27 ms·

Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

• bobobob420 3y ago
  Smart people are smart.
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• sokoloff 3y ago
  Shocking that a “Scholastic Aptitude Test” or “American College Test” would predict future scholastic achievement at the collegiate level.
  • bigbillheck 3y ago
    You can't wish nominative determinism into being.
  • NegativeK 3y ago
    Those are marketing terms, though. It's not trivial to go from performance on a single test to performance throughout the year, which will include long-form writing, lab work, and other forms of learning.
    • tomtheelder 3y ago
      SAT/ACT for high achieving students means months of prep/studying and practice test taking. It ends up being a ~somewhat~ similar experience to a college class. Not really similar to humanities classes that depend on discussion section and papers, but if you squint enough it kind of looks like some STEM classes.
    • grdgyredb 3y ago
      You are right it’s not trivial, but on the other hand if you simply try to make such a test you’d do better than completely uncorrelated pretty easily I’d suppose.
      • sokoloff 3y ago
        SAT has has been around almost 100 years and ACT around 2/3 of that, so they've had pretty long to hone the tests as well. This is far from their first stab at it.
        • grdgyredb 3y ago
          And indeed they seem to have produced a test that is correlated with success.
• resters 3y ago
  this says more (good stuff) about Dartmouth than it does about the standardized tests. If scoring higher on something that is close to an IQ test doesn't predict higher academic performance, what does that say about the coursework?
  • abeppu 3y ago
    ... is it close to an IQ test? Like, people study very specifically for these standardized tests, and success is also related to how much prep work you put in. I think that may also align with how people study for exams once they're enrolled students, how much work they put into projects/papers/etc.
    • resters 3y ago
      True. Having the will to prepare for one test (such as the SAT) might indicate a will to prepare for other tests, such as those considered for academic performance ratings.
    • zeroCalories 3y ago
      Then you just normalize the scores based on socioeconomic indicators like is done in the article. Of course, this highly advantages well groomed students from bad demographics, and horribly disadvantages neglected students from good demographics. That's why China worked hard to ban test prep. But either way, it's a pretty good proxy for IQ.
      • abeppu 3y ago
        I think we're missing each other. Propensity to study may be a different attribute than IQ, which is a predictor for both standardized test scores and academic success. Normalizing for socioeconomic factors does not in itself disambiguate these possibilities. Someone with low motivation to study is not necessarily 'neglected'. I've seen years ago a highly cited paper showing relatively high correlations between SAT scores and IQs, but critically its data was from the late 1970s, when norms around test prep, and access to prep resources, were meaningfully different.
• SnooSux 3y ago
  To measure academic achievement they use First Year GPA. It makes sense they're correlated, both require studying known material for a test. But is GPA the best measure, especially first year? I would be interested in other metrics like 3rd-4th year GPA or placements into jobs and such.
  • thaumasiotes 3y ago
    The reason people measure first year GPA is that, in the past, all freshmen at a college took the same set of classes. If you measure 3rd year GPA, you get confounded by the difference between physics students and French students. Obviously, the worth of the metric goes down over time as first-year curricula differentiate from each other. > But is GPA the best measure, especially first year? No. For example, SAT score is a better single measure than GPA is. But you can't use that to check the validity of SAT scores.
  • abcc8 3y ago
    I didn't read the entire document in depth, but perhaps it has been shown elsewhere that first year GPA is a good quality predictor of GPA in subsequent years.
  • old_bayes 3y ago
    I believe they do look at other things (EDIT: or at least the study this paper was based on did): "Using detailed admissions data from IvyPlus institutions, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman (2023) show that SAT and ACT scores also predict career success, including high levels of earnings and attendance at elite graduate schools, holding family income constant."
    • paxys 3y ago
      That is referring to another study. This particular one doesn't add anything in that regard, just looks at freshman year GPAs.
      • old_bayes 3y ago
        Right, but what I think they're trying to do is to confirm that the larger, more comprehensive study also applies to Dartmouth. But the fact that they didn't also run the test against other metrics might suggest they didn't want to publish that data publicly. Or if you're more cynical, they failed to produce those results.
• jgwil2 3y ago
  The headline should really be, "A test-optional policy is likely a barrier to Dartmouth identifying less-advantaged students who would succeed at Dartmouth." I think it's no surprise to anyone that test scores correlate with academic success, but it might seem counterintuitive that test-optional policies actually bias admission in favor of higher-income students.
  • lupusreal 3y ago
    I really wonder about the people to whom that is counterintuitive. Don't they realize that rich privileged kids can do more extracurriculars?
  • doctorwho42 3y ago
    Honestly, reading this makes me think "well yeah... Why is anyone surprised?" Being a good test taker will 100% translate to doing well in college. Almost every course I took in college had over 80% of it's overall grade being tests, with a large number of them being closer to 90-95% for how much tests+final count. So yeah, if you are good at taking tests and/or studying for them effectively... Yeah, you will do well in college. Especially the first year.
