7 ms·

Socioeconomic status and the relationship between the SAT and GPA (2009) [pdf]

27 points by noch 3y ago

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
i.e. socioeconomic status is correlated with SAT performance because socioeconomic status is also correlated with stronger basic academic skills.
- Amezarak 3y ago
  Yeah, the article ends with: > In conclusion, our work focuses on the predictive power of admissions tests and shows that this power is not an artifact of SES. There is a substantial SES–test relationship, though it is important to note that test scores reflect far more than SES. About a quarter of the variance in test scores is shared with SES, and thus there is large variability in test scores at any given level of SES. Thus, claims that tests are merely proxies for SES are unfounded I've never understood the model of the world that people who don't agree with this. If you believe that a) genetics exist, and traits such as intelligence are therefore hereditary; and b) socioeconomic success is correlated to intelligence Then the inevitable conclusion is that wealthy people will be more likely to have higher SAT scores. Of course this is obviously just a correlation; lottery winners are rich but with no correlation to intelligence, children of two intelligent parents tend to regress to the mean, two average parents can produce intelligent children, families might be poor simply through bad luck or some particular emotional/mental block they have, and a million other factors. But nevertheless we'd expect test scores to be our best available wealth-blind predictor of college success and later success. Certainly it's hard to imagine children with money-poor - or maybe mildly abusive - parents having a shot without test scores. They'd be less likely to have a deep extracurricular involvement or anything else requiring parental involvement.
  - noodlesUK 3y ago
    I think that the strength of point b) is the point that a lot of people question. I think for people like me who question the SES - intelligence link, the point of testing is to provide any opportunity for bright people who have lower SES to have a shot, which they would be otherwise denied due to their status. If anything, testing is one of the things that can help create that link between SES and intelligence.
    - Amezarak 3y ago
      Right, it's only a correlation, not a guarantee. And people who don't end up part of the correlation have maybe their best shot of becoming successful (assuming they pursue a career requiring a degree) via test scores. Anything else likely has a much stronger correlation with SES or might be very noisy: extracurriculars require money and parental involvement, high school grades can be worthless depending on the school, filtering by school rules out a lot of poor people, etc.
    - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
      I think the OP has the arrow of causation pointing the other way from what you suggest: that is to say that higher intelligence leads to higher SES because knowledge work tends to be higher SES and those with higher intelligence are more likely to be able to find employment in knowledge work professions. That is probably predicated on the existence of at least some social mobility though.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    I've never understood the model of the world that people who don't agree with this. My take is people question the tests because wealthy/powerful people have a history of "gaming the system" in order to retain that wealth/power. It's not unreasonable to ask "is the test predictive of anything other than the parent's ability to hire a tutor?" While a test is, in theory, easy for a poor student to pass through independent studies/library, etc, reality gets in the way - that student needs transport to the library, time to study (many work), etc. But, based on this research, it seems the answer is "Yes, the test is actually predictive of something other than parent's SES."
    - gitfan86 3y ago
      A more common term is "Victim Mentality". It is the world view that all injustices or inequality is due to an oppressor group victimizing the oppressed class.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    > Yeah, the article ends with: > > In conclusion, our work focuses on the predictive power of admissions tests and shows that this power is not an artifact of SES. There is a substantial SES–test relationship, though it is important to note that test scores reflect far more than SES. About a quarter of the variance in test scores is shared with SES, and thus there is large variability in test scores at any given level of SES. Thus, claims that tests are merely proxies for SES are unfounded > I've never understood the model of the world that people who don't agree with this. If you believe that > a) genetics exist, and traits such as intelligence are therefore hereditary; > and > b) socioeconomic success is correlated to intelligence That is only true up to a certain level though. The correlation plateaus and even decreases above 1% https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230208125113.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230208125113.h...
