most frustrated with re: our testing decision — a local institutional choice based on 50 years of research in the context of a highly specific education — is the way it has been taken as a universal statement re: Testing Is Always Good At Everything And We Should Not Be Worried About It. That’s why in the original blog post, we had 200% text in footnotes trying to explain the research. But that’s not what gets circulated on Twitter (or CollegeConfidential).
Nor is anyone suggesting use of such tests for immigration, so the whole discussion of its historical use there is not relevant…
Trains were misused for horrid purposes in WW2. It doesn’t mean they are not a useful form of public transit. Things can be used for good or not. We don’t ban trains because they were used by some for evil. We shouldn’t get rid of tests useful for informed college admissions today because they served a different role 75 years ago.
To steelman MWolf’s argument (though they can speak for themselves and tell me to go pound sand): I think you could argue that some people treat the tests — today — as a static indicator of a fixed intelligence level that you have or you don’t, and that “meritocracy” means you should give people who were more or less born with a certain static condition more opportunities. I mean, Charles Murray’s Bell Curve was not published that long ago, in terms of thinly veiled eugenicist junk science.
Kranzberg’s law of technology — technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral — applies to testing as a technology (and all technologies are social orders made durable through materials). A society organized around an idea of testing, and one which reproduces itself through testing (because the people who were good at tests become the civil servants who make the rules) is different than one without testing.
That is why I would prefer, personally, to not see a society organized around “test-based meritocracy” if what is meant by that is something like “we preferentially give opportunities to people who do well on tests.” I think we should give people opportunities based on a mixture of what they are good at, what they like to do, and what society needs them to do, and everyone deserves material security and human dignity regardless of their score on a test, and you cannot use “meritocracy” to elide those basic social responsibilities. I would prefer (as I think you do — I mean I think this is your point re: what is useful, I’m just trying to illustrate something broader) to use testing strategically and where locally appropriate, and to look at those questions empirically.
But it’s hard to not get caught up in the culture war…
Let me know when we can achieve that goal of material security and dignity for all. Not likely in my lifetime. Or my kids’. But I am all for using such tests strategically as appropriate. I just happen to think they are in this case, in this time.
So I would fear this too. An example could be a society which would use testing to sort people into different castes where each caste would offer access to certain levels of power, SES, and certain professional endeavors… this would be horrible in my book.
But the outcomes of graduates of Harvard, MIT, UChicago, etc if viewed as a distribution (gah, I’m talking about gaussians after a reference to the Bell Curve… 
) would overlap those of graduates from Indiana, UC Davis, and Oregon St. So if a test (with other admission collateral) sorted people into these schools… is that fate as horrible? Or horrible at all?
For myself, I walk the fine line between wanting a prestigious institution to be graced by my children’s presence vs a humble but hardworking institution without bling, but at the same time realizing that it doesn’t matter THAT much to how much satisfaction or achievement will await them in their lives. Jensen Huang, correct?
I still believe that no college vs college is more life changing than Denison vs Harvard. And academic fit more important than prestige.
Yes
I don’t understand what you are saying. Are you saying that it wouldn’t be harmful to society if one were to use an imperfect test to sort students into these various schools, because there is overlap between outcomes, so it doesn’t really matter which bucket a student ends up in?