• paxys 3y ago
  So, students entering Dartmouth with a higher SAT score also have higher first year GPAs. Which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone considering they are both basically testing the same thing. The fact that over the last couple decades employers at large have stopped asking for college GPAs (and by extension SAT scores) on their job applications should instead tell you that all these numbers have very little relevance in the real world.
  • 1980phipsi 3y ago
    They don't ask for SAT because they don't want to get sued.
• lxe 3y ago
  They should "un-bin" the statistics and identify individual outliers -- those who scored poorly on the tests but hold higher GPA, and vice versa, and learn things from these individual students.
  • HPsquared 3y ago
    That's the "work ethic" part.
    • hodgesrm 3y ago
      Well that's the part that deserves some additional research.
      • HPsquared 3y ago
        Maybe college scores should have two components: performance in "smart but lazy" tasks, and "hard work regardless of smarts" tasks.
• cowmix 3y ago
  ... but it still doesn't predict actual success in my experience. I was "gifted program" adjacent growing up (all my friends were in these programs in the late 70s -> 80s) -- all earned high grades and test scores -- but many are now puzzled why they are not showered with $$ and success into present day. Well, they don't think they are successful to where they should be.
  • doctorwho42 3y ago
    Well yeah, our society doesn't really reward hard work and advanced knowledge for the many. There are the rare exceptions, but for the most part to make $$$ you need to buy into the current system which is all about making spreadsheet numbers go up YoY at the cost of everything else. If you don't do that, well I hope you can find a niche somewhere that is stable and comfortable.
• ccleve 3y ago
  Here's the money quote: >> Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts. Precisely. SATs aren't about hurting the poor or disadvantaged. It's about giving them a chance.
  • doctorpangloss 3y ago
    If the universities were sincere about that, they would figure out how to increase enrollment. Why is every parameter of admissions open to change despite tradition, except that one?
    • ZeWaka 3y ago
      You can't enroll infinite people.
      • Rebuff5007 3y ago
        No, but surely you can enroll more people. I can't imagine theres a dearth of physical space or qualified educators near any university. The fact that they are not growing to accommodate the demand has always boggled my mind...
        • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
          Space isn’t the limiter, teaching hours via faculty are. The most popular universities, research ones, have faculty that teach only a few undergrad classes a year. Changing those popular universities into ones more focused on undergrad education would make them less popular. Germany might be a better model where barebones education is easily accessible. They leave much more up to students: your homework might not be looked at and your grade depends solely on a final exam. No student centers or leafy campuses either.
          • stonemetal12 3y ago
• light_hue_1 3y ago
  If this was a paper submitted by one of my students, they would fail. Why would these faculty members sign their names to this drivel? If you read carefully, you see how useless SAT and ACT scores really are. Here are just a few insane things. > Figure 1 shows a linear relationship between SAT scores and cumulative first-year GPA for Dartmouth students. SAT scores are grouped into 16 equal-sized bins, and we plot mean first-year GPA (y-axis) against mean SAT score (x-axis) in the bin.4 Within any smaller range of scores, first-year GPA and the SAT maintain the same linear relationship. Total nonsense. Figure 1 does not mean that SAT/ACT scores are predictive of academic achievement! Without seeing the variance you cannot make this statement. At all. The fact that there is a linear relationship means nothing statistically. > SAT by itself explains about 22% of the variation in first-year GPA So we're explaining less than 1/5th of the variance. This makes SAT scores basically worthless, this account for almost none of the real world performance of people, never mind how redundant they are with GPAs. The correct title for this would be: SAT and ACT are not highly predictive of academic achievement at Dartmouth. There's a massive disconnect between the title and the data. The data shows there is likely some statistical effect on performance by SAT. The title would have you think that if you know a student's SAT scores, you would be good at predicting their outcomes at Dartmouth. The data shows this is wrong: if you only used SAT scores, you would almost always be wrong in predicting how well a student would do. A lot of papers play this game, they imply that statistically significant means meaningful. Nothing could be further from the truth. Something can be statistically significant but inconsequential. Never mind that they define as success at Dartmouth as your first year GPA.
  • toomim 3y ago
    Um, 22% > 1/5.