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Top 1% is very high though, correlation up to top 1% is very good.
  - fallingfrog 3y ago
    Regression to the mean is a real thing though. The reason why is this: every gene in your body is also in the bodies of millions of other people. Your genes are not unique. It’s the combination that’s unique. And the combination is diluted 50% with each generation. So Einstein was a prodigy and a genius, but his great grandchildren are pretty ordinary. That’s just the way it goes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- underlipton 3y ago
  It's ironic to conclude this, without skepticism, knowing that it's a study sponsored by College Board which shows that the tests which College Board administers are definitely efficacious.
  - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    Sure; but do you disagree with the method or the conclusions?
    - alistairSH 3y ago
      Their study makes a link between test scores and first-semester performance. Even if we accept that link is real, that doesn't imply first-semester performance is indicative of academic success over the typical 4+ year undergraduate timeline. I'd like to see independent corroboration of their study. Plus a longer term follow-up tracking these students through graduation or withdrawal.
rayiner 3y ago
Relatedly, UT Austin found the SAT highly predictive and decided to reinstate the requirement: https://news.utexas.edu/2024/03/11/ut-austin-reinstates-standardized-test-scores-in-admissions/ https://news.utexas.edu/2024/03/11/ut-austin-reinstates-stan... > Those who opted in had a median SAT score of 1420, compared with a median of 1160 among those who did not. > The higher standardized scores translated on average to better collegiate academic performance. Of 9,217 first-year students enrolled in 2023, those who opted in had an estimated average GPA of 0.86 grade points higher during their first fall semester, controlling for a wide range of factors, including high school class rank and GPA.
- resource_waste 3y ago
  These kind of things are making me conservative on knowledge. >10-15 years ago 'standardized testing doesnt matter at all' >You are an idiot if you think it matters >Oops THEY were wrong. You are still an idiot and ahole for disagreeing with me 10 years ago. Obviously there is a golden mean here, but I just remember how radical some of these teachers were.
  - username332211 3y ago
    A golden mean between what? Truth and falsehoods. I hate citing 1984 in any matter such as this one, but there's a word in it for that - "doublethink".
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      A golden mean between "standardized tests don't matter at all" (false) and "standardized tests are the one right way to measure students' abilities" (also false).
      - porkbeer 3y ago
        They arent binary. Some tests wont matter at all, some will, and many will be in an unverifiable grey area,
  - deleted 3y ago
cschmidt 3y ago
The NYTimes had an good interactive story on this same topic this week: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/09/upshot/affirmative-action-alternatives.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/09/upshot/affirm...
dsq 3y ago
Wouldn't socioeconomic status correlate just as strongly or even more with high school AP grades and extracurriculars? It seems that these would require more discretionary time, as well as discretionary money, when comoared to the SAT.
retskrad 3y ago
I can get almost all the questions correct on the SAT test without any time pressure but when I do it when the clock is ticking, I find myself unable to reason my way to the correct answer nowhere near as fast. As a result, I have to move on and skip 1/2 of the verbal and math questions because I don't have enough time. And I don't draw blank when under pressure so there must be something else going on. I have tried to pretend that I'm an LLM and trained myself on hundreds of SAT questions on YouTUbe where people solve them. I've found that my reasoning speed under time pressure is a direct function of the amount data I've trained myself on. Is there a quicker way to this or do people like me, with average IQ or Chat-GPT 3.5 if you will, have to train on thousands of math and verbal questions because we don't have the Chat-GPT4 like the gifted people where they ara able to be creative and don't need to rely only on past knowledge to solve novel problems?
- aruss 3y ago
  Yes, there are ways to speed up your time. When I took the SAT (2011), the main skill I developed was to quickly categorize the kind of question. Since there are only a few different kinds of questions, you could train yourself to do this formulaically/algorithmically. The type of question tells you how to eliminate a couple of the answer choices, and then you apply another question-type-specific algorithm to figure out the answer from the remaining options.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The Kaplan book (or similar) went over this. You learn to avoid “solving the problem the hard way” as much as possible. However, the new digital SAT will require new strategies because its computer assisted, more like the LSAT/GRE (?) is.
