5 ms·

This is why I'm so skeptical that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT scores will make college admissions more equitable. Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can affor

This is why I'm so skeptical that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT scores will make college admissions more equitable. Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. Unfortunately, rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal is used by the admissions committee. Extracurriculars? Those violin lessons didn't pay for themselves! High School internship? Consider which families have the connections to find those opportunities. And now research papers... I actually think standardized test scores are considerably less subject to bias than anything else! IMO, the only actual solution is to specifically consider socioeconomic background as part of the admissions process. But everyone hates that because it feels unfair. And it is unfair, but that's the point—any system we come up with will be unfair, so we have to find the least-unfair one.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> High School internship? Which families have the connections necessary to find those opportunities? Less connections than being able to get to and from a non-paying internship.
atdrummond 3y ago
The good news is that test prep seems to have a very small effect: https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffe...
- andrewprock 3y ago
  There are a number of papers making related claims. The typical conclusion is: test prep helps, but paying for test prep is only marginally better than self study. For some strange reason they are often summarized as "test prep had no effect".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghaff 3y ago
    The context is often "Can someone buy themselves into a better college by paying for test prep?" But yes. If only because of the time constraints of the test (and it's more than that), sitting down and taking the SAT cold would be really hard for most people without prior exposure to similar tests. Heck, I'm pretty sure I couldn't today. I'm guessing I would do pretty well on verbal but too much of the math would be way too far in the past. And I wouldn't have time to derive formulae even if I remembered enough first principles to do so.
    - andrewprock 3y ago
      Yeah. And the context often assumes that dollars are expensive, minutes are cheap, and knowledge is free. Test prep certainly helps. Knowing that test prep helps is key knowledge that is suppressed by these studies. Having the time to engage in test prep is often a luxury. Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask.
      - nordsieck 3y ago
        > Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask. This is part of what colleges are selecting for.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Everything I've seen suggests that, once you get beyond familiarizing yourself with the basic form of the test which you can do with a test prep book from the library, you get into pretty diminishing returns relative to free/almost free resources. Of course, heaving learned the material in the first place and doing a modicum of test prep so the test isn't a wholly unfamiliar thing is still important but it's probably fair to say that the SAT is far less gameable by spending money than many things.
api 3y ago
> rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal This applies to all signals. "It will be gamed. No exceptions." If you care about being equitable, there is no way to fix the elite university system. There are by definition only a few elite universities and they can only admit a small fraction of the population. Even if it were a lottery it'd still exclude the vast majority of people. I feel like a lot of the over-the-top "wokeness" coming out of places like Yale is a case of "they doth protest too much." The vanguard institutions of an inherently discriminatory elitist system of conferred nobility are trying to deflect from this by blathering about diversity. The nobles are lecturing us about how woke they are in the hope of distracting us from the fact that we are not and probably never can be nobility. The only real solution is to make that system obsolete. A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well. Nothing else. No degrees. No name dropping. No elitism based on what region of the country you're from or where you went to school. Just ability. Colleges would only be able to justify their existence (and cost) by arguing that they are good places to learn and hone one's abilities. This would not only be more equitable but might allow people to get into the workforce without a writ of indenture in the form of a giant student loan to repay.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Reasonable standards + lottery selections is far less gameable. And it has the right incentives, as it pressures rich folks to develop more high-quality universities.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - candiodari 3y ago
    The problem is you cannot trust those who run the lottery, or the exams. People will cheat to get in, and they can be quite creative: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53316895 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53316895
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  > A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well. And how do you do that? The reason education is considered is because it's a signal of who can do the job well.
fullshark 3y ago
That's cause the goal is not equity but to make the process more opaque, so they can admit legacy kids without issue, and enough students from various demographic groups at a volume they desire without anyone pointing to any embarrassing measures like SAT scores showing discrimination.
- onetimeusename 3y ago
  Legacy people have higher SAT admissions scores at Harvard at least https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academics-narrative/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi...
  - pxmpxm 3y ago
    Yeah, it's not legacy, but rather a carte blanche to admit people of whatever ethnicity the administrators deem in need of more "equity". Can't have those pesky, studious asians suing the schools, after all.
    - onetimeusename 3y ago
      I don't understand what you're arguing. The legacy admits' SAT scores were higher than non-legacy. The Asians suing Harvard argued the legacy admissions were used as a backdoor for white people specifically. It has nothing to do with equity.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    Kids of rich people are on average smarter, because intelligence is heritable.
  - civilized 3y ago
    That doesn't change the incentive for the admissions committee to find a way to admit the left tail of legacies without criticism. If they want to take all the money that's on the table, they have to admit all the kids whose parents they want to incentivize to donate, regardless of their test scores.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
The fact that some rich people literally went to prison for paying someone to take their kid’s SAT illustrates there are limits to much scores can be improved even with coaching.
