>> 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.
>> 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.
> 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.
Will processes like this result in families avoiding (or at least not seeking out as much) rigorous high schools? It seems like some families might choose to send their kid to a not-super-rigorous high school — where they can coast in class and learn via outside enrichment — instead of a school with more rigorous academics where they'll be held to a higher bar by colleges.
This would allow students to have a lower-stress life and have an advantage at college admissions — even if they actually learned less academically than they would have at the rigorous high school.
This is a critical part. The problem is not using metrics (like SAT/ACT), the problem is using metrics blindly. That's the thing that always bugs me is when people just go on metrics alone as if they perfectly align with what's being attempted to be measured when metrics are only guides which choices must then be made from through careful evaluation.
At what point can we use genetics to weight scores as well? I’m having a hard time logically justifying class factors (being born poor is not something you can control) but not genetic factors (being born dumb is not something you can control).
>> 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
Since I encountered a similar approach just three years ago in my son's High School application in the Chicago Public School System I can say this leaves a lot to be desired non low-info,e families. Here's a high-level summary of how it works:
1. Chicago is neighborhoods are assigned one of (if memory serves) four levels, which represent socioeconomic levels.
2. With the thought that the economic level is proportional to school quality (this is more true in most places in the US than other countries, since a big chunk of school budget comes from property taxes, so neighborhoods with low taxes get school with lower budgets) scores from the entrance exams for kids from different levels are boosted by different multipliers.
Now, of course, (2) is a travesty of the US but that's another long discussion. The problem with (1) is that the neighborhood to level assignments are not revised each year. So you can be affluent in a district that has gentrified in the past 2-5 years and your kid will get the low-income boost unfairly.
Additionally some neighborhoods are highly bimodal, eg take Lakeview. This is considered a low-income neighborhood but there are many high-income high rises and single family homes within its borders. Alternately, there are many rental condos in our neighborhood which is the highest income level, so these middle income kids get slammed.
Still another problem is families purposefully gaming the system. We had friends who changed their rental condo during their child's 8th year so they can get a lower-info,e address sin their application. This is widely known and done.
Perhaps a better approach would be to use the family's income rather than communities.
Edit: I had more time to research and found the following, in case somebody is interested:
* What I referred to as the four levels are actually called tiers
It's so weird to me that all this data exists, and that's it available and munged enough to be actionable. Do colleges really keep track of this for the tens of thousands of high schools, not only that, but all the income info, the mechanics of student placement for each school district, etc... it just seems so intensely convoluted.
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]
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.
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.
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.
The way you phrased it, yes. But, that isn't what the report was saying. It was using a generalized criteria of disadvantaged meaning low income or non-english speaking. Race based criteria can't be considered, but income can which means poor white kids from Appalachia as well as poor black and latino kids from urban areas.
That’s why they choose something not directly associated with race like socioeconomic environment. If the result is correlated with race, that’s not necessarily an issue with admission processes.
There are other non-academic tests like CogAT, Wechsler, etc. that may be even better since they evaluate abstract reasoning and scale from young to old without significant modification. Those are used by gifted programs and organizations like Mensa. It’s possible that these would be adequate replacements for college admissions as well, but you may get a bunch of mildly on-spectrum kids who have never had to work hard for academic success (from my personal experience).
Yes, it will be easier to sue Dartmouth (successfully) for race-based discrimination if/when they return to requiring standardized tests. For example, they won't be able to admit certain minorities with low test scores while not admitting other applicants with similar/better test scores.
However, it sounds like their system works around this problem by weighting the test score based on the average score at the school. So they can still down-weight the application of a poor Asian student from a more challenging school, compared to a different minority student who goes to a school with worse SAT performance. If Dartmouth's percentage of Asian students doesn't tick upward materially in coming years, I would assume this is what they are doing.
To steelman the argument for this process, it's effectively boosting the scores of kids whose parents didn't care as much about education, or who had no avenue into a challenging school. On the other hand, this process dings students from families that prioritize education, who work really hard. Those kids would probably succeed at Dartmouth, and beyond.
> 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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
Notably it’s not clear if there’s a better determinant of that. Tests at least have the advantage of being a knowable thing you can prep for, instead of whatever you have without tests.
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.
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
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.
"Should". Every time I read the word "should" I cringe. Everything should be free. I should be able to go to restaurants for free and have the chefs prepare the food for me and the waiters serve me and I should do this and not have to pay money. After all food should be a right.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
The war against standardized tests has far more to do with black students performing disproportionately poorer on them. Many people are unwilling to acknowledge the multitude of cultural and socioeconomic factors responsible for that and instead want to simply chalk it up to racism. And so there's a war against any admissions policy that results in disproportionate racial outcomes, until we're left with admissions policies that are openly racist in order to achieve race-based results.
> And so there's a war against any admissions policy that results in disproportionate racial outcomes
Except legacy admissions and pay-to-play donations. After all, pedigree and wealth are merit (or proof thereof) - no need for pesky test scores in the face of such overwhelming evidence.