- tekla 3y ago
  > I've found that my reasoning speed under time pressure is a direct function of the amount data I've trained myself on. That is the most pretentious way I have ever heard of saying "I did better when I studied and practiced more" I'm actually in awe.
fallingfrog 3y ago
For me, I got much, much better SAT scores than my grades would suggest, because my grades were depressed significantly due to ADHD, (forgetfulness, never remembering when tests were going to happen, going off on tangents when studying) even though I actually knew the material. So the standardized tests were a chance to prove that I wasn’t a total dummy. And you know, I think that’s kind of the point of a standardized test- grades definitely vary based on how involved your parents are, the particular teachers you have, whether you have adhd, and yes socioeconomic status- tests in principal are blind to all that stuff.
Workaccount2 3y ago
1.) Intelligent people befriend other intelligent people. 2.) Intelligent people get higher paying jobs. 3.) Intelligent people live in wealthier areas. 4.) Intelligent people marry other intelligent people. 5.) Intelligent people birth intelligent children. 6.) Intelligent people use their intelligence to augment their kid's intelligence. 7.) Intelligent kids go to step 1.) The emperor is walking around naked, and virtually all of academia is terrified to acknowledge it (namely step 5). Right there is the solution to 50 years of sociological fumbling to avoid saying "Intelligence has a strong genetic component, and we are not all born with equal mental capabilities" Once academia can acknowledge this, then they can finally work on real solutions to close the disproportionate economic gaps it creates. (Yes, I am aware of your anecdote that counters this. It's a broad generalization to counter the mainstream broad generalization.)
- esotericimpl 3y ago
  Except the research doesn't show this at all. However, having wealth provides tutors, better schooling and teachers which lead to better outcomes from having better mentors, opportunities and education which leads to... and so on and so on.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Right, that is step 6. If you go over the research, you realize that they all assume the premise "everyone is born with an identical blank slate". Which leads to conclusions (either said outright or implied) like; "If you give enough resources to any given child, they can grow up to be anything." So we end up with schools that serve low income areas getting enormous amounts of funding to teach admin assistants and tile layers to be heart surgeons. And the data on that end shows unequivocally that it is not working.
    - davemp 3y ago
      > And the data on that end shows unequivocally that it is not working. Of course throwing money at (sometimes corrupt) school boards isn’t going to be effective. There isn’t much 1/20th of a school teacher can do 8am-2pm M-F to counter a bad environment. It takes a village after all. Not exactly data that’s useful to your hypothesis.
fallingfrog 3y ago
I would hypothesize that SES probably correlates very heavily with grades at the very bottom where you have things like abuse, abject poverty, children supporting their own parents, lack of access to quality nutrition, violence inside and outside the home, etc and even a genius would be swimming against the current. But middle class and above, I would expect the curve to flatten out. In my experience super wealthy people are more lucky than clever- it doesn’t take much brains to make more money when you’re already rich. So, the goal here should be to identify smart kids in terrible situations, while not allowing rich kids who aren’t actually that talented to game the system. That’s the goal. And of course there will also be genuinely talented middle class kids and you don’t want to ignore them either.
077sd015o46 3y ago
So, I know the authors of this report personally. I sincerely have the highest respect for them, they do solid work; if I see something by them I take it seriously because I know I will disagree at my peril. However, I also feel like findings like this get distorted and manipulated, and used to refute strawmen versions of arguments out there against use of standardized testing. Some of the recent arguments being used to reinstate standardized testing as required seem irresponsible to me, even though I don't necessarily see required standardized testing as undefensible per se (my own opinions about all of this are complex and don't fall neatly into either "side", so take this all as coming from someone who is frustrated with how things get oversimplified on both sides, not as advocating for a particular position). Here's some things to keep in mind: 1. This is all about predicting freshman GPA, which itself is questionable as a criterion. If your sole question is "how will this individual do in our college their first year", it's reasonable. But if you are asking "how well would this individual master the skills necessary to succeed in X, Y, or Z role" it's entirely different. Freshman GPA predicts graduating GPA less well than you might think, and both of those are poor proxies for "real world" behavior. They're not unrelated to "real world behavior", but the relationship is low enough that this is the entire point of social justice advocates. A lot of people would say neither SAT nor freshman GPA are relevant, that that's the point. 