  • anon291 3y ago
    I'm confused. The authors cite several instances of research done at other institutions as the main evidence that SAT/ACT scores are predictive of overall success. At that point, the a priori assumption is that Dartmouth would behave the same way, which they then go on to show. I agree that they could have fully analyzed graduation rates and full-term GPA, but other studies have already done that. I do believe their analysis is thorough enough (looking at first year GPA) to adequately show to me that there is absolutely no reason to believe that Dartmouth would be any different than the other institutions at which much larger / more rigorous studies have been done. I mean... do you have a full double-blind study done when you're sick to determine the right dosage for you, or does your doctor consult an existing dosing study, make sure nothing is substantially different between you and the study group, and then decide upon an appropriate dose. There's a certain point at which over-analyzing makes little sense. The authors here ARE NOT engaged in research. This is NOT peer-reviewed. It's a letter elucidating an opinion by researchers in the field based on their knowledge of previous literature in the field and then a surface-level analysis to make sure that those results ought to apply to Dartmouth as well. Moreover, you're hyperbolizing yourself. Namely, you criticize the title, which is not the author's title at all. Their letter is titled "Report From Working Group on the Role of Standardized Test Scores in Undergraduate Admissions" The authors main claim (on the first page after niceties) is that ".Our overall conclusion is that the use of SAT and ACT scores is an essential method by which Admissions can identify applicants who will succeed at Dartmouth." This is not "SAT / ACT scores are highly predictive...". It's an entirely different statement. Let's not confuse HN editorializing with the contents of the letter. > The title would have you think that if you know a student's SAT scores, you would be good at predicting their outcomes at Dartmouth. The data shows this is wrong: if you only used SAT scores, you would almost always be wrong in predicting how well a student would do. Except if you read the text, that's not at all what the authors claim. The authors do not claim the title (again... that's HN's title, not the paper's). The authors say: > In short, consideration of SAT scores allows Admissions to identify applicants who will thrive academically at Dartmouth better than does the use of high school GPA alone. which is true. Even if you don't think it's a useful predictor, it is a more useful predictor than GPA. This is a reasonable contrast because in the absence of test scores, this would be the only data available. As for the other critiques. I agree that Figure 1 is not useful and shouldn't have been included. However, the table at the end is pretty straightforwards and provides essentially the same conclusion as above, which is that SAT is better than GPA. Moreover, just because the figure they included is bad does not mean the data they studied was. We'd need to know more, not wholesale reject their conclusion. The authors then go on to argue that other papers agree with these conclusions (they do), and that alternates to both SAT and GPA (letters of rec, etc) have been shown to exacerbate inequality while having very little power to predict how well a student will do. > The fact that there is a linear relationship means nothing statistically. It does... in fact... mean that there is a linear relationship in the observed data with the given levels of significance. I'm not sure what exactly you're going at here. I agree a scatter plot of all the data might be more useful, but honestly, given the plethora of other work on the subject published by so many disparate institutions of higher ed, I really have no reason to believe dartmouth would be much different. So while the included figure is not great, I'm guessing that if we saw all the data the conclusion would probably still be the same.
• amusingimpala75 3y ago
  Recently saw an article about parents spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their kids work with professional resume builders just to get an advantage with college applications. Now that many colleges are trying to phase out SATs because “it discriminates against poorer households”, it’s being replaced with essay and resume based things that seem to provide an advantage to the richer households who can afford the absurd amounts to very carefully cultivate the documents.
  • Macha 3y ago
    Yeah, Canonical presented one of these 40 question style interviews that felt like a very thinly veiled class check in comparison to the usual interviews in my country. I'd much rather a whiteboard exercise than that. Apparently it's been discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857
  • boeingUH60 3y ago
    That was the aim always. To disadvantage the poor and middle class by disguising under “equality” and “diversity”. Two-faced hypocrisy at its peak.
• kragen 3y ago
  this fact suggests that dartmouth is not weighting sat test scores highly enough in their admissions process if dartmouth took sat scores into account in the admissions process by precisely the right amount, then within the set of people they actually admitted, sat scores would have no predictive value with respect to academic achievement, because the students who were admitted despite low sat scores would have been admitted due to some advantages detected by admissions that turned out to matter precisely as much as the higher sat scores would have if, across the entire population, higher sat scores had no predictive value with respect to academic achievement, dartmouth could get this result by preferentially admitting students with lower sat scores. (for example, maybe you would need a high school gpa of 4.1 or higher to get in if your meaningless sat score were 1500, but this hypothetical bizarro dartmouth would let you in with a high-school gpa of 3.1 or higher if your meaningless sat score were only 1000; if the 3.1 students in high school continued being 3.1 students at dartmouth, it would make the meaningless sat scores highly predictive of academic achievement at dartmouth, among the people who actually got in.) of course that would be an extremely unlikely thing for dartmouth to do, and they mention a lot of other evidence that sat scores predict academic achievement in general, not just among the students they admit r-squared of 0.22 is still not a great predictor, though if you want to read this report, it may be useful to open it in two separate browser tabs, scrolling the second one to the figures, which begin on p. 9
• Scubabear68 3y ago
  This is not surprising to me. Our local school district started using social promotion several years ago when a new Superintendent started. Struggling students were ratcheted down to being taught materials 1-3 grades below their level. Extra credit not related to the subject were allowed to boost grades (such as coloring assignments in 4th grade Spanish). The end result was a huge population of kids with straight B averages who performed dismally on State standardized testing. We know because our kids were two of those students. We took them out of public school into private last year. The first six months were hell as they had to catch up from their deficits and learn how to study for real. 18 months later they are getting real A’s and B’s (and a few C’s) that are real grades. We need standardized tests because more and more school districts are going the social promotion route
  • ericjmorey 3y ago
    That seems like a poor plan to get kids "up to speed" with their peer groups. Especially if any of those students have parents who are unable or unwilling to provide a nurturing environment for their kids.