- njovin 3y ago
  I think that says more about the work ethic of unethical rich people's children than it does about the efficacy of coaching.
jkaptur 3y ago
I agree - I did a fair amount of SAT tutoring, and there's no question in my mind that preparation improves performance. However, all preparation is basically the same - take a practice test and see what you need to improve, then learn like a dozen tricks (on a math question you should maybe try plugging in the answers and calculating rather than doing algebra, get a good night's sleep, bring two pencils, ...). These resources are essentially free - there's not much that an in-person class teaches that isn't available in a test-prep book from the local library. Now, you need to know the book exists, go to the library, check out that book, read it, and do the exercises. Having a parent pay for classes dramatically lowers that bar (they'll get you out of bed and into a tutoring classroom on a sunny summer Saturday), but, unlike virtually everything else on a resume, money can't actually buy you that much of an advantage on the materials available. It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves.
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  > It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves. That's the way poor immigrant Asian kids and rural whites did it a generation ago. Nowadays, CRT activists are trying to get "holistic" criterions to be used by admission committee. [0] You guessed it, they also argue that the SAT should be de-emphasized. [0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-american-admission-rates-20150609-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-...
  - sirtaj 3y ago
    There is nothing about CRT activists in the link you posted, and if anything the "tag" criteria seem to favour children of alumni and people from well-connected, wealthy backgrounds.
flashgordon 3y ago
Isn't this a good thing. Yes - rich folks can pay for prep. But at least the not so rich folks know "what" to pay for and can try to plan for it early on. As much as I hate standardized tests, I hate opaque arbitrary subjective decision making by random gatekeepers with vested interests and biases.
dangwhy 3y ago
> the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. Its not just rich, it favors boys across all economic classes. I think one of the ideas was that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT will get more women into stem.
- sgerenser 3y ago
  Women already represent almost 60% of incoming freshmen[1]. Do we really need to further discourage boys from going to college? [1] https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/women-increasingly-outnumber-men-at-u-s-colleges-but-why https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/women-incre...
eunos 3y ago
SAT/ACT difficulty ceiling is too low. 10% applicants scored higher than 1350, which is around 1350/1600 = 81%. Should made it so only less than 1% applicants scored higher than 80%.
- dmurray 3y ago
  Why is that too low? It seems like 250 points and 20% of the questions is plenty of room to distinguish the good from the excellent. Even the most elite universities don't need to distinguish between the top 0.1% and the top 0.5%. 10% of applicants getting the top marks 1600/1600 - which happens on other tests! - would indicate a problem.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    It's been a long time since I've known someone involved with admissions at a top school. But my understanding was that not only were quantitative academic scores only part of the process, but by aand large they didn't really use SATs to fine tune admission decisions at the very top of the scale. They used SATs to set an academic floor and, while higher was better, that was only one of the factors in play at that point.
  - eunos 3y ago
    My ideal test would be something like JEE Mains where getting 200 out of 300 means you are top of 99.4% applicants.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Except as I wrote earlier, most top schools in the US don't care about discriminating using standardized tests to that degree. They want to apply a reasonable filter and then move on to other aspects of the application. One may disagree with that approach but pretty much no top school in the US wants to admit solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of a standardized test score.
- jaybrendansmith 3y ago
  This was my thought. Should be very difficult to score high, with score as close to IQ as possible (100=1000). We'll see how many people get a 1600 at that point.
rayiner 3y ago
> Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. "Rich" is the wrong word here and really distorts the comparison. A typical in-person SAT prep class is $1,000-$1,500. This is a one-time expense you can plan for over a number of years. That's affordable to the vast majority of the population in a country where 87% of teenagers own an iPhone: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/11/teen-survey-iphone-ownership https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/11/teen-survey-iphone-owne.... As for time, only 20% of teenagers work while enrolled in school. Only about 1/3 have a job during the summer. Yes, there are kids who are homeless, etc. Spending $1,000 and a couple of days a week in the summer going to prep classes might not be achievable for kids in the very bottom rung of society. But it's quite approachable for kids in the lower middle class and up. It's not only the "rich." By contrast, a lot of college resume boosters are only available to the rich and well-connected. Lower middle class probably don't know anyone who works at a human-rights non-profit who can help secure an interesting internship. Most parents don't have the time to get their kids involved at the Olympic level in some obscure sport. As a matter of geography, many of the things that stand out to admissions officers at elite universities don't really exist in middle America; and the things that do, such as involvement in high-school football or FFA, are looked down upon. There's also a matter of cultural capital. Pretty much everyone knows you should study for tests. That's a no-brainer, and accessible to all cultural groups. But figuring out what will pique the interest of some WASP in Harvard's admissions office takes special cultural knowledge. I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam). But we hang around enough rich white people to know that's not what they mean by "diversity." Instead, it would be far more helpful for her to go back to Bangladesh and fight against Bangladeshis to legalize abortion. That's what they mean by diversity.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  > I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam). ...that actually sounds to me like it could be a great diversity essay, I don't think I agree with your interpretation.
ignite 3y ago
Everyone wants the system that is least unfair to their group.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> High School internship? Which families have the connections necessary to find those opportunities? Less connections than being able to get to and from a non-paying internship.