2. A correlation of 0.47 or 0.44 is something to pay attention to, but it's also far from perfect. If you want to remind yourself of how much noise is in that correlation look here: http://www.analytictech.com/mb313/correl4.jpg http://www.analytictech.com/mb313/correl4.jpg That's a ton of noise at the individual level, which is the level we care about when we're talking about admissions decisions. The problem with a lot of this isn't with the SAT, it's that what happens is this 0.45 r inevitably gets turned into a blind metric that ignores all that real variation because it puts too much pressure on the school to take people who have all kinds of other evidence of competency, because it makes their numbers look bad. Let me put it this way: if I was selling you a bathroom scale, and showed you that scatterplot of my scale's numbers and actual weight, would you buy it? You shouldn't, but we're making consequential life decisions based on that level of noise. The Dartmouth report conveniently ignored that noise, when that noise is about 75% of the problem. 3. Relatedly, if you look at the individual level, things are vastly different when you start taking these kinds of population-level trends and using them to make individual decisions around a threshold. That is, it's very easy to say "0.46 correlation is pretty substantial, we should require SATs", but that 0.46 correlation is across the entire range. It includes people whose SAT scores are very very low. It's not only in the range of where decisions tend to be made, and to make use of that test as a metric for decision-making, you have to assume that what's in the college board's SES index is a perfect summary of what might be said for every applicant to your college. Maybe someone is upper class but their parents were both killed in a plane crash. Maybe they are middle class but come from an abusive family. Maybe they are applying as a much older candidate, or much younger candidate, and the meaning of the scores is really different. In a sane world where we can have nice things, the admissions committee would look at this and make exceptions. This is the idea of having test scores optional. But when you make them required, and are required to post them, then there's pressure to take the highest scores regardless of all the other information. 4. About the other information: in Table 2, they show that HS GPA is actually less correlated with SES than SAT score. Other papers with similarly large amounts of data have shown that HS GPA is actually slightly more correlated with freshman GPA than SAT score. So is the SAT necessary? Probably not. We can argue about grade inflation etc., but the numbers are the numbers, and if it's working as an alternative that is less correlated with SES, reflects a longer sample of school behavior than just a few hours on one day, why wouldn't you prefer that? 5. Note their Figure 1b. They spend a lot of time talking about this model, and in some ways it's the focus of their paper, evaluating it against the alternative. But related to my first point, the model in Figure 1b says nothing about the extent to which a college, or anyone else for that matter, might want to select on some process represented by Figure 1b. What does it matter if test score predicts, say, some other test score composite, and both are influenced by SES? In widely used intelligence tests, there were questions about things like 19th century European literature and classical music (I think they're still there, but I can't remember offhand; they might have been made optional now). On the one hand, yes, 19th century European literature and classical music is great, knowledge of it probably reflects some memory ability etc, but are questions about that really how you want to evaluate someone's skillset? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I can tell you if you're not knowledgable about that you would not get credit on those questions. In many ways, for many, the SAT and college freshman GPA are kind of similar. I don't feel that way, but this is the classic "book smarts" versus "real smarts" issue that always has come up since the beginning of humanity probably. Showing book smarts predicts other book smarts just isn't important in some paradigms. Again, I'm not anti-standardized testing. I think it's useful. But I also think the way it's been used in the past, and continues to be used, is in fact broken. It's not even necessarily a problem with the tests, it's a problem with the way they get used. But to paraphrase a famous educational psychologist, if you have a thing that people tend to misuse, every single time, and there are good alternatives, maybe there is something about that thing that's a problem when you put it the hands of people, and the thing either shouldn't be used, or there should be some rules put in place with teeth to prevent it from being misused.
Gordon1188 3y ago
[dead]

