If they are selling the data of the people for whom they are providing the service without notifying people? When those people are minors? That sounds dishonest to me.
If by “it”, ya mean, the opportunity to actually take Algebra II in high school, you’re right. If by “it”, you mean an upper class life and a good high school, you’re absolutely right.
Evidently there are schools which do not teach some of the supposedly “basic” classes that you are talking about. So for many students, this isn’t “basic”. around 15% of the high poverty schools do not provide Geometry, Algebra I and Algebra II. The figure is from the article I linked above.
Absolutely. However, the GPA is usually given by the teacher in the context of the classroom that is being taught. A low income kid in a high school which serves mostly low income kids is being compared to kids who have similar issues. The SAT is comparing kids from a high school which doesn’t have Algebra II to the kids who are attending a well funded high schools with a long list of courses and resources, not to mention academic support. Far more importantly, the kids have far more personal resources for tutoring, for enrichment, for identifying learning issues and dealing with them, for basic healthcare.
BTW, again, I am for the use of SATs in context, and am still a proponent of TO, rather than required or test blind (so long as TO is indeed TO). I also am in general OK with public universities with admissions rates of over 50% generally are using the SAT scores in a fairly coarse grained manner, because they are looking at very large application pools, limited resources for admissions, high acceptance rates, and low yield. However, that really needs to be coupled with free SATs at all public school of the state where the public university is.
I couldn’t agree more. People like Feynman were denied admissions under the holistic admission. I live in Berkeley, CA and based on what I have seen here, the so-called “holistic admission” without use of any standardized test has been used to disadvantage/deny admission in competitive majors to students from middle income families, especially those from certain demographics. Now upper income Jewish people generally do fine under holistic criteria.
The vast majority of highly selective colleges in the US have test optional admissions, rather than test blind admissions. Students are allowed to submit their high SAT/ACT scores, and if they submit them, the high scores will be considered in admission decisions, much like they were prior to going test optional. You mentioned living in Berkeley and admission to competitive majors, so I expect you are instead referring to UC Berkeley. The test blind UC system is more the exception than the rule. Note that Berkeley does consider AP/IB scores and SAT subject tests, even though they are test blind for SAT I/ACT.
A summary of how Berkeley’s demographics have changed since switching to test blind is below. Lower SES and URMs appear to have had notable increases, particularly in the competitive tech majors. Asian students did not have a loss, if that’s the demographic you were referring to. It’s unclear how middle class share was impacted, but I’d expect a greater relative loss in upper income than middle income due to the correlation between income and scores.
Berkeley 2019 → 2023 CS/Eng Major New Freshmen:
Pell: 22% → 28%
First Gen: 21% → 32%
URM: 14% → 23%
Asian: 45% → 46%
All Freshmen Students:
Pell: 27% → 30%
First Gen: 28% → 33%
URM: 20% → 26%
Asian: 39% → 39%
Yes, I am talking about UC Berkeley. The UC Regents are by and large political appointees and I suspect that their policies towards admission have a very specific political purpose. I will not discuss that here.
The use of “holistic admission” encourages all sorts of perverse behavior -bogus extracurriculars, phony community service and all sorts of making up of stories. I would rather have objectively verifiable academic accomplishments as the the most important criteria for admission. SAT with all its flaws is one of them. Actually UCs can create their own standardized tests and that could replace SAT for admission to UC.
I, too, think the SAT has a purpose but for applications only to specific programs. However, it should be the “tie breaker” and not the barrier to entry.
Earning a living doesn’t mean to make a profit. The College Board is supposed to be a not-for-profit but, has millions in surpluses sitting in offshore accounts and has no transparency about what its sources of income is and where its payments go. Earning a living doesn’t mean that 20+ people earn $300K + a year salaries. etc…Remember that the College Board for comprised with respect to its relations with a Chinese company. So all of this craves for greater transparency.
From Wikipedia:
“On January 19, 2021, the College Board discontinued Subject Tests. This was effective immediately in the United States, and the tests were to be phased out by the following summer for international students.”
If you’re low income and have a good score, that’s only going to enhance your application.
If you’re upper income and have a good score, that’s probably not going to help your application.
Isnt that one of your primary concerns? Inequality? Colleges may pick kids who have wealth but it’s not due to the SAT.
We have a kid this year who is Top 10 in our class, with very good EC’s who got a 1600 SAT. He applied to all the top schools. His best acceptance was UNC. UNC is good but not what he hoped for. His 1600 didn’t move the needle at all.
I really think that is how it functions right now. It is a ‘tie breaker.’