atdrummond 3y ago

The good news is that test prep seems to have a very small effect: https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffe...

andrewprock 3y ago
There are a number of papers making related claims. The typical conclusion is: test prep helps, but paying for test prep is only marginally better than self study. For some strange reason they are often summarized as "test prep had no effect".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 3y ago
  The context is often "Can someone buy themselves into a better college by paying for test prep?" But yes. If only because of the time constraints of the test (and it's more than that), sitting down and taking the SAT cold would be really hard for most people without prior exposure to similar tests. Heck, I'm pretty sure I couldn't today. I'm guessing I would do pretty well on verbal but too much of the math would be way too far in the past. And I wouldn't have time to derive formulae even if I remembered enough first principles to do so.
  - andrewprock 3y ago
    Yeah. And the context often assumes that dollars are expensive, minutes are cheap, and knowledge is free. Test prep certainly helps. Knowing that test prep helps is key knowledge that is suppressed by these studies. Having the time to engage in test prep is often a luxury. Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask.
    - nordsieck 3y ago
      > Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask. This is part of what colleges are selecting for.
ghaff 3y ago
Everything I've seen suggests that, once you get beyond familiarizing yourself with the basic form of the test which you can do with a test prep book from the library, you get into pretty diminishing returns relative to free/almost free resources. Of course, heaving learned the material in the first place and doing a modicum of test prep so the test isn't a wholly unfamiliar thing is still important but it's probably fair to say that the SAT is far less gameable by spending money than many things.

api 3y ago

> rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal This applies to all signals. "It will be gamed. No exceptions." If you care about being equitable, there is no way to fix the elite university system. There are by definition only a few elite universities and they can only admit a small fraction of the population. Even if it were a lottery it'd still exclude the vast majority of people. I feel like a lot of the over-the-top "wokeness" coming out of places like Yale is a case of "they doth protest too much." The vanguard institutions of an inherently discriminatory elitist system of conferred nobility are trying to deflect from this by blathering about diversity. The nobles are lecturing us about how woke they are in the hope of distracting us from the fact that we are not and probably never can be nobility. The only real solution is to make that system obsolete. A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well. Nothing else. No degrees. No name dropping. No elitism based on what region of the country you're from or where you went to school. Just ability. Colleges would only be able to justify their existence (and cost) by arguing that they are good places to learn and hone one's abilities. This would not only be more equitable but might allow people to get into the workforce without a writ of indenture in the form of a giant student loan to repay.

hgsgm 3y ago
Reasonable standards + lottery selections is far less gameable. And it has the right incentives, as it pressures rich folks to develop more high-quality universities.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- candiodari 3y ago
  The problem is you cannot trust those who run the lottery, or the exams. People will cheat to get in, and they can be quite creative: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53316895 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53316895
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well. And how do you do that? The reason education is considered is because it's a signal of who can do the job well.

fullshark 3y ago

That's cause the goal is not equity but to make the process more opaque, so they can admit legacy kids without issue, and enough students from various demographic groups at a volume they desire without anyone pointing to any embarrassing measures like SAT scores showing discrimination.

onetimeusename 3y ago
Legacy people have higher SAT admissions scores at Harvard at least https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academics-narrative/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi...
- pxmpxm 3y ago
  Yeah, it's not legacy, but rather a carte blanche to admit people of whatever ethnicity the administrators deem in need of more "equity". Can't have those pesky, studious asians suing the schools, after all.
  - onetimeusename 3y ago
    I don't understand what you're arguing. The legacy admits' SAT scores were higher than non-legacy. The Asians suing Harvard argued the legacy admissions were used as a backdoor for white people specifically. It has nothing to do with equity.
- rayiner 3y ago
  Kids of rich people are on average smarter, because intelligence is heritable.
- civilized 3y ago
  That doesn't change the incentive for the admissions committee to find a way to admit the left tail of legacies without criticism. If they want to take all the money that's on the table, they have to admit all the kids whose parents they want to incentivize to donate, regardless of their test scores.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

The fact that some rich people literally went to prison for paying someone to take their kid’s SAT illustrates there are limits to much scores can be improved even with coaching.

njovin 3y ago
I think that says more about the work ethic of unethical rich people's children than it does about the efficacy of coaching.

jkaptur 3y ago

I agree - I did a fair amount of SAT tutoring, and there's no question in my mind that preparation improves performance. However, all preparation is basically the same - take a practice test and see what you need to improve, then learn like a dozen tricks (on a math question you should maybe try plugging in the answers and calculating rather than doing algebra, get a good night's sleep, bring two pencils, ...). These resources are essentially free - there's not much that an in-person class teaches that isn't available in a test-prep book from the local library. Now, you need to know the book exists, go to the library, check out that book, read it, and do the exercises. Having a parent pay for classes dramatically lowers that bar (they'll get you out of bed and into a tutoring classroom on a sunny summer Saturday), but, unlike virtually everything else on a resume, money can't actually buy you that much of an advantage on the materials available. It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves.