27 points by noch 3y ago

i.e. socioeconomic status is correlated with SAT performance because socioeconomic status is also correlated with stronger basic academic skills.

Amezarak 3y ago
Yeah, the article ends with: > In conclusion, our work focuses on the predictive power of admissions tests and shows that this power is not an artifact of SES. There is a substantial SES–test relationship, though it is important to note that test scores reflect far more than SES. About a quarter of the variance in test scores is shared with SES, and thus there is large variability in test scores at any given level of SES. Thus, claims that tests are merely proxies for SES are unfounded I've never understood the model of the world that people who don't agree with this. If you believe that a) genetics exist, and traits such as intelligence are therefore hereditary; and b) socioeconomic success is correlated to intelligence Then the inevitable conclusion is that wealthy people will be more likely to have higher SAT scores. Of course this is obviously just a correlation; lottery winners are rich but with no correlation to intelligence, children of two intelligent parents tend to regress to the mean, two average parents can produce intelligent children, families might be poor simply through bad luck or some particular emotional/mental block they have, and a million other factors. But nevertheless we'd expect test scores to be our best available wealth-blind predictor of college success and later success. Certainly it's hard to imagine children with money-poor - or maybe mildly abusive - parents having a shot without test scores. They'd be less likely to have a deep extracurricular involvement or anything else requiring parental involvement.
- noodlesUK 3y ago
  I think that the strength of point b) is the point that a lot of people question. I think for people like me who question the SES - intelligence link, the point of testing is to provide any opportunity for bright people who have lower SES to have a shot, which they would be otherwise denied due to their status. If anything, testing is one of the things that can help create that link between SES and intelligence.
  - Amezarak 3y ago
    Right, it's only a correlation, not a guarantee. And people who don't end up part of the correlation have maybe their best shot of becoming successful (assuming they pursue a career requiring a degree) via test scores. Anything else likely has a much stronger correlation with SES or might be very noisy: extracurriculars require money and parental involvement, high school grades can be worthless depending on the school, filtering by school rules out a lot of poor people, etc.
  - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    I think the OP has the arrow of causation pointing the other way from what you suggest: that is to say that higher intelligence leads to higher SES because knowledge work tends to be higher SES and those with higher intelligence are more likely to be able to find employment in knowledge work professions. That is probably predicated on the existence of at least some social mobility though.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  I've never understood the model of the world that people who don't agree with this. My take is people question the tests because wealthy/powerful people have a history of "gaming the system" in order to retain that wealth/power. It's not unreasonable to ask "is the test predictive of anything other than the parent's ability to hire a tutor?" While a test is, in theory, easy for a poor student to pass through independent studies/library, etc, reality gets in the way - that student needs transport to the library, time to study (many work), etc. But, based on this research, it seems the answer is "Yes, the test is actually predictive of something other than parent's SES."
  - gitfan86 3y ago
    A more common term is "Victim Mentality". It is the world view that all injustices or inequality is due to an oppressor group victimizing the oppressed class.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  > Yeah, the article ends with: > > In conclusion, our work focuses on the predictive power of admissions tests and shows that this power is not an artifact of SES. There is a substantial SES–test relationship, though it is important to note that test scores reflect far more than SES. About a quarter of the variance in test scores is shared with SES, and thus there is large variability in test scores at any given level of SES. Thus, claims that tests are merely proxies for SES are unfounded > I've never understood the model of the world that people who don't agree with this. If you believe that > a) genetics exist, and traits such as intelligence are therefore hereditary; > and > b) socioeconomic success is correlated to intelligence That is only true up to a certain level though. The correlation plateaus and even decreases above 1% https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230208125113.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230208125113.h...
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Top 1% is very high though, correlation up to top 1% is very good.
- fallingfrog 3y ago
  Regression to the mean is a real thing though. The reason why is this: every gene in your body is also in the bodies of millions of other people. Your genes are not unique. It’s the combination that’s unique. And the combination is diluted 50% with each generation. So Einstein was a prodigy and a genius, but his great grandchildren are pretty ordinary. That’s just the way it goes.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
underlipton 3y ago
It's ironic to conclude this, without skepticism, knowing that it's a study sponsored by College Board which shows that the tests which College Board administers are definitely efficacious.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  Sure; but do you disagree with the method or the conclusions?
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    Their study makes a link between test scores and first-semester performance. Even if we accept that link is real, that doesn't imply first-semester performance is indicative of academic success over the typical 4+ year undergraduate timeline. I'd like to see independent corroboration of their study. Plus a longer term follow-up tracking these students through graduation or withdrawal.