The barrier to entry is that our most selective universities have so few available seats. This is true with or without any standardized tests.
There are so many incredible kids with top tier GPAs and ECs - how do you compare them? What is the ‘standard candle’ when evaluating these ‘star’ applicants (my apologies to the physicists)?
I am very open to the idea that the SAT needs to be improved or replaced. Obviously, we need a much harder standardized math exam for our top tier technical universities.
You could be talking about my son. At the top of his class, 1580 SAT, solid ECs, nice essays, outstanding recommendations - his best acceptance was UVA. He didn’t apply to all the T20s but was rejected or WL at the ones he did. It was a common result at our HS this year. Fortunately, he didn’t spend (waste) any significant time or effort on prepping the SAT . . .
Absolutely correct. Wealthy people have deployed admission consultants, targeted extracurriculars, community service, and even internships based on their connections. That is making a lot of difference in admission.
This is all true. Many of us have seen it in practice.
As has been mentioned before, of all of the unfair aspects of college admissions, standardized tests are the least unfair of all of the unfair aspects. Remove standardized tests and you make things worse for folks that aren’t wealthy. Many people seem to be so upset that their kids don’t test well that they can’t (or won’t) acknowledge that their crusade will hurt underprivileged applicants.
I think it more likely that the scores set an initial hurdle, maybe something like an AI (academic index) or academic rating score. Once that hurdle is met, scores are never discussed again. I can’t see an admissions committee when deciding the final yes/no’s giving the edge to the 1560 over the 1520 kid. More likely tie breakers relate to the background and which part of the “orchestra” the kid belongs, and for better or worse how strongly the AO who is advocating for this kid presents his/her case.
The vast majority of research indicates that SATs support inequality. The recent round of “marketing” of very questionable studies is far less than the historical record of studies demonstrating issues with the SATs as it relates to lower income applicants.
The vast majority of research indicates that success on standardized tests correlates with wealth.
The vast majority of research indicates that the other aspects of ‘holistic’ admissions (ECs, recommendations, writing essays, starting a non-profit, getting research opportunities as a high school student, getting published as a high school student) correlate EVEN MORE strongly with wealth.
Remove standardized tests and you make things more, not less, unfair.
I’m not saying standardized tests are perfectly fair. They are not. We can and should do better. We just can’t screw over poor folks and minorities while we work towards a better solution.
Exactly. Parents using their wealth to give their kids an advantage is nothing new. What is happening now is that wealthy people are giving their kids huge advantage under the name of “holistic” admissions with the pretense that it is intended to advance equity. How stupid do we have to be to take this seriously?
This is a popular theory on this forum and has been previously discussed in this thread, yet I’ve never seen ANY research that supports the theory. The last time it was mentioned in this thread, I asked about what specific research they were referring to. Their claim related to misinterpreting the following 2 studies:
1 . Chetty Study – This study found the exact opposite of what you claim. SAT was tremendously more correlated with income than any other analyzed factor. However, when controlling for SAT score, top 1% still had an advantage even beyond that. Specific numbers from the quoted study are repeated below.
Portion of Kids Scoring 1500+ on SAT by Parents Income
99.9th Percentile Income – 7%
99th Percentile Income – 5%
98th Percentile Income – 4%
96-97th Percentile Income – 3%
90-95th Percentile Income – 2%
…
Median Income – 0.2%
Low Income – 0.0%
2 . Study Finds Essay Content More Strongly Correlated with Wealth than SAT Scores – The study did not find that good college essays correlate with income. It instead found that keywords related to essay content correlated with income . For example, it found that essays with keywords related to travel + China were associated with high income. It didn’t evaluate whether those essays talking about traveling to China were good or not, just that an admin officer could theoretically try to predict income based on essay topic.
In contrast, there is countless amount of research suggesting that SAT is more correlated with wealth than other aspects of the application used to admit test optional applicants. Perhaps the most simple measure is looking at who is actually admitted test optional vs who is admitted as test submitter. For example, the previously linked review NACAC paper analyzed 21 test optional colleges. At all 21 of them, the enrollees who were admitted test optional had a lower average income than the enrollees who submitted test scores. The previously linked Bates 25 years of test optional paper found the same thing, kids who were admitted test optional had lower average income than kids admitted as test submitter, as did the Ithaca study, and every other study I am aware of that has analyzed this
Only if you take the simplistic approach of looking at the correlation of test scores and income. As I stated in the very first post of this thread, the colleges know to look at the test scores in the context of the students taking them.