    • Scubabear68 3y ago
      Standardized tests aren’t a fix, they are a form of measurement to diagnose the problem. When your son has a B average in 8th grade and scores in single digits on State standardized tests, it is clear there is a very serious problem. The fix is to get proper leadership in the schools. Our Superintendent started his career as a gym teacher, and it shows. At a school board meeting when parents criticized the low standardized test scores, he crowed that they don’t matter because colleges stopped looking at them.
      • Scubabear68 3y ago
        Forgot to add - public schools in the US are effectively mini monopolies. You are forced to send your kid there, unless you work very hard to get your kids into a “choice” program, or can afford private school, or have free time to home school. In our State, NJ, in theory each County has a County Superintendent to over see schools, and the State Dept of Education to oversee them. In reality, the County and State bureaucracy does little to nothing to provide actual oversight, and schools become private fiefdoms. The end result is school quality varies wildly, and housing prices are very strongly correlated to school quality. In our crappy district, real estate agents complain it is very hard to sell housing to families with children or who will soon have them because the schools are so bad. This creates a downward spiral for the school as fewer and fewer kids are enrolled.
• bovermyer 3y ago
  Ah, but how well does academic achievement (at Dartmouth, or others) correlate to job/life performance?
• kqr2 3y ago
  Also listen to the Daily Podcast The Messy Fight Over the SAT: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/podcasts/the-daily/the-war-on-the-sat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/podcasts/the-daily/the-wa...
• alberth 3y ago
  Anecdote: a friend of mine is an admission officer for one of the US largest public university. They told me that if your kid has a 4.0 GPA (a perfect GPA), do not take the SAT/ACT ... because, without those standardized test scores - your kid is "perfect". But unless your kid has a perfect 4.0 GPA, taking the SAT/ACT typically helps your child get into a better school than their GPA might indicate. YMMV
  • elteto 3y ago
    That sounds very localized to the institution your friend works at. And public universities have very different admission procedures than private ones. You won’t get into a high tier private university (Ivy or not) without SAT/ACT scores.
    • alberth 3y ago
      We’re saying the same thing. 99% of kids don’t have a perfect 4.0 GPA. But the point is, if you do happen to have a kid who does - there’s more harm than good that will result from taking SAT/ACT. For all others, it’s highly recommend to take.
      • elteto 3y ago
        I don’t think we are saying the same thing. My point is that, 4.0 GPA or not, if you don’t take the SAT/ACT you will be at a disadvantage when applying to elite, private universities. For the very simple reason that there’ll be many others with similar background as you, with the exact same GPA _and_ SAT/ACT scores. You’ll be more of a wildcard to admissions due to lack of information. If you want to have a chance to get into Harvard/MIT/Stanford/etc you have to take the SAT/ACT. Period.
        • alberth 3y ago
          Are you guessing this or know this for a fact? Because you should make clear if you’re speculating what your saying or know it’s true
• verst 3y ago
  I was born and raised in Germany where I attended an ordinary high school. Eventually I decided I wanted to attend university in the US but had no help navigating the process and requirements. Needless to say, I realized I had to take the SAT last minute and had never seen a practice test, or taken this kind of test in English before. All my instructions had been in German, and the German school system does not usually perform multiple choice tests - everything is about showing your thought process and your steps. Needless to say, I received an abysmal score. For me this test truly only tests how good you are at that test. I applied as an international student to a top tier liberal arts college equivalent to Dartmouth. I was able to make my case and was accepted there. My academic performance in both my first year and the rest of the four years was stellar. Perhaps the SAT can be predictive of performance for those who grew up in the system that prepares you for the SAT (or ACT). For anyone else, this is however meaningless.
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    > For me this test truly only tests how good you are at that test. International students are a completely different story. As you say, your entire educational experience had been in another language. This is not the case for students in the US. All students here have taken many multiple choice tests in English by the time they get to the SAT. For example, there are state- and federal-mandated tests that students must take. > Perhaps the SAT can be predictive of performance for those who grew up in the system that prepares you for the SAT (or ACT). For anyone else, this is however meaningless. It is perhaps close to meaningless for an international student, but for a student who went to school in the US, it is not meaningless at all.
  • hirvi74 3y ago
    > everything is about showing your thought process and your steps You probably did well at a US college because you came from a system that actually provided you with critical thinking and reasoning skills. Instead of a system, like the US, which is rife with route memorization and multiple choice tests. I would imagine the opposite experience would be much more difficult (assuming what I remember from studying German is actually correct).