rayiner 3y ago

Relatedly, UT Austin found the SAT highly predictive and decided to reinstate the requirement: https://news.utexas.edu/2024/03/11/ut-austin-reinstates-standardized-test-scores-in-admissions/ https://news.utexas.edu/2024/03/11/ut-austin-reinstates-stan... > Those who opted in had a median SAT score of 1420, compared with a median of 1160 among those who did not. > The higher standardized scores translated on average to better collegiate academic performance. Of 9,217 first-year students enrolled in 2023, those who opted in had an estimated average GPA of 0.86 grade points higher during their first fall semester, controlling for a wide range of factors, including high school class rank and GPA.

resource_waste 3y ago
These kind of things are making me conservative on knowledge. >10-15 years ago 'standardized testing doesnt matter at all' >You are an idiot if you think it matters >Oops THEY were wrong. You are still an idiot and ahole for disagreeing with me 10 years ago. Obviously there is a golden mean here, but I just remember how radical some of these teachers were.
- username332211 3y ago
  A golden mean between what? Truth and falsehoods. I hate citing 1984 in any matter such as this one, but there's a word in it for that - "doublethink".
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    A golden mean between "standardized tests don't matter at all" (false) and "standardized tests are the one right way to measure students' abilities" (also false).
    - porkbeer 3y ago
      They arent binary. Some tests wont matter at all, some will, and many will be in an unverifiable grey area,
- deleted 3y ago

cschmidt 3y ago

The NYTimes had an good interactive story on this same topic this week: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/09/upshot/affirmative-action-alternatives.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/09/upshot/affirm...

dsq 3y ago

Wouldn't socioeconomic status correlate just as strongly or even more with high school AP grades and extracurriculars? It seems that these would require more discretionary time, as well as discretionary money, when comoared to the SAT.

retskrad 3y ago

I can get almost all the questions correct on the SAT test without any time pressure but when I do it when the clock is ticking, I find myself unable to reason my way to the correct answer nowhere near as fast. As a result, I have to move on and skip 1/2 of the verbal and math questions because I don't have enough time. And I don't draw blank when under pressure so there must be something else going on. I have tried to pretend that I'm an LLM and trained myself on hundreds of SAT questions on YouTUbe where people solve them. I've found that my reasoning speed under time pressure is a direct function of the amount data I've trained myself on. Is there a quicker way to this or do people like me, with average IQ or Chat-GPT 3.5 if you will, have to train on thousands of math and verbal questions because we don't have the Chat-GPT4 like the gifted people where they ara able to be creative and don't need to rely only on past knowledge to solve novel problems?

aruss 3y ago
Yes, there are ways to speed up your time. When I took the SAT (2011), the main skill I developed was to quickly categorize the kind of question. Since there are only a few different kinds of questions, you could train yourself to do this formulaically/algorithmically. The type of question tells you how to eliminate a couple of the answer choices, and then you apply another question-type-specific algorithm to figure out the answer from the remaining options.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The Kaplan book (or similar) went over this. You learn to avoid “solving the problem the hard way” as much as possible. However, the new digital SAT will require new strategies because its computer assisted, more like the LSAT/GRE (?) is.
tekla 3y ago
> I've found that my reasoning speed under time pressure is a direct function of the amount data I've trained myself on. That is the most pretentious way I have ever heard of saying "I did better when I studied and practiced more" I'm actually in awe.

