16 ms·

Here's the money quote: >> Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving a

• 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
          >Space isn’t the limiter, teaching hours via faculty are. The glut of un/under employed PHds suggest that the limited faculty is an artificial limit. Schools could easily hire more faculty and expand their undergrad programs if they wanted to. They see their half percent acceptance rate as something that makes them special.
          • anticorporate 3y ago
            Exactly. There's no shortage of people who can teach, there is only a shortage of a willingness to pay them to do so.
            • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
              Your popularity goes down if too many of your classes are taught by PhD students and post docs. Overhead is brutal, and research grants are limited, so hiring more faculty is tough. If they just hire enough professors to satisfy demand, they would be on the hook for paying most of their salaries since they are unlikely to get funding. Hiring a bunch of pure teaching faculty is a no go since that turns the flag ship into a less popular non-research university.
              • jcranmer 3y ago
                In the humanities at least, tenure-track hiring numbers are down about 50% from pre-2008 era, while the supply of humanity PhDs is broadly stable. The problem is that the university departments are less willing to hire the faculty that they once did, and that largely comes down to university administrations having decided that paying for anything non-STEM (and non-sports, I guess) isn't worth it anymore.
                • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
                  Research universities don’t pay most of their faculty’s paychecks, research grants do. Research funding agencies are more to blame for this than universities, and it also reflects more STEM demand in the job market, why encourage creating a bunch of graduates who can’t get jobs?
      • JCharante 3y ago
        Many things fail at scale.
  • Avicebron 3y ago
    I tend to think there is an unspoken fear that if it became more accessible it loses its prestige
    • nordsieck 3y ago
      > I tend to think there is an unspoken fear that if it became more accessible it loses its prestige That might be a concern for Dartmouth and the Ivys. But for US state schools, not so much. And those generally provide a very high value:cost product.
      • Jensson 3y ago
        College already lost its prestige since today everyone who wants to attend a college can do it, there are free spots every year. Now only specific colleges are prestigious not colleges in general like before. Also means that the "just increase the spots" already happened as well, there is no lack of spots today, just a lack of prestigious spots. But not everyone can get into prestigious positions, by definition prestigious has to be something special and not for everyone.
        • Der_Einzige 3y ago
          Related, men mass opting out of academia is going to erode it's privileged independently of the other factors listed - https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233 https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-...
      • JCharante 3y ago
        but state schools are already massive? They are certainly already going with that approach.
        • nordsieck 3y ago
          > but state schools are already massive? They are certainly already going with that approach. Sort of. Sure, the school itself is huge, but often times that means that worthless majors[1] like Psychology and English are open, but more valuable majors are often limited. --- 1. Worthless in the sense of earning potential with a Bachelors
  • dghlsakjg 3y ago
    Dartmouth in 1950 was an all mens college that enrolled less than 2,500. Women weren't allowed until the 1970s. Dartmouth today has 6,700 students of all races, genders, religions. Enrollment numbers can and do change, but it is much harder and slower to change something that is physically and resource constrained than it is to change policy.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      There's long been this mythos around Dartmouth in the vein of Daniel Webster's "It's a small college but there are those of us who love it" when in fact it's a research university even if it at least clings to the idea that it's a rural, athletically-oriented New England liberal arts college.
    • Geisterde 3y ago
      I thought we could fix the world by writing things on offical looking paper though, you are saying we cant just vote that everyone gets a free Lamborghini?
  • subpixel 3y ago
    Elite institutions do not exist to give more people access to anything. And where that is a goal, there is clearly a point where you have to draw a line based on capacity, student:teacher ratios, etc.
  • readthenotes1 3y ago
    Why would we want more people taking student loans to get a questionable degree? Trade schools make a lot more sense for most. Get a good job and you can self study from a position of safety...
  • BeetleB 3y ago
    Not sure if you're referring to Dartmouth or universities in general. For state universities, I think they do increase enrollment all the time. University of Michigan, for example, increased enrollment by 25% in the last decade. What did you have in mind?
