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Can you provide more background on your statement that the SAT and ACT are not achieving the goals for which they were designed? My suspicion has been that thi

• snowwrestler 12y ago
  Basically, the tests were supposed to provide an objective means to predict student outcomes. But they are no better predictors than high school grades alone. And the scoring shows significant correlations with factors like gender, race, language, family income, etc.--so they're not objective. From this article: > The University of California, Berkeley1 economist Jesse M. Rothstein has found that the combination of a student’s high school grades and demographic information predicted first-year grades in college about as well as her high school grades and SAT scores do. > DePaul is implementing their own tests for non-cognitive skills, with a series of essay questions. For the entering class of 2012, about 10 percent of applicants (or about 5 percent of the freshman class) chose not to send ACT or SAT scores. Instead they completed four short-answer questions, designed to measure their leadership skills and their ability to meet long-term goals. Systematically scoring the responses to those questions, DePaul reported that the freshman-to-sophomore retention rate was almost identical for those who submitted standardized test scores (85 percent) and those who did not (84 percent).