Abolish the SAT — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

03 Sep 13

Ammar Elhassan ElMerhbi

assessment testing SAT

14 May 13

Janelle H

“The SAT measures students’ verbal reasoning, critical reading, and skills,” while the achievement tests “show colleges their mastery of specific subjects.” In practice, SAT and achievement test scores are so highly correlated that SAT scores tell the admissions office little that it does not learn from the achievement test scores alone.
But the SAT’s independent role in predicting freshman grade point turned out to be so small that knowing the SAT score added next to nothing to an admissions officer’s ability to forecast how an applicant will do in college—the reason to give the test in the first place.
Again, the SAT was unnecessary; it added nothing to the forecasts provided by high school grades and achievement tests.
hat leaves the worst case: high-ability students who are alienated by school and perhaps by life. They don’t study, don’t go out for the debate team, don’t read on their own, don’t even watch the Discovery Channel. It is possible for them nonetheless to achieve a high score on an individually administered IQ test, despite being hostile and uninterested.
So keeping the SAT will not help most students in this category. They won’t try hard, and their SAT scores will be mediocre despite their ability.
“Now that most of the great scores are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
If you’re rich, the critics say, you can raise your children in an environment where they will naturally acquire the information the SAT tests.
Combine these edges, and it comes down to this: if you’re rich, you can buy your kids a high SAT score.
Then parents confuse the effects of coaching with the effect of the basic preparation that students can do on their own. No student should walk into the SAT cold. It makes sense for students to practice some sample items, easily available from school guidance offices and online, and to review their algebra textbook if it has been a few years since they have taken algebra. But once a few hours have been spent on these routine steps, most of the juice has been squeezed out of preparation for the SAT. Combine self-selection artifacts with the role of basic preparation, and you have the reason that independent studies using control groups show such small average gains from formal coaching.

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19 Dec 12

Eliza McKenney

RELIABILITY:
- easily accessible link on Charles Murray with other articles; also, a sentence at the end naming one of his credentials; lacking in other credentials
- the site is a "magazine of ideas" as stated on the ABOUT US page
- no ads
- about us page has lists of those responsible for the site
- well formatted and neat, easy to read

Written by someone who used to support the SAT-- it got him into Harvard by showing admission workers that he "could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover." He goes on to explain why he changed his mind.

testing sat fair

The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged children—“a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it—has been ubiquitous.
Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy,
The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom
The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose.
SAT and achievement test scores are so highly correlated that SAT scores tell the admissions office little that it does not learn from the achievement test scores alone.
Using a database of 77,893 students who applied to UC from 1996 to 1999, Saul Geiser and Roger Studley analyzed the relationship among high school grades, SAT scores, achievement test scores, and freshman grades in college.
But the SAT’s independent role in predicting freshman grade point turned out to be so small that knowing the SAT score added next to nothing to an admissions officer’s ability to forecast how an applicant will do in college—the reason to give the test in the first place
after controlling for parental income and education, the independent role of the SAT in predicting freshman grade point disappeared altogether.
Once high school grade point and achievement test scores are known, the incremental value of knowing the SAT score is trivially small.
the point of the SAT—whose initials, after all, stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test—was to measure aptitude, defined by the dictionary as “inherent ability,” rather than to measure academic achievement.
The bright students’ achievement test scores are likely to be depressed by the schools’ dreadfulness, but even scores that are just fair will get the attention of an admissions office if the transcript shows As and the recommendations are enthusiastic. The nation’s top colleges desperately want to increase their enrollment of inner-city blacks and Hispanics, and are willing to make large allowances for bad schooling to do so.
that same alienated boy is unlikely to get a high score on the SAT because no one, no matter how smart, gets a high score on the SAT without concentrating and trying hard over the course of three stressful hours. So keeping the SAT will not help most students in this category. They won’t try hard, and their SAT scores will be mediocre despite their ability.
so alienated that they do nothing to express their ability in school, so completely walled off from independent learning that they do poorly on the achievement tests, and yet able to buckle down on the SAT and get a good score.
we are now talking about a very few students, and even for them it is not clear whether dropping the SAT introduces an injustice. Should such a student be given a slot that could have been filled by a less-talented student who is eager to give a competitive college his best effort?
“Back when kids just got a good night’s sleep and took the SAT, it was a leveler that helped you find the diamond in the rough,” Lawrence University’s dean of admissions told The New York Times recently. “Now that most of the great scores are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
Combine these edges, and it comes down to this: if you’re rich, you can buy your kids a high SAT score
On average, coaching raises scores by no more than a few dozen points, enough to sway college admissions in exceedingly few cases.
Most obviously, parents who pay for expensive coaching courses ignore the role of self-selection: the students who seem to profit from a coaching course tend to be those who, if the course had not been available, would have worked hard on their own to prepare for the test.