  • troupe 3y ago
    Harvard, Yale, etc. could set a particular standard and increase enrollment to accept everyone who met that standard and (if logistics allowed) that could possibly be a good thing. In some ways the massive online classes seem to be piloting this idea. However, if you go spend some time teaching at a community college, I don't think you'll walk away with the idea that somehow getting all those students pushed into a university would improve things for the community college students or for the ability to educate kids at the university. Increasing enrollment might be beneficial, but past a certain point it is going to be detrimental to education.
  • forrestthewoods 3y ago
    I don’t know why this comment got downvoted. It’s an objective truth that there are more elite students than there are positions in these schools. It’s also true that schools have absolutely exploded in administration size. They just haven’t hired more teachers. Schools can’t double capcity overnight. But they currently aren’t making student body growth a goal. They prefer to keep it small and be extremely selective and exclusionary. The flip side to this is that undergrad doesn’t matter. These elite schools don’t actually provide an elite education. They merely serve as a talent filter.
  • dpweb 3y ago
    Increasing enrollment means increasing faculty. Maybe controversial but I really believe this lowers overall standards. You just can't find enough faculty to meet the high standards. Look what happened when tech blew up - they hired like crazy. I'd argue the overall level of programming skill went down.
    • BeetleB 3y ago
      > You just can't find enough faculty to meet the high standards. Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Many/most PhDs who want a faculty position will never be able to get one because the availability of jobs is so low. There's really no shortage of potential faculty members.
    • balderdash 3y ago
      I can’t find the study, but all the inflation in tuition can be basically be traced back to everything but increasing educational staffing (in other words all the incremental spending goes to new new sports complexes, administrators, etc.)…
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    Dartmouth actually has a pretty unique program that allowed them to increase enrollment substantially. Basically, every sophomore stays around for the summer semester, but takes off either fall or spring to do an internship or something. The sophomore summer is a great bonding experience for the students, and the program allows the school to enroll significantly more students than they would be able to house otherwise. To my knowledge, no other similar school has a program like this.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      The Dartmouth plan (D-plan was basically a way to introduce co-education without reducing the number of male students. Not a bad thing at all but that was pretty much the impetus.
• hardware2win 3y ago
  Indeed. Standardized exams are the most fair and transparent. Materials and tutors are available easily for free or cheaply on the internet nowadays.
  • webdood90 3y ago
    > Standardized exams are the most fair and transparent. perhaps the _most_ fair right now, but certainly not what I would consider fair. consider a middle class family that has secure food, housing, and transportation vs lower class family where the child might potentially have less consistent sleep, food, or has to work to help pay bills. one has more distractions than the other.
    • Ekaros 3y ago
      And how do you correct for that? Move all children to government controlled facilities and do not let them see their parents until they are some age like 21? Or maybe we should get rid of all criteria for education and just do huge once a year lottery. You get one chance to enter. As poor people can not afford more.
      • Tainnor 3y ago
        > As poor people can not afford more. Then you gotta make it affordable for them. You can still have elite schools for the absolute best (though I would question that certain self-styled 'elite schools' are really principally selecting for that and not e.g. wealth or family connections), but that doesn't mean that you cannot raise the bar on public and affordable education (including traditional schools and universities but also via other means, e.g. self-teaching via online resources). These are two competing goals and often people only focus on the one to the exclusion of the other, but they are both important.
        • HL33tibCe7 3y ago
          > certain self-styled 'elite schools' are really principally selecting for that and not e.g. wealth or family connections), This hasn’t been true for years, decades even
• disintegore 3y ago
  More precisely, it's not the standardized testing that's hurting, it's the underlying material conditions.
• msravi 3y ago
  And this: >> Third, under test-optional policies, some less-advantaged students withhold test scores even in cases where providing the test score would be a significant positive signal to Admissions. Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community with higher school-wide test scores. Admissions uses numerous detailed measures of outcomes at the high school and neighborhood levels to account for these known disadvantages. As one example, Admissions computes a measure of how each applicant performs on standardized tests relative to the aggregate score of all test-takers in their high school, using data available from the College Board.
  • elteto 3y ago
    > Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is completely arbitrary and tuned to achieve whatever objectives they have.