• rconti 3y ago
  NYTimes "The Daily" podcast had an informative episode on the matter[1] I'm out of the loop since my college days are behind me, and I don't have kids. I had heard colleges were going to rely less on standardized testing (and many dropped the requirement during Covid when SAT tests didn't take place at all). I had also heard that there was controversy over reliance on standardized tests, because the wealthy can more easily afford expensive test prep, which initially seemed reasonable to me. But then when I listed to the podcast I was stunned that the colleges seemed to think relying much more heavily on grades and extracurricular activities was somehow an _improvement_. I thought "grade inflation" was a big worry over the past couple of decades? I thought we all joked about today's nonsensical GPAs where kids get, whatever, 4.5s or 5.0s on a scale of 0-4. And it goes without saying that it's obvious to most of us that volunteering and participating in travel sports and debate teams and so on, is FAR more accessible to those with money, with transportation, with resources, with involved parents? Standardized tests can't tell us how diligently kids do their homework, how well they do after encountering a setback. Maybe they favor kids who are smart but lazy. They can't tell us how a kid will do when they go from being a high school standout to a below average Harvard student. But they sure as hell tell us a lot more than utterly subjective grading systems with no standardization whatsoever, and "intangibles" that tell us only how good a kid's family (or hired college prep expert) is at identifying activities that will get them into a selective University. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/podcasts/the-daily/the-war-on-the-sat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/podcasts/the-daily/the-wa...
  • dyno12345 3y ago
    re: grade inflation, they can statistically normalize the grades fwiw GPA and SAT scores are highly correlated anyway
    • tech_ken 3y ago
      Not exactly, it's tough because every high school needs a different normalization, and it may drift from cohort to cohort. Most universities only ever see a handful of students from any given HS, so it's really tough to untangle the big spike of 5.0 students. Usually the results are weakly predictive of academic success, if the correlation even exists at all. External agencies like the CollegeBoard offer data as a service type solutions for this, but they're (A) low quality, (B) expensive, and (C) have lots of weird privacy concerns because it's data about minors.
• garyrob 3y ago
  My own experience was that I was a mediocre high school student due to my ADHD-Inattentive, but then the SATs were interesting enough to me that I was able to really, really focus for the length of the test. And I did far better on that test that anyone would have suspected I could do based only on my grades, and it was, in fact, predictive of my college performance. In college, I was able to figure out tricks to manage my ADHD.
  • hirvi74 3y ago
    Interesting, for I was quite the opposite. I'm ADHD-C, but I always did well in school, got shit on by the ACT, went to college and did well up until my final year, but that was mainly due to some extenuating circumstances and not my drive or intelligence.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  Of course high scores on a test are going to correlate with academic achievement, they are both just a measure of ability to pass tests. This is like saying people who swim very well will have high achievement in swimming competitions. The paper's summary implies that they should make testing mandatory, because when they made testing optional, they couldn't see the students who they'd like to admit. But they kind of ridiculously don't comment on the fact that mandatory testing might not make any difference at all. There must be reasons students don't send in scores when testing is optional. But just making the testing mandatory doesn't address those reasons at all. So there is no reason to conclude that suddenly applicants would start sending in scores at a higher rate. It's equally likely they would just stop applying.
• carabiner 3y ago
  Yep. And STEM students have higher SAT scores than lib arts. And Asians have higher SAT scores than everyone else.
  • breadwinner 3y ago
    > And Asians have higher SAT scores than everyone else. And that might be the biggest reason to prefer "holistic review" over SAT scores. Originally invented to limit the number of Jews [1], "holistic reviews" is now being used to limit the number of Asians in top universities. [1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit-reveals-how-peculiar-harvards-definition-of-merit-is https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
    • carabiner 3y ago
      That's why you prefer holistic review?
      • breadwinner 3y ago
        Not me, the universities who do engage in "holistic reviews". See article: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-false-promise-of-holistic-college-admissions/282432/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa... Excerpts from the story: From colleges’ perspective, “holistic” is just shorthand for, we make the decisions we make, and would rather not be asked to spell out each one. It’s a way for schools to discreetly take various sensitive factors—“overrepresented” minorities, or students whose families might donate a gym—into account.
• laidoffamazon 3y ago
  My ideal admissions system would consist of highly weighting standardized test scores and grades along with community impact and other extracurriculars as well as letters of recommendation from teachers and other community members. ...oh, wait, we have that admissions system. That's the admissions system of every flagship state school and the US Service Academies. Why does Dartmouth (and before it, MIT's) flip-flop on this matter to 99% of us again?
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    That’s not what the UC system does — they refuse to consider SATs.
    • laidoffamazon 3y ago
      I’ll admit I forgot they kept test optional - I’ll celebrate when they bring it back, not when elite schools whose purpose is to segregate and enrich the few do it.
