“We should require that university admissions be based strictly on objective criteria such as grades and SAT/ACT scores”
I wonder why so many people assume the SAT is such a perfect measure of academic ability. It’s not. It’s just another test, and while it certainly does give some information, all it really tells you is how well the student answers multiple choice questions on a few basic topics in a hurry. At the high end, it’s more a measure of how fast you read and how accurately you work.
The college board used to have some data on its website which they removed a few years ago. I wish I had thought to download it, because it was quite interesting. If I recall correctly, it showed that 80% of students who scored very high were not able to replicate their score upon retake. And the average loss was something like 50 points. Lots of students post multiple scores on this site and you can see them bouncing around. What are we to make of scores going down? If these scores are such an accurate measure of student skills, how can they often go down? Did the student get dumber? These tests simply aren’t as reproducible as the college board would like people to think. Which is why I think it’s silly for people to make such a big deal about fairly small differences in scores.
I’m sure when the new SAT comes out there will be students saying it’s easier and students saying it’s harder. Scores will go up and scores will go down. So which “perfect” measure of their academic ability do we use–the new “perfect” measure or the old “perfect” measure?
We already have this situation with the ACT and the SAT–plenty of students take both and do substantially better on one than the other. What is the “true” measure then? How is it fair to the student who excels on both SAT and ACT that another student who can excel on only one of the two exams gets the same “objective” score? If we use either score would it not be fairer to require all students to take both exams and count them both since evidently they do not measure the same exact thing, or else scores would be the same?
And what are we measuring? Do we care about the “achievement” of getting a high SAT score? Or do we care about what that score may indicate about a student’s aptitude? I’d say we should care about the latter, and if we do, we need to take into account the fact that some students will, because of their environment and opportunities, score higher than others with comparable ability. Isn’t it more fair to try to evaluate the score within a larger context?
And what about those grades? How do you compare grades when some kids take harder classes or more classes than others? How do you compare grades when an A is a 93 in one school and a 90 in another? How do you compare grades when one school hands out A’s like candy and another school makes it near impossible to get straight A’s?
I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to having admissions be much more heavily exam-based, but I would hope the exams would be much better ones than the SAT/ACT. I recently heard another admissions officer talk. And, yes, he said the SAT is not the most important thing to us.