fallingfrog 3y ago

For me, I got much, much better SAT scores than my grades would suggest, because my grades were depressed significantly due to ADHD, (forgetfulness, never remembering when tests were going to happen, going off on tangents when studying) even though I actually knew the material. So the standardized tests were a chance to prove that I wasn’t a total dummy. And you know, I think that’s kind of the point of a standardized test- grades definitely vary based on how involved your parents are, the particular teachers you have, whether you have adhd, and yes socioeconomic status- tests in principal are blind to all that stuff.

Workaccount2 3y ago

1.) Intelligent people befriend other intelligent people. 2.) Intelligent people get higher paying jobs. 3.) Intelligent people live in wealthier areas. 4.) Intelligent people marry other intelligent people. 5.) Intelligent people birth intelligent children. 6.) Intelligent people use their intelligence to augment their kid's intelligence. 7.) Intelligent kids go to step 1.) The emperor is walking around naked, and virtually all of academia is terrified to acknowledge it (namely step 5). Right there is the solution to 50 years of sociological fumbling to avoid saying "Intelligence has a strong genetic component, and we are not all born with equal mental capabilities" Once academia can acknowledge this, then they can finally work on real solutions to close the disproportionate economic gaps it creates. (Yes, I am aware of your anecdote that counters this. It's a broad generalization to counter the mainstream broad generalization.)

esotericimpl 3y ago
Except the research doesn't show this at all. However, having wealth provides tutors, better schooling and teachers which lead to better outcomes from having better mentors, opportunities and education which leads to... and so on and so on.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Right, that is step 6. If you go over the research, you realize that they all assume the premise "everyone is born with an identical blank slate". Which leads to conclusions (either said outright or implied) like; "If you give enough resources to any given child, they can grow up to be anything." So we end up with schools that serve low income areas getting enormous amounts of funding to teach admin assistants and tile layers to be heart surgeons. And the data on that end shows unequivocally that it is not working.
  - davemp 3y ago
    > And the data on that end shows unequivocally that it is not working. Of course throwing money at (sometimes corrupt) school boards isn’t going to be effective. There isn’t much 1/20th of a school teacher can do 8am-2pm M-F to counter a bad environment. It takes a village after all. Not exactly data that’s useful to your hypothesis.

fallingfrog 3y ago

I would hypothesize that SES probably correlates very heavily with grades at the very bottom where you have things like abuse, abject poverty, children supporting their own parents, lack of access to quality nutrition, violence inside and outside the home, etc and even a genius would be swimming against the current. But middle class and above, I would expect the curve to flatten out. In my experience super wealthy people are more lucky than clever- it doesn’t take much brains to make more money when you’re already rich. So, the goal here should be to identify smart kids in terrible situations, while not allowing rich kids who aren’t actually that talented to game the system. That’s the goal. And of course there will also be genuinely talented middle class kids and you don’t want to ignore them either.