      • gnicholas 3y ago
        They are not test-optional; they refuse to consider it. They previously toyed with the idea of making their own test, but IIRC they gave up on it (probably because they realized it have the same features/bugs as the existing tests). They may be forced to bring mandatory testing back in the future, but currently there are no rumors that will happen. They have other priorities for admission these days.
  • costco 3y ago
    Extracurriculars are by and large a scam. I became vice president of a few clubs, started a UNICEF chapter at my school, etc. But I made almost 0 impact on the world because we only raised like $200, most of which was from me and my family. The proof that most people don't actually care about these things is that they quit them the day they start college. Maybe participation in something like ISEF is a better signal. But not National Honor Society membership (which I of course had, because that's what you do). No one can verify the accuracy of letters of recommendation and teachers routinely break the rules by showing them to students. In some cases I have heard of teachers asking students to write them (!).
• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  It seems fairly obvious you need these standardized tests, especially when GPA inflation would be incentivized otherwise, but the SAT and ACT drive some very uncomfortable discussions involving intelligence, primarily on its hereditary nature and the possibility of "group-differences". Gets even more uncomfortable since we're talking about children. If "group-differences" exist at the genetic level for example, why shouldn't affirmative action be required since disadvantaged groups also pay taxes to these schools.
• gumby 3y ago
  MIT publicly said their stats showed that SAT was the best predictor of graduation (MIT tracks six-year graduation rate): https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our... They accepted me (same year as the guy who wrote that article!) from a high school than only gave letter grades, computed no class rank or GPA, and offered no "AP" classes or SAT prep. Then again, back then, I don't remember colleges caring about extracurriculars either, though I might have forgotten.
• ren_engineer 3y ago
  The SAT was based on IQ tests used during WWI to try and find draftees with the most potential who shouldn't be wasted in the trenches. Standardized tests have always been about making things as fair as possible, and the fact that paying huge money for tutoring only results in minor score improvements should be a sign they are effective the war against them was because people didn't like the implications that poor Asian immigrants were able to outscore other demographics regardless of income, which goes against modern academia's favored nurture over nature mindset and destroys the basis for trillions in social programs. Standardized tests effectively threaten the entire house of cards, even more than the replication crisis showing that most of the "research" used to justify modern social programs was fake in the first place
  • drewcoo 3y ago
    If you're going to talk about the origins of the SAT, don't forget that it was designed by a eugenicist to try to exclude black candidates. Ironically, the problem with them now is that they're now used to exclude white people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_SAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_SAT
    • ren_engineer 3y ago
      Eugenics was hot among progressive academics in those days, the founder of Planned Parenthood was one and so was the guy whose statistical methods are still the basis for all modern research back then being against eugenics meant you were a crazy religious nutcase who couldn't accept scientific fact about evolution and genetics
      • camdenlock 3y ago
        Progressive academics, all the way up to the president of the United States (Woodrow Wilson). It should be embarrassing to call oneself a “Progressive” these days, yet here we are. A small but meaningful indicator of the extreme bias in our education system…
      • jltsiren 3y ago
• costco 3y ago
  What does the new SAT even measure? It's just some Common Core© Algebra 1 and 2 knowledge (also basic trig), reading comprehension, and a section where you read sentences in your head and see if they sound right. You can get over 10 questions wrong and still get a 1500. There's no more shape rotation questions anymore or really any question where you aren't just applying an equation. I got a 1530 by just doing 20 practice tests from the stickied thread on r/SAT and basically learning every possible question type. 1-2 tests a week over the summer and into the early school year. Not a monumental amount of effort and didn't cost me any resources besides time and paper. I think most people just don't know how or what to study.
• Kwpolska 3y ago
  You know what’s an even better policy? Making standardised tests the sole admission criterion. No high school grades (which are often inflated, unless your teachers hate you), no extracurricular activities, no essays. Just one set of objective numbers from the national maturity exam; which tests and with what weights depending on the field of study. This is what universities do in Poland (for most fields of study; some might have extra tests to write), and it’s great at letting people from different backgrounds into universities while filtering out people highly unlikely to succeed.
  • maxglute 3y ago
    You want academic prep to drive consumption in multiple sectors silly /s.
  • zahma 3y ago
    What a silly idea. Universities are not just in charge with academic education but rather with the formation of a person’s character. To succeed with the latter, academic capability must be held alongside the estimation of one’s character, for it is not only about one’s intellectual capacity but rather how one uses it.
    • asdff 3y ago
      If schools started estimating the merit of one's character they'd have to probably throw out half of their own faculty and cut off ties with many of their donors.
    • LudwigNagasena 3y ago
      If academic education is not their top priority, it would be beneficial to separate research facilities from universities and let universities be glorified fraternities. It's a waste to spend resources of top professors on "formation of a person's character" when they can help build the next generation of elite scientists and engineers.