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18 Dec 12

Ben Kropp

SAT

n. In 2001, Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission.
More and more prestigious small colleges, such as Middlebury and Bennington, are making the SAT optional.
In theory, the SAT and the achievement tests measure different things. In the College Board’s own words from its website, “The SAT
Achievement tests did slightly better than the SAT in predicting freshman grades

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14 Dec 12

Susan Inman

SATs

29 Nov 12

mrsschmeck

testing SAT bias high stakes testing

07 Dec 11

Laura Perry

testing

11 Nov 11

Janey G

The researchers found that achievement tests and high school grade point each had about the same independent role

17 Oct 11

Kyle Howerton

who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test.
But events of recent years have challenged the SAT’s position.
In 2001, Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission.
The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged children—“a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it—has been ubiquitous.
making the SAT optional.
The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom.
Students from small towns and from poor neighborhoods in big cities were supposed to benefit—as I thought I did,
SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose.
Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life.
but no longer administered.
Much would be gained.
SAT and the achievement tests measure different things
Achievement tests did slightly better than the SAT in predicting freshman grades.
The researchers found that achievement tests and high school grade point each had about the same independent role—that is, each factor was, by itself, an equally accurate predictor of how a student will do as a college freshman.
But the SAT’s independent role in predicting freshman grade point turned out to be so small that knowing the SAT score added next to nothing to an admissions officer’s ability to forecast how an applicant will do in college
the reason to give the test in the first place.
the achievement tests did slightly better than the SAT in predicting how the test-takers would perform as college freshmen.
Combine these edges, the critics say, and it comes down to this: if you're rich, you can buy your kids a high SAT score.
The results were unaffected. Again, the SAT was unnecessary;
The College Board, which makes many millions of dollars every year from the SAT, had every incentive and ample resources to refute the UC results. But it could not.
aptitude
“inherent ability,”
measure academic achievement.
SAT had to be a bad test, culturally biased in favor of upper-middle-class white kids.
Even coming from mediocre high schools, our scores on achievement tests would have conveyed about the same picture to college admissions committees as our scores on the SAT conveyed.
hat the smartest kids tend to get the highest scores.
This information has been gathered inefficiently, but high-ability students absorb knowledge like a sponge, no matter what schools they attend.
Their Bs do not mean they didn’t absorb the substance of the coursework, and they too have typically encountered and retained large amounts of information outside school.
no matter how smart, gets a high score on the SAT without concentrating and trying hard over the course of three stressful hours
In any case, we are now talking about a very few students, and even for them it is not clear whether dropping the SAT introduces an injustice
. “Now that most of the great scores are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
Kaplan, or Princeton Review, or even get private tutors to coach your kids in the tricks of test-taking, and thereby increase their SAT scores by a couple of hundred points
. If you’re rich, you can shop around for a diagnostician who will classify your child as learning-disabled and therefore eligible to take the SAT without time limits. Combine these edges, and it comes down to this: if you’re rich, you can buy your kids a high SAT score.

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13 Oct 11

Audra Chalmers

abolish

In 2001, Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission. More and more prestigious small colleges, such as Middlebury and Bennington, are making the SAT optional.
The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged children—“a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it—has been ubiquitous.
Then, America’s elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America’s wealthy sent their children.
The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom.
The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose.
nothing important would be lost by dropping the SAT
redundant if students are required to take achievement tests
High school grade point average, SAT scores, and achievement test scores were entered into a statistical equation to predict the grade point that applicants achieved during their freshman year in college
the SAT’s independent role in predicting freshman grade point turned out to be so small that knowing the SAT score added next to nothing to an admissions officer’s ability to forecast how an applicant will do in college

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09 Mar 10

John Hurd

The SAT got him into Harvard from a small Iowa town. But now, CHARLES MURRAY wants to abolish the test. It’s unnecessary and, worse, a negative force in American life.
the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life’s landmarks.
But events of recent years have challenged the SAT’s position. In 2001, Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission.
The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged children—“a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it—has been ubiquitous.
Start with the proposition that nothing important would be lost by dropping the SAT. The surprising empirical reality is that the SAT is redundant if students are required to take achievement tests.

In theory, the SAT and the achievement tests measure different things. In the College Board’s own words from its website, “The SAT measures students’ verbal reasoning, critical reading, and skills,” while the achievement tests “show colleges their mastery of specific subjects.” In practice, SAT and achievement test scores are so highly correlated that SAT scores tell the admissions office little that it does not learn from the achievement test scores alone.

3 more annotations...

18 Mar 08

dahyunk08

The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom.
The SAT measures students’ verbal reasoning, critical reading, and skills,” while the achievement tests “show colleges their mastery of specific subjects.”
SAT and the achievement tests measure different things.
he SAT had to be a bad test, culturally biased in favor of upper-middle-class white kids.

2 more annotations...

08 Nov 07

The 17-year-old who is at the 40th percentile on the SAT has no other score that lets him say to himself, “Yes, but I’m at the 99th percentile in working with my hands,” or “Yes, but I’m at the 99th percentile for courage in the face of adversity.

26 Oct 07

SAT testing