<p>As bigredfan’s linked article points out, the Grad schools at Wake won’t be dropping the LSAT, MCAT, GRE etc, any time soon. Hmmmmm, I wonder why?</p>
<p>The pool of URM’s with SAT’s in the range of Wake’s average, is small. The HYP’s of the world quickly snap them up, leaving few for very good schools like Wake, that lack the cache of Stanford, Duke etal. The Supreme court upheld Michigan’s use of race as “one factor” in a holistic approach to admissions, but a simple look at the numbers would show its often the only factor. At a place like Wake, I would suspect a simple check of admissions granted to low SAT applicants, would yield mostly URM’s. How could you argue that URM status was just one factor? Its really just a shell game.</p>
Really? Because the most widely cited anti-SAT study (the 2001 University of California study) states that SAT-IIs are a better predictor of freshman GPA (which are the most accepted measure of college success) than high school grades. That same study shows that HSGPA combined with the SAT (of either variety) is significantly more accurate than HSGPA alone. It is silly to merely toss out a significant factor in predicting college success.</p>
<p>In fact, the UC study said that the SAT-II writing test, now part of the SAT-I, was the most accurate SAT-II in predicting college success. </p>
<p>But admittedly, it is difficult to study. I don’t actually care about somebody’s freshman GPA. My personal appreciation of a individuals’ intelligences has in every case but two matched up with their relative SAT-I scores. Is that anecdotal? Completely. But I don’t think I’m the only person who has noticed this correlation.</p>
<p>Anecdotal maybe, but it was easy to guess who was a NMSF in d/s/d classes before the announcement was made.</p>
<p>And to repeat an earlier post:</p>
<p>Just for the record: oldest d’s SAT indicated she was smart with a particular strength in writing; math was not quite as strong. Accurate.</p>
<p>S’s SAT indicated that he is a math student, less of a reader, and an average writer at best. Accurate.</p>
<p>Youngest d reads and then reads another book - or the same one again. She is the child who started Harry Potter at midnight and finished the next day at 11 a.m. SAT in CR: 800. Again - accurate.</p>
<p>However, even if you look closely at the hs transcripts of the three, I promise that you couldn’t discern much difference.</p>
<p>Were the SATs at this house an anomaly? Maybe, but it is hard to believe. </p>
<p>(That isn’t too say that the oldest d still argues her M score - and she took it twice. :))</p>
<p>yes, I’m aware of the UC study on subject tests. But, this thread is about the SAT Reasoning Tests, so Subject Tests are irrelevant. Second, the “significantly more accurate” predictability of SAT+gpa, is only marginally better than gpa alone (same UC study)… Thus, its a huge expense (for students) for little knowledge gain by admissions officers. If gpa predicts 80% of Frosh grades, but gpa+SAT predict 81-82% with higher somewhat accuracy, is it worth the extra costs & efforts? Wake says no, and it will be interesting to see how their experiment works for them. And, btw, the SAT (nor ACT, for that matter) does NOT measure “intelligences” – never has, never will.</p>
<p>Fascinating thread, and bluebayou is correct. The SAT and ACT offer some limited additional predictive value of student performance in the first year of college, however there are any number of studies that show great inconsistency for a variety of students. Perhaps more important, it takes a score difference of over 100 points to actually make a difference, so the small differences that can make or break many admission decisions are not statistically significant. When making the decision to create the largest score optional program in the country, my staff and I studied our own data extensively. We found that the scores were particularly useless once a student crossed the basic threshold of strong curriculum with strong GPA. As a result, we implemented score optional well ahead of Wake’s decision, although we’re glad they’ve decided to follow our lead.
As for the rnakings, US News uses whatever score range you send as long as it’s based on more than 50% of the class. They do want you to collect more but there is no requirement to do so.</p>
If you note, I cited the UC study was in response to your ridiculous assertion that it is 'difficult to find data to support the belief that standardized test scores (not necessarily the SAT-I) are ‘a better indicator’ of desired qualities. Indeed, the correlation was strongest between a standardized test and conventionally-defined college success.