    • pknomad 3y ago
      How though? They're explicitly tying academic performance in relation to one's socioeconomic background. I find their claim of "doing more with less being more impressive than doing more with more" reasonable. The only way to avoid any sort of judgmental/arbitrary calls is to blindly apply academic standards (the way UT Austin does top 4% of your HS class) and that comes with its own problems.
      • gnicholas 3y ago
        It's not just socioeconomic background, it also includes 'how much your parents cared about your education', to some extent. For some families (think of the typical Asian immigrant family), getting the kids a good education is the first priority. They will sacrifice vacations, living in a nicer house, etc. in order to make sure their kids go to better schools and get better grades. If you have two families that are equally poor, but where one family cares a lot about education and sends their kid to the harder school (perhaps by living in the cheapest apartment in the neighborhood that is eligible for that school), they will be disadvantaged compared to the other family, who send their kids to the less rigorous school. To the extent that there are racial/cultural correlations that result in poor Asian kids going to schools that have higher average SATs than poor kids of other races, an ostensibly race-neutral policy like this will mean Asian students could (as a group) continue to face disadvantages in the admissions process.
• BobaFloutist 3y ago
  Then they should be publicly run and free to take and send to universities.
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    There is a lot of support for students who can’t afford to take the test. What isn’t really included is test prep. China has the gaokao, which everyone can take, but the prep factor is real even if they tried to outlaw it.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      But your local library probably has test prep books. I know things have gotten more competitive since back in the day but you can probably get 90% of the way there without expensive test prep courses. (Yes, it takes time and commitment but it's mostly not the case that paying for test prep courses automatically translates into higher scores.)
      • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I prepped on my own and did really good, but I was middle class and had a lot of other advantages. Prepping isn’t just about having access to prep material, but coaching that encourages you to actually practice the material.
        • ghaff 3y ago
          Absolutely. If someone isn't from a household that values the idea of test prep and education more broadly, that's a huge disadvantage. It's just the idea that if you can't plop down whatever a test prep class costs that, in itself, is a huge inhibitor is mostly not true.
        • localhost 3y ago
          That's what AI is for, and it does a great job of this today.
        • 3y ago
• troupe 3y ago
  If a school asks for SAT or ACT scores but, hypothetically, wants to discriminate based on race or some other characteristic, doesn't requiring the ACT/SAT make them more likely to be liable for discrimination because there is an objective standard to show that they are treating some groups differently than others? I thought that some of the recent rulings against selecting students based on their race hinged on the statistics showing that some groups were able to get in with lower ACT/SAT scores, while other groups had to have a much higher score to be admitted.
  • retzkek 3y ago
    The NY Times article about this addressed that concern specifically, indeed it was the key point of the study: > It’s worth acknowledging a crucial part of this story. Dartmouth admits disadvantaged students who have scores that are lower on average than those of privileged students. The college doesn’t apologize for that. Students from poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools have effectively been running with wind in their face. They are not competing fairly with affluent teenagers. > I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/briefing/dartmouth-sat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/briefing/dartmouth-sat.ht...
    • anon291 3y ago
      > I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said. I am conservative and I have no problem with poor students from disadvantaged backgrounds having their scores weighed differently. I absolutely do have a problem with race-based admissions. Most conservatives have a problem with race-based admissions because it is not fair to poor students. I remember a girl from my college (elite institution on west coast) that would go on and on about how disadvantaged she was because she was 'black'. Firstly, she's like a quarter black and looks completely white. Secondly, and more importantly, she's filthy rich. I mean... like multiple international trips a year growing up. Super picky about fashion, etc. Both parents had PhDs. Nevertheless, she qualified for all the diversity offerings the school had, including scholarships, special programs, etc. Meanwhile, we had kids whose parents never attended college and grew up in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with very disadvantaged background, who were given nothing because of their race and sex. Now, I'm certainly not part of the latter group (grew up middle class and am neither white nor black or any 'disadvantaged' minority) and frankly don't have a whole lot to lose in this debate, but seeing this with my own eyes has convinced me that we need to look at actual disadvantage, not just race. There are A LOT of high-achieving black, latinos, <insert minority here>. That's great! More power to them. I have no qualms with rich people. I do have qualms when they pretend to be disadvantaged to get an advantage over obviously more disadvantaged others. This is annoying when Donald Trump does it. It's annoying when Elon Musk does it. And it's annoying if someone who's not white does it too. The idea that simply because you're of a particular race, you're automatically disadvantaged is retarded.