077sd015o46 3y ago

So, I know the authors of this report personally. I sincerely have the highest respect for them, they do solid work; if I see something by them I take it seriously because I know I will disagree at my peril. However, I also feel like findings like this get distorted and manipulated, and used to refute strawmen versions of arguments out there against use of standardized testing. Some of the recent arguments being used to reinstate standardized testing as required seem irresponsible to me, even though I don't necessarily see required standardized testing as undefensible per se (my own opinions about all of this are complex and don't fall neatly into either "side", so take this all as coming from someone who is frustrated with how things get oversimplified on both sides, not as advocating for a particular position). Here's some things to keep in mind: 1. This is all about predicting freshman GPA, which itself is questionable as a criterion. If your sole question is "how will this individual do in our college their first year", it's reasonable. But if you are asking "how well would this individual master the skills necessary to succeed in X, Y, or Z role" it's entirely different. Freshman GPA predicts graduating GPA less well than you might think, and both of those are poor proxies for "real world" behavior. They're not unrelated to "real world behavior", but the relationship is low enough that this is the entire point of social justice advocates. A lot of people would say neither SAT nor freshman GPA are relevant, that that's the point. 2. A correlation of 0.47 or 0.44 is something to pay attention to, but it's also far from perfect. If you want to remind yourself of how much noise is in that correlation look here: http://www.analytictech.com/mb313/correl4.jpg http://www.analytictech.com/mb313/correl4.jpg That's a ton of noise at the individual level, which is the level we care about when we're talking about admissions decisions. The problem with a lot of this isn't with the SAT, it's that what happens is this 0.45 r inevitably gets turned into a blind metric that ignores all that real variation because it puts too much pressure on the school to take people who have all kinds of other evidence of competency, because it makes their numbers look bad. Let me put it this way: if I was selling you a bathroom scale, and showed you that scatterplot of my scale's numbers and actual weight, would you buy it? You shouldn't, but we're making consequential life decisions based on that level of noise. The Dartmouth report conveniently ignored that noise, when that noise is about 75% of the problem. 3. Relatedly, if you look at the individual level, things are vastly different when you start taking these kinds of population-level trends and using them to make individual decisions around a threshold. That is, it's very easy to say "0.46 correlation is pretty substantial, we should require SATs", but that 0.46 correlation is across the entire range. It includes people whose SAT scores are very very low. It's not only in the range of where decisions tend to be made, and to make use of that test as a metric for decision-making, you have to assume that what's in the college board's SES index is a perfect summary of what might be said for every applicant to your college. Maybe someone is upper class but their parents were both killed in a plane crash. Maybe they are middle class but come from an abusive family. Maybe they are applying as a much older candidate, or much younger candidate, and the meaning of the scores is really different. In a sane world where we can have nice things, the admissions committee would look at this and make exceptions. This is the idea of having test scores optional. But when you make them required, and are required to post them, then there's pressure to take the highest scores regardless of all the other information. 4. About the other information: in Table 2, they show that HS GPA is actually less correlated with SES than SAT score. Other papers with similarly large amounts of data have shown that HS GPA is actually slightly more correlated with freshman GPA than SAT score. So is the SAT necessary? Probably not. We can argue about grade inflation etc., but the numbers are the numbers, and if it's working as an alternative that is less correlated with SES, reflects a longer sample of school behavior than just a few hours on one day, why wouldn't you prefer that? 5. Note their Figure 1b. They spend a lot of time talking about this model, and in some ways it's the focus of their paper, evaluating it against the alternative. But related to my first point, the model in Figure 1b says nothing about the extent to which a college, or anyone else for that matter, might want to select on some process represented by Figure 1b. What does it matter if test score predicts, say, some other test score composite, and both are influenced by SES? In widely used intelligence tests, there were questions about things like 19th century European literature and classical music (I think they're still there, but I can't remember offhand; they might have been made optional now). On the one hand, yes, 19th century European literature and classical music is great, knowledge of it probably reflects some memory ability etc, but are questions about that really how you want to evaluate someone's skillset? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I can tell you if you're not knowledgable about that you would not get credit on those questions. In many ways, for many, the SAT and college freshman GPA are kind of similar. I don't feel that way, but this is the classic "book smarts" versus "real smarts" issue that always has come up since the beginning of humanity probably. Showing book smarts predicts other book smarts just isn't important in some paradigms. Again, I'm not anti-standardized testing. I think it's useful. But I also think the way it's been used in the past, and continues to be used, is in fact broken. It's not even necessarily a problem with the tests, it's a problem with the way they get used. But to paraphrase a famous educational psychologist, if you have a thing that people tend to misuse, every single time, and there are good alternatives, maybe there is something about that thing that's a problem when you put it the hands of people, and the thing either shouldn't be used, or there should be some rules put in place with teeth to prevent it from being misused.

Gordon1188 3y ago

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