Nope, wrong. See the 2004 Meredith C. Frey and Douglas K. Detterman study. It shows IQ and SAT scores strongly correlate. This provides the data for the beliefs held by people like myself and Ignatius, based on our personal experiences.</p>
<hr>
<p>For the record, if I caused the perception that I think the SAT is perfect or that it should be the only factor used in admissions, I apologize. Rather, I think that it adds a lot of important information to an applicant’s file, or at the very least, confirms or denies other information in that file.</p>
<p>It’s good to keep in mind that this improvement is from explaining 15% of the variance in first-yr. gpa to 20%, both pretty dismal, and this is for the very diverse UC system. I suspect that the figures for WF would be even less impressive both because of a restriction in the range of the test scores of their student body and the compression of grades upward toward the A-B range (at least if WF is typical of similar schools). And in the real world, the predictive power that you lose from not having SAT scores doesn’t just vanish as it does in a regression analysis; you can impute modest scores to nonsubmitters with near certainty.</p>
<p>It seems sensible that a college in WF’s position–they lag behind their peers fairly dramatically in enrolling minority students–would decide that SAT optional is worth a small tradeoff in predicting 1st year grades. They hope to draw more minority students and perhaps some students with high HS gpa/low SAT (students who tend also to have desirable attributes) into their applicant pool. First year gpa is not the only “desired quality” in building a class.</p>
<p>what keeps colleges from just reporting the top 50%? The truth is that some of the less scrupulous colleges do screen out legacies, athletes, and other “special admits”. Theoretically it’s ethics that keeps us from doing so - The US News asks us for to report any students that submitted scores. The score optional programs have pretty much all agreed that students who apply score optional are decided NOT to submit scores, so we pull those out of our system. We leave in, however, athletes, legacies, etc.</p>
<p>Also, I’d compare the data cited to that found in the William Sedlacek book, the Big Test, and the data in the National Research Council publication Myths and Tradeoffs, the Role of Tests in Undergraduate Admissions. While the SAT and IQ tests might both be found to be tests of some type of intelligence, in cases where grades and curriculum are strong it generally does not appear that SAT scores are adding predictive value. At Mason, for instance, I found that they indicated potential success when students with lower GPA’s had great scores, but did not correlate with performance up or down when GPA was high. In fact, for a large subset of our students the SAt score was actually negatively correlated with first year performance (3.7-3.8. as I recall, entering unweighted GPA’s).
Like some have mentioned here, I’m not opposed to using standardized tests in admissions, and in fact find that Wake Forest’s plan, which mirrors the one we implemented, does not do so. As has been mentioned, they will offer the chance for students to not have scores considered, but will consider scores for most of the applicant pool. Even at Bates, one of if not the most established score optional program, only 20% of the pool applies score optional (in this our second year of our program 8% of applicants applied score optional).</p>
<p>Try understanding what it actually means. I did not say that high intelligence causes high SAT scores, or vice versa, merely that people with greater SAT scores possess greater intelligence (as measured by IQ), a fact supported by peer-reviewed research. If the causative process happens to be something other than high intelligence causes people to do well on the SAT, then great, but it doesn’t matter for me, because the end result is that an SAT score tells me, with a relatively high degree of precision, what I want to know - how intelligent somebody is.</p>
<p>Mantras are nice. So is critical thinking. </p>
<p>I think it’s somewhat well established that, in isolation, SAT-I scores aren’t the best predictors of college success, as defined by freshman GPA. Nobody is really contesting that. My argument is that standardized tests in general (SAT-II certainly, APs would be even better were equity issues revolving around the lack of AP options in some schools resolved) can be better predictors of college success. And SAT-I scores not only give (or at least should give) prospective students and admission officers a sense of the average general intelligence of a school - something that is very important to many prospective students, but they provide another piece of information that helps a college select the most academically capable class it can.</p>
<p>the sat is a total joke, it indicates absolutely nothing. if you go to any sat test prep center theyll tell you that it runs on a system and as long as you know that system, its easy to get a really good score no matter how smart you are.</p>
<p>the test gives a huge advantage to affluent families who can afford both to take the test 10 times and to spend thousands of dollars on prep, its not a fair test nor is it representative of intelligence or “scholastic aptitude”</p>
<p>some high schools are not a fair test in a student’s academic prowess either (inflated or deflated GPA’s are everywhere and its hard to discern which schools do this), which is why there should be STs, because without them there is not a level ground at which admissions people can evaluate students. What does it hurt to take a simple test designed to test scholastic aptitude. If you can’t afford to take it, get a fee waiver.</p>
<p>so youre telling me that a 3 hr test is more representative of a persons intelligence than 4 years of high school and all the application essays and reccomendations?</p>
<p>Rip, ever wonder why SAT test prep centers tell you that? Could it be, perhaps, because that is a way for them to make money no matter how true that statement is? Studies of SAT coaching show it to be of limited efficacy.</p>
<p>my girlfriend took the test twice and got right around a 1600 both times then went to elite and took their prep program and got a 2330. nothing else changed in her academic performance and she even said all the things they told her (order, wording, etc) were all just what they said they would be and that she knew what the answers would be just based on the fact that questions x-y were all based on one thing and so on and so forth. </p>
<p>those classes also ran her about four grand, and i think thats pretty good evidence for what i came into this discussion saying</p>
<p>“so youre telling me that a 3 hr test is more representative of a persons intelligence than 4 years of high school and all the application essays and reccomendations?”</p>
<p>Considering that recommendations depend as much on a student’s desire or skill at sucking up to a teacher, as well as how nice the teacher is in general, considering that college admissions boards don’t see you for 4 years in high school, but just a small packet of information about those four years, considering that a rich kid can have Harvard graduates write his essay for him (and you talk about economic unfairness with the SAT) and will almost certainly have it edited in a superior fashion than a poor kid, considering that intelligence does not necessarily result in good grades, yes, that three hour test is the best representation of a person’s intelligence an admission committee has.</p>
<p>I call BS. “My girlfriend scored a 2200, a 2250, then took the Elite prep program and couldn’t get above a 1500 the next two times she took the SAT.” If you’re going to ignore study upon study upon study, then at least make your anecdotes convincing, bud.</p>