• piombisallow 3y ago
  What, you mean kids from a disadvantaged background can't build a 10 page CV filled with outreach, volunteering, expensive sports and musical practice by the time they're 18? They don't have an instinctive feel for the current pieties, bred into them since they're 3, to put in their admission essays?
  • candiodari 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • mrchucklepants 3y ago
      You may have missed the sarcasm here.
    • sauwan 3y ago
      Pretty sure that was sarcasm...
    • choilive 3y ago
      [flagged]
  • laidoffamazon 3y ago
    This is a super goofy thing to say about Dartmouth admissions, because as of 2019 they expected admits to have all of that and have a 1550+/35+ test score. I'm beginning to think a lot of the people commenting on these things have this weird concept of these schools admitting poor kids from the sticks and asian kids from Chinatowns with no resume items except good grades and test scores....it's true they have much lower standards for them, but they still need to have a decently "pointy" resume to get in. The only way Dartmouth can fix it's "equity" problems is by shutting down for good.
    • gnicholas 3y ago
      > as of 2019 they expected admits to have all of that and have a 1550+/35+ test score FYI the middle 50 is 1480 to 1560 for the class of 2028: https://www.crimsoneducation.org/us/blog/dartmouth-acceptance-rate/#class-of-2028-acceptance https://www.crimsoneducation.org/us/blog/dartmouth-acceptanc...
• omgJustTest 3y ago
  IMO the thing that tests do not sample is persistance. Missing that degree of freedom misses important mind-sets to achieving goals. One of the most interesting studies, not specifically focused on "success" / GPA, but on "life-satisfaction" comes from a longitudinal study "Project Talent"[1]. The key correlation to "life-satisfaction"/happiness is how many questions a person _attempts_ to answer on an otherwise un-finishable exam. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Talent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Talent
  • CharlieDigital 3y ago
    > IMO the thing that tests do not sample is persistance See Angela Duckworth's research on "grit"; it is indeed very difficult to test for.
    • Animats 3y ago
      No, it's not hard to test for. Military units test for it routinely. At the SEAL/Delta/Army Special Forces level, the testing for that is insane. Some companies used to do this. Around 1900, if you went to work for a major US steel company, you started out shoveling coal. Even if you were destined for management. Japan Air Lines pilot training for new pilots involves a stage where they do grunt jobs in maintenance such as checking incoming part serial numbers.
      • CharlieDigital 3y ago
        > No, it's not hard to test for. Hmm... > ...the testing for that is insane. Sounds like it's...hard to test for.
    • omgJustTest 3y ago
      I would agree it is hard but not impossible to test for. The test being very long, at some point people just figure no one can finish it... and in some ways that is how I feel about work in life. I imagine if you told people "we are not testing for correctness, just number of problems solved" then you would skew this test. However when the tests were administered in the longitudinal study, the researchers didn't know which metrics would be important so they just put a lot of problems on it.
• dpweb 3y ago
  Always felt that the ability to think was indicative of academic success. But also a good SAT for (those not naturally brilliant = most of us) also a positive indication of the student work ethic (to study for the test). The problem I believe with the disadvantged students argument, which I believe to be a very real problem - is that lowering the standards wrt the test scores - is just a bad solution to a real problem. Poor students do sit at a disadvantage - but the fix is much more difficult and complicated, and involves that child's entire life experience until they become 17 or 18 y/old. No one has a handle on how to fix it. I get the feeling smart + hard work will come back into fashion when it comes to academic opportunities.
  • visarga 3y ago
    It's also risky to take on debt if there is a higher chance of not graduating. Being admitted on a lower score might come back to bite the student. There's no substitute for actually having a handle on the subject matter. The fix is to help students before they start lagging.