      • thfuran 3y ago
• alphazard 3y ago
  This is refreshing. I sometimes wonder if the universities understand why they have value to industry. It's not the education. Schools are rating agencies for people. The university admission process takes a more comprehensive look at candidates than is practical during the hiring process in industry. In particular they pay close attention to proxies for general intelligence (SAT math and to a lesser extent reading) and trait conscientiousness (grades, extra-curricular, etc.). If an employer sees Dartmouth on your resume, they can make an educated guess about your IQ and your conscientiousness, both of which they should care about as an employer. As other comments have mentioned, measuring these psychometric traits more directly has the effect of identifying top candidates in unprivileged circumstances. While diluting these psychometric scores with other measures has the effect of biasing towards affluent candidates who can afford to do things that are impressive on paper.
• smeej 3y ago
  Are we maybe missing the forest for the trees here? Like, do the test scores or the academic achievement at Dartmouth actually matter? By sheer dumb luck, I am exactly the kind of intelligent schools and standardized tests measure for. I went to my first choice schools on a full academic scholarship for both undergrad and grad school. And it's meaningless in the real world. The most important connections I've made certainly weren't at school. The academics themselves weren't terribly useful in terms of preparing me for life outside the ivory tower. Why are we trying to sell people on this dream?
  • alphazard 3y ago
    If what you said is true, then you are likely an ideal employee for the vast majority of roles. You can read well, understand what you are supposed to do, follow instructions, etc. It's not meaningless in the real world. You may not be satisfied with your level of success, but that's dependent on how you define success. You won't find many dumb people among self made multi-millionaires. But being high IQ isn't enough to get you there. It also requires creativity, people skills, a network, luck, etc. We don't test for those things because the people running the show aren't interested in identifying people to compete with them, they are interested in identifying people who will work for them.
    • smeej 3y ago
      I'm not, though. I'm terrible at taking anyone's word for anything, partially (not entirely) because I was told I knew more things than my peers. I'm also garbage at just doing what I'm told. Who's giving me the directions? Why should I trust them? What do they know? You seem to be thinking of the people who did well in school because they worked hard. Perhaps they are excellent employees. Those of us who never had to apply ourselves to anything and were told incessantly how much better we were than our peers make terrible employees in most atmospheres.
  • dfedbeef 3y ago
    High five to all the former gifted and talenteds.
• seabass-labrax 3y ago
  Disambiguation for my fellow residents of Britain: this is about university entrance tests for undergraduate courses at Dartmouth university in New Hampshire, USA, not primary school examinations at Dartmouth, Devon (the Original and the Best™).
• francisofascii 3y ago
  SATs are the worst predictor of academic success, except for all those other forms of predictive measures that have been tried. (a variation of Churchill's democracy quote)
• kebsup 3y ago
  I've taken ACT as an exchange student when I was in the US. I didn't need it, but everyone in my grade was doing it and it was for free, so why not. Sometimes people say, that for ACTs, one needs a specific knowledge of how to take the test, which does not teach you anything, but I did not get the feeling. All of the questions seemed quite reasonable, no tricks and not even a need for smart ideas (unlike let's say math Olympiad). Basically know the basic math rules, and you'll be fine. The knowledge I've gained at a Czech Gymnasium with more traditional methods (i.e. no multiple choice) translated very well into getting a good score.
  • hirvi74 3y ago
    > Basically know the basic math rules I was raised in the Southeast, USA. That's a big ask of us and our education system. In my state, we have a few state administered tests that are taking throughout one's primary schooling years. Student take these exams at periodic intervals. For example, there is one for reading comprehension and assessment taken, iirc, at grade 3, 6, and 9 or something like that. Well, 60% of students in my state right now who took the 3rd grade reading comprehension assessment have failed to demonstrate the ability to read at a 3rd grade level. I have a hard time accepting these test [ACT/SAT] as some kind of arbiter or one's future when the education system is failing many students long before he or she ever gets to take the SAT/ACT.
  • foobiekr 3y ago
    I feel this way about most of the standardized tests. I took the LSAT on a whim which no prep and scored 95th percentile. The whole thing was completely reasonable and mostly tested basic logical reasoning and vocabulary/reading comprehension. At the time, there was a short essay component which was entirely about the ability to express whatever thoughts you were supposed to express clearly. The thing about these tests is that they are all perfectly reasonable. The main reason people have a test with them is they also tend to identify people who _probably_ should not be in college at all and that is not a message anyone wants to accept needs to be sent.
• coolbreezetft24 3y ago
  In Canada there are no high school SATs and university admission is mostly based on high school performance. Universities there don't seem to have the issues that American ones do. Living in America now I see a lot of parents spending thousands of dollars on SAT tutoring & preparation. It seems a lot of things could be fixed just by being able to support and admit more students at the "good" schools? (also not sure why there is such a massive disparity in the quality of colleges here as well)
  • sudosysgen 3y ago
    Universities in Canada definitely do have issues due to the high school GPA system. In Quebec, it's not present, instead you get in based on a Z-score renormalized based on how good your class was at standardized tests in CEGEP, which itself disproportionately looks at your standardized tests scores and those of your peers in high school As far as the rest of Canada, highly competitive programs have to calculate the strength of a high school to normalize for grade inflation, especially in Ontario. It's a huge problem and makes it unfair for some students who don't go to the right high school.