908B64B197 3y ago
> It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves. That's the way poor immigrant Asian kids and rural whites did it a generation ago. Nowadays, CRT activists are trying to get "holistic" criterions to be used by admission committee. [0] You guessed it, they also argue that the SAT should be de-emphasized. [0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-american-admission-rates-20150609-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-...
- sirtaj 3y ago
  There is nothing about CRT activists in the link you posted, and if anything the "tag" criteria seem to favour children of alumni and people from well-connected, wealthy backgrounds.

flashgordon 3y ago

Isn't this a good thing. Yes - rich folks can pay for prep. But at least the not so rich folks know "what" to pay for and can try to plan for it early on. As much as I hate standardized tests, I hate opaque arbitrary subjective decision making by random gatekeepers with vested interests and biases.

dangwhy 3y ago

> the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. Its not just rich, it favors boys across all economic classes. I think one of the ideas was that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT will get more women into stem.

sgerenser 3y ago
Women already represent almost 60% of incoming freshmen[1]. Do we really need to further discourage boys from going to college? [1] https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/women-increasingly-outnumber-men-at-u-s-colleges-but-why https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/women-incre...

eunos 3y ago

SAT/ACT difficulty ceiling is too low. 10% applicants scored higher than 1350, which is around 1350/1600 = 81%. Should made it so only less than 1% applicants scored higher than 80%.

dmurray 3y ago
Why is that too low? It seems like 250 points and 20% of the questions is plenty of room to distinguish the good from the excellent. Even the most elite universities don't need to distinguish between the top 0.1% and the top 0.5%. 10% of applicants getting the top marks 1600/1600 - which happens on other tests! - would indicate a problem.
- ghaff 3y ago
  It's been a long time since I've known someone involved with admissions at a top school. But my understanding was that not only were quantitative academic scores only part of the process, but by aand large they didn't really use SATs to fine tune admission decisions at the very top of the scale. They used SATs to set an academic floor and, while higher was better, that was only one of the factors in play at that point.
- eunos 3y ago
  My ideal test would be something like JEE Mains where getting 200 out of 300 means you are top of 99.4% applicants.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Except as I wrote earlier, most top schools in the US don't care about discriminating using standardized tests to that degree. They want to apply a reasonable filter and then move on to other aspects of the application. One may disagree with that approach but pretty much no top school in the US wants to admit solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of a standardized test score.
jaybrendansmith 3y ago
This was my thought. Should be very difficult to score high, with score as close to IQ as possible (100=1000). We'll see how many people get a 1600 at that point.

rayiner 3y ago

> Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. "Rich" is the wrong word here and really distorts the comparison. A typical in-person SAT prep class is $1,000-$1,500. This is a one-time expense you can plan for over a number of years. That's affordable to the vast majority of the population in a country where 87% of teenagers own an iPhone: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/11/teen-survey-iphone-ownership https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/11/teen-survey-iphone-owne.... As for time, only 20% of teenagers work while enrolled in school. Only about 1/3 have a job during the summer. Yes, there are kids who are homeless, etc. Spending $1,000 and a couple of days a week in the summer going to prep classes might not be achievable for kids in the very bottom rung of society. But it's quite approachable for kids in the lower middle class and up. It's not only the "rich." By contrast, a lot of college resume boosters are only available to the rich and well-connected. Lower middle class probably don't know anyone who works at a human-rights non-profit who can help secure an interesting internship. Most parents don't have the time to get their kids involved at the Olympic level in some obscure sport. As a matter of geography, many of the things that stand out to admissions officers at elite universities don't really exist in middle America; and the things that do, such as involvement in high-school football or FFA, are looked down upon. There's also a matter of cultural capital. Pretty much everyone knows you should study for tests. That's a no-brainer, and accessible to all cultural groups. But figuring out what will pique the interest of some WASP in Harvard's admissions office takes special cultural knowledge. I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam). But we hang around enough rich white people to know that's not what they mean by "diversity." Instead, it would be far more helpful for her to go back to Bangladesh and fight against Bangladeshis to legalize abortion. That's what they mean by diversity.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam). ...that actually sounds to me like it could be a great diversity essay, I don't think I agree with your interpretation.

ignite 3y ago

Everyone wants the system that is least unfair to their group.