• nyrikki 3y ago
  Except that metrics like how many TVs a household has are indicators of performance on SAT scores. Obviously this is a proxy for socioeconomic status, and people higher on that ladder will have better support structures to do better in school. This is begging the question as socioeconomic status is the primary indicator of educational attainment in our country today. They aren't measuring potential, but the persons ability and advantages. Just as buying more TVs won't improve your students performance.
  • gizmo686 3y ago
    This point is specifically addressed in the paper. The predictive power of SAT/ACT goes far beyond its corralation to socioeconomic status. > Importantly, the relationship between first-year college GPA and SAT/ACT scores is likewise quite similar across neighborhood income and other demographic subgroups at Dartmouth. By contrast, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman (2023) show that certain non-test score inputs in the admissions process, such as guidance counselor recommendations, do not predict college performance even though they do advantage more-advantaged applicants at IvyPlus institutions, increasing their admissions chance
    • nyrikki 3y ago
      Disadvantage students having lower GPA isn't surprising, it is the expectation. The question that hard to answer is did those lower performance groups still learn, and what was the delta on where they started. Private tutoring, existing life skills, access to money to free up studying time etc... A student that has to work through school or has to help with the career of a family member has to sometimes sacrifice GPA for life's reality. Obviously GPA is important for social ladder climbing. But this is part of the reason social mobility is the US is far lower than many other countries. A B or C+ student is still learning and allowing for a path for those in the lowe 'casts' is how we grow economically. This isn't a zero sum game. Eugenics based policies have hurt our competitiveness.
  • nostrademons 3y ago
    The point of the report is that SAT scores are less correlated with socioeconomic status than other metrics used by admissions like GPA, high school reputation, extracurriculars, essay content, etc. They're still correlated. One of the interesting findings of social science research is that a lot of different metrics like IQ (itself a correlation between different subtest performances), GPA, parental income, child's income, parental wealth, child's wealth, college acceptance chance, eventual education level, ability to delay gratification, general health, etc are all correlated - that's the idea behind the g-factor, a measure of general intelligence that highly correlates with wealth & income. But this research shows that among those correlates, SAT scores are actually less correlated with socioeconomic status than the other metrics that admissions committees can use. This is also why the SAT was adopted by Harvard in 1934. Prior to that, most students attending Harvard came from private New England boarding schools that could only be afforded by the upper class. They saw an opportunity to diversify the student body by testing the general public and admitting those that scored highest. As an added benefit, the SAT was much easier to grade than previous essay-based admissions standards, and so it reduced cost for the University.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • Jensson 3y ago
    > SATs are the chemotherapy of inclusion This is very apt. And then all the anti science people come and argue we need to take every patient off chemotherapy because it hurts them, and thus making things worse for these poor patients. I think it is ok to think that those kind of people are insane and need to be stopped, and that chemotherapy is overall a good things for patients even if it hurts a bit.
    • logicchains 3y ago
      Being pro-every single medical treatment is epitome of anti-science. Science is following evidence-based medicine and the evidence shows that there are cases where chemotherapy is ineffective, like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1533002818305346 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15330... and https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20191213/adjuvant-chemotherapy-offers-limited-benefit-for-invasive-lobular-carcinoma https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20191213/adj... . Putting everybody with cancer on chemotherapy is anti-science.
      • throwway120385 3y ago
        Well if I were diagnosed with cancer and my doctor said 90% of the time chemotherapy was ineffective but that there are no other treatments, I might still consider doing chemotherapy in case I'm in that other 10% of patients. So it should at least be considered as an option. And this is what every good doctor does with every patient -- presents options, lets you know what the risks and benefits are, and works with you to make decisions. I would be really upset if the doctor didn't at least let me make an informed decision here, even if you think I'm being anti-science by doing so.
      • Jensson 3y ago
        I didn't say that we should put everyone on chemotherapy, you are arguing against a strawman.