• cubefox 3y ago
  SAT score statistics also make for some of the most offensive graphs possible. E.g. https://s20.directupload.net/images/240205/xfm7k5l8.png https://s20.directupload.net/images/240205/xfm7k5l8.png
• stanford_labrat 3y ago
  What if schools had a minimum-level lottery system based on standardized tests? E.g. "you must score XXXX to be eligible for entry to a T20 school, and you will get in randomly". XXXX+50 for a T10, XXXX+100 for a T5, XXXX-50 for a T50 etc...schools could tailor their minimum score to whatever they desired.
• kbos87 3y ago
  Of course standardized test performance correlates with test performance a year later when someone arrives at a college or university. That's the wrong question to be asking ourselves. This discussion is maddening to me because it assumes that what colleges and universities should optimize for is test performance, full stop. I've never been a strong test taker, but I gained a lot from my time in college and I've done objectively well in my career. The way colleges, universities, and some of the people commenting here are willing to limit access to education and life-changing opportunity based on one narrow measure is antiquated and narrow-minded. If I had to give advice to someone who is motivated and interested in higher education but doesn't perform particularly well on standardized tests, it would be to feel no shame in doing whatever it takes to find your way through or around the arbitrary barriers like standardized tests that are going to be put in front of you.
• ksoped 3y ago
  This just makes me more sad, thinking about what could have been. I had a 1500 on SAT from a school where the average is probably at 1000.
• jncfhnb 3y ago
  My grad program was fairly open about saying the standardized tests were used to sort applicants for consideration order and other disregarded. I thought that seemed fair.
• Geisterde 3y ago
  There is a lot of really interesting and simultaneously totally useless information in the comments here. If I ran a college, im accepting whoever I decide, because its mine. Imagine accepting random strangers in your house to level out income/racial/gender inequities. Of course the standardized tests are the best indicator of collegiate performance, and of course you will miss inspired candidates by only looking at test scores. Its a numbers game, and people pay a high price to come to my college, because every student gets a well paying job, because every student has a good grasp of the material and we built a reputation for high standards. If I accept unqualified candidates then my reputation and profit will suffer, because im dumping thousands of subpar kids into the market with papermill degrees. "Oh no, it was always my dream to go to harvard, its not fair!" Like fuck-all is fair in life.
  • BeetleB 3y ago
    > If I ran a college, im accepting whoever I decide, because its mine. Imagine accepting random strangers in your house to level out income/racial/gender inequities. You probably can get away with it, as long as you don't want to be credentialed and don't want any federal funds.
    • Geisterde 3y ago
      Of course, if were we in a time when those policies I would be arguing that they are immoral and regressive, but of course you are correct.
• wnc3141 3y ago
  We may nitpick at which process gives more equitable chances of admission to Dartmouth. But ultimately we are still saddled with the absurd notion (and very real prospect) that a ticket to the middle class depends on winning very costly degrees. - particularly degrees whose brand recognition enables employment with greater proximity to the deployment of capital rather than operation of capital. Meanwhile there is little discussion of why issues of equity in admissions are zero sum rather than leveraging multi-billion dollar endowments to expand access overall.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    Education scales to a point, but doesn’t scale infinitely. Professors are limited; labs are limited; dorms are limited; campus real estate is limited. Some of those are amenable to short-term growth; others are not.
  • closeparen 3y ago
    Endowments are used to fund scholarships for students from middle-class and lower backgrounds. The degree is only costly to the extent that your parents are to well-off or your school's endowment is too small. (This is a serious problem if your parents are well-off but stingy, or if you get into an elite-ish but not actually top-tier college). Endowments, like universities, are meant to be perpetual, so the amount of access they can provide is limited by the return on capital. Some people would perhaps like to see the principal spent down, which could provide dramatically more access in the short term, but then the money would be gone.
• devwastaken 3y ago
  The HN algorithm for comments is not prepared for the 90% problem. One poor quality comment receives the majority of the replies, putting the poor quality first in the list.
• spoonjim 3y ago
  As the universities attempt their cute little social science experiments there is probably a lot of opportunity to create a new university whose admission criterion is simply a 1600 SAT score
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  Standardized test scores are objective qualifications not subject to racist prejudice. Racist prejudice invades every step of admittance to college, subjective grading, scholarships, hiring, promotion, and firing. Therefore qualifications like education, worke experience, references, and salary history are racist and must be disregard in favor if objective qualifications. A fair employer would only look at SAT, ACT, and industry certifications that are awarded solely based on passing an exam.