> Many people are unwilling to acknowledge the multitude of cultural and socioeconomic factors responsible for that and instead want to simply chalk it up to racism.
How many of those cultural and socioeconomic factors were almost directly related to racism though?
> the fact that paying huge money for tutoring only results in minor score improvements
This might be true in aggregate, but I’ve seen data that says otherwise (buddy owns a test prep school). The keys are that the student wants the test prep and that the student has room to grow (i.e., not already near the top, where increases are capped).
Middle of the pack students can gain 50-150 points per skill (this is a lot).
> 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
Is this implying that Asian immigrants do better because of genetics (nature)?
The non-agenda-based research on this topic is pretty clear that Asian immigrant success is mostly about a culture of schooling and learning in Asian communities. This includes things like tutoring, “cram schools”, and test prep.
Here is an example of research/views from outside the US:
Almost all academic success is built on a culture of learning of some sort (e.g., parental involvement in schooling, reading to kids, etc.). Note that this is true regardless of race. The higher quality (non-agenda-based) research in this area all focuses on how this culture of learning can be fostered, with special focus on low SES (low socio-economic status) families regardless of race.
> destroys the basis for trillions in social programs
> Standardized tests effectively threaten the entire house of cards
Programs like Head Start in the US have measurable positive impact:
Fwiw, I actually agree that a lot of research in education is non-replicable, agenda-based bullshit, but your comments here go against both the better research and fairly substantial anecdotal evidence (my buddy’s test prep program).
>Is this implying that Asian immigrants do better because of genetics (nature)?
Yes, that is very likely true. I would go as far as to say that the "nurture" side of this coin is to a large extent an indirect result of nature as well.
> Programs like Head Start in the US have measurable positive impact:
Something can have an unjustified basis, but have a measurable positive impact. Just because the unjustified basis of race was correlated with income. But using the justified basis of income and wealth will not only lead to even more measurable positive impact, it will also be fair.
> modern academia's favored nurture over nature mindset
The is a simplified way of putting it by I would roughly agree with this statement. However, I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from the fact that "poor Asian immigrants were able to outscore other demographics". It is absolutely about nurture, but not in a way that the "academia" wants to emphasize. I think the main reason these poor kids achieve better is the support and, yes, the tremendous push they get from their families on topics related to education. I'd wager that having a two-parent family that places importance in education correlates most with academic performance.
That is a pretty old link which has been severed a long time ago. They’ve even changed the name from Scholastic aptitude test to just SAT, in an effort to convey that SAT doesn’t actually measure anything but it self. (This is in a stark contrast to IQ which makes ridiculous and pseudo-scientific claims that it measures something approaching what they call general intelligence)
I have many beefs with SAT and standardized testing in general, but the link with IQ is not (anymore) one of them. IQ is a horrible and racist concept that should remain along with phrenology as a pathetic attempt to use science to explain racist beliefs. SAT used to be there. But we have to give them credit for having moved on.
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
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.
I believe there's some research that suggests your college GPA is not correlated strongly with job performance[1]. I suspect if SAT/ACT scores are strongly correlated with GPA, there's reason to suggest it may also not be strongly correlated with job performance (but I can't find anywhere that tests that).
I suppose this shouldn't be surprising. School does not train you to be a good office worker.
The goal of school IS NOT to make you a good office worker. The goal of school is to create the ability to think creatively, rationally and critically and make you a better citizen of society through those processes.
Job performance is subjectively measured by your bosses which has political implications. It is inherently a terrible metric.
SAT is well-correlated with 1st year GPA, but not well-correlated with eventual job placement (although it does correlate pretty well with eventual income). However, 1st year GPA is well-correlated with 2nd year GPA, which is well-correlated with 3rd-year GPA, which is well-correlated with 4th year GPA, which is well-correlated with eventual job placement, which is well-correlated with entry-level salary, which is well-correlated with mid-career salary.
A pretty useful model for life is that it's a series of contests, and doing well at the previous contest gives you an advantage for the next couple contests, but only the next couple contests. By the time you get to mid-career, nobody really cares what your high school GPA was. However, because each contest determines which set of subsequent contests you'll face, performance early on can have outsize effects on eventual life outcomes. You typically won't be applying for CEO jobs if you worked retail your whole life, unless you lie your ass off and bullshit convincingly to executive recruiters.
In my own experience, first-year GPA in college was a cakewalk. I had straight As until Junior year, then things got a bit more demanding and I was caught off-guard because college had been pretty easy up to that point. (Large state university).
I agree. Every other comment here seems to be like "well duh" and I'm... skeptical. My experience is that the ACT/SAT seem to be good indicators of getting good grades in well-defined spaces. But things like creativity, curiosity, work ethic are much better predictors of other kinds of success that frankly matter much more in the real world.
I know some really, really unintelligent people who got good grades in college. They just ate books.
Undergraduate GPA predicts lifetime earnings[1], incoming test scores and GPA are highly predictive of both advanced degrees (which increase earnings), and increased earnings within degrees [2], [3].
I suggest these effects are because being a good student aka "eating books" is correlated with conscientiousness. They show up to lectures, prepare, and test well.
And conscientiousness is very highly correlated with lifetime achievement, AND fufillment [4]. So measuring conscientiousness, and signalling high conscientiousness is a really good idea.
IQ is great, but conscientiousness is how you get things done [5]
Their Figure 1 is why we keep having these discussions in society. It's grossly misleading and not what a scatterplot for a 0.46 correlation looks like. I know what the figure is, it's just done in a way to overstate a case and ignore variability within bin.
If that figure were about anything else, people would be screaming bloody murder about misleading figures and overly generalized interpretation.
I'm in favor of allowing for the use of test scores but they get abused and the language in this report is a good example of how this happens. Scores have these real but modest correlations with real world situations, but then get used as rulers of atomic precision without any context or recognition of their massive limitations.
It makes the authors of this report look either deceiving or ignorant of statistics or both.
The thing is: completely unsuitable students need to fail out in the first year. That's what "weeder" courses are for. They prevent students wasting time and money, only to fail out years later.
Which means: you don't have the same stats for 3rd and 4th year students.
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.
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."
If I were judged by my first year GPA I'd be homeless. Instead I'm really quite successful in spite of my first try (and miserable failure) at university.
When I went back and was paying for tuition out of my own pocket as opposed to magic sky money falling into my lap from the US Dept of Education, things were a LOT different.
I think some of us (like me) were too immature at 18-22 to make good use of college. I'm not sure the amount of skin in the game would have made much difference, but I wouldn't have been able to pay for it myself, so that's a benefit. When I went back and got high grades, I also had manna-money from Direct loans. I just had a lot more life experience and maturity.
Contrary to what some may think: I would strongly suspect that particularly high scores on SAT/ACT would also correlate fairly strongly with well-paying job placements and long term GPA.
Note I am not saying that people who don't do particularly well on SAT/ACT can't also succeed on college and beyond, I had a pretty average score myself and consider myself fairly successful. But all the people I know who had the highest scores on SAT's were also the people most motivated to study and work extremely hard whether it be based on family pressure or just an inherent drive to be better than everyone else, and even to this day these people I knew who had scores in like the top 95+% are for the most part the most successful people I know primarily just due to an inherent drive to succeed at all costs.
Of course this will also depend on what metric you use for success. Also of course there will be people who do extremely poorly in traditional education but become wildly successful.
There's some nuance to the "work ethic" factor. Work ethic makes a big difference in academic outcomes, but it depends on where that work is targeted.
Anecdotal evidence, part 1:
I grew up in the suburbs and went to public schools that, at the time, were good-not-great within the state. In that setting, I was a high achiever by any sensible metric. I was friends with a lot of the other "smart kids," and I definitely worked harder than some of them, but outside of school, I was also working on different things. My hobbies and extracurriculars weren't strictly academic, but they certainly set me up for academic success better than sports or video games would have.
Anecdotal evidence, part 2:
One of my classmates was "freak of nature" levels of gifted. I shared math classes with him for three years of high school, and to my knowledge he got one math test question wrong in that entire time period. He was also one of the school's best tennis players, and he made it into so many state concert bands/jazz bands/choir groups that their schedules overlapped and he couldn't do all of them. Last I checked, he was finishing up a PhD in neuroscience. But get this: he was our salutatorian, solely because someone else who did no sports and few clubs took more summer classes, and thus had the same GPA with more total credit hours.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People who take the SAT are self-selecting. An awful lot of kids don't take it, and a lot of schools don't require it. So the sort of kid who takes it will also be the sort of kid who gets good grades.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, it doesn't. We already have K-12 for that and rightfully so. Academia is supposed to be a place for complete adults to be able to optionally invest to specialize. At this rate we have to admit that 12 years of general education isn't enough to build characters so we have to make K-16, which is certainly an option with its own concerns.
In theory this is what the diploma or GED is already for. These are all certified by the state to show you've completed a certain amount of education to a certain level of quality. What is an SAT or ACT supposed to be on top of all that honestly? Really its tackling a symptom of colleges for whatever reason no longer trusting the states own education departments' diploma or GED. Which is damning considering these schools point to these same states accreditation as a quality measure for their own programs, forgetting that if the diploma is untrustworthy then so are these state accreditation...
Where do the grades on a US high school diploma come from? They are arbitrarily assigned by teachers from the student’s high school, right? One teacher might give everyone good grades, while another will be more strict, and yet another may give good grades to their favourite students only. Grades of two students from the same class are often not comparable, let alone grades of two students from different states.
The SAT and the ACT are standardized tests, meaning that everyone in the country writes the same test on the same day, and the tests are designed to make the test results comparable between different sessions.
I don't know if you're trying to make a point about test taking, but you're aware that college GPA is composed of more than just being a good test taker? Better way of putting it might be: someone that scores highly on an IQ proxy is good at everything.
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.
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.
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.
Except that the test is pretty clearly perverted. You take two kids, same education, give one an after school