• balderdash 3y ago
  >> who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts IIRC most colleges correlate incoming and outgoing grades for specific high schools - so that a 3.0 average at a highly competitive high school (think Stuyvesant or Thomas Jefferson) is a better indicator of success than a 4.0 at a poor performing school - the SAT is very helpful to add context to a GPA for a students applying from schools where colleges don’t already have a sense for the HS program’s rigor. I came to appreciate my high school education when I attended a highly selective university and found my grades going up from high school without actually doing any more work while seeing class valedictorians (I barely scraped by with a cum laude) from other high schools really struggling.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  Which was, of course, a major justification for creating the SAT in the first place: > First offered in 1926 by the College Board... Early proponents of the SAT argued that the admissions exam made higher education more meritocratic. Admissions officers at elite institutions like Harvard believed the test would identify talented applicants at less academically strong high schools and accelerate their journeys into higher education. [1] [1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/history-of-sat/ https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/history-of-sat/
  • laidoffamazon 3y ago
    There was probably a time in which SAT scores are weighted highly in admissions for elite schools. Now it's a starting level filter. You're not getting in because of top scores, but you will get rejected because of bad scores absent a massive alternative hook. People that get in have top scores and other superhuman traits.
    • tejtm 3y ago
      In that it comes from their parents, that is fair.
    • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
      Or: Having a high IQ isn't enough anymore, you also need to have - and prove - that you have doggedly high Conscientiousness. Preferably in a way which aligns with traditional prestige seeking, like debate or math competitions or football. That's probably a good thing imo. It indicates that our overall expectations for our elites is on the rise, which translates to better outcomes on net down the line when they actually get fast tracked into positions of power. Those of us who are smart and lazy similarly benefit because many more of us are able to find less taxing jobs plying our expertise at the right hands of these elites for very comfortable wages, rather than being forced into the millstone of the C suite ourselves.
      • rangestransform 3y ago
        That sounds like Japan and Korea, i vastly prefer the status quo over that
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  A chance to acquire a massive debt (four year tuition alone is > $240,000, not counting rent and food and books). Whether or not that will be worth it (as the main reason to go to an Ivy League school is for social networking with the children of wealthy parents who might fund future endeavors) is an open question.
• runarberg 3y ago
  You have to look at the context surrounding them though. In today’s educational environment in America, students are rewarded heavily for belonging to an upper class, they are made to donate volunteer hours, join a sport team or a social club, participate in extracurricular activities, do homework (hopefully in a peaceful home setting with helpful parents and/or tutors), and then master the niche skill of pen and paper test taking. The SATs at the very least allow some students to skip all but last one, and have some chance of getting a decent education. Ideally the systemic barriers to proper education should be dismantled. Remove this volunteer hour, move sports and social activities outside of the school system, remove homework, provide tutors to everyone that needs one, stop relying on pen and paper tests as the primary method of evaluation, etc. With all these systemic barriers removed, you can be sure that the SAT will have a diminished value.
• mnky9800n 3y ago
  Then why do the tests cost money?
• hintymad 3y ago
  Is this a US thing because there has been so much debate on race, equity and etc? I thought this was obvious. Academic excellence arguably requires the least resources, which means the difference in social-economic status matters the least. All one needs is access to excellent books and internet resources, a competent teacher, and optionally a supporting community. And one driven kid can get all of them from libraries and the internet nowadays. Besides, SAT and ACT are really simple tests. If one gets 1600 for SAT, it does not mean this person will excel in academics, but if one gets 800 for SAT, well, this person statistically is not smart enough to achieve academic excellence. Of course, this person can be smart in many other ways.
  • chaps 3y ago
    "All one needs is access to excellent books and internet resources, a competent teacher, and optionally a supporting community" That "all" is doing a heck of a lot of work, to the point of being indistinguishable from satire! A lot of SAT success happens because of families who can afford to train and hire tutors specifically for preparation.
    • hintymad 3y ago
      Luckily those kids won’t go far academically. I can understand why one needs tutoring for IIT’s JEE, but SAT? Students in Asia and Eastern Europe send their LOLs. So kids who have certain talent can beat those who need tutoring for SAT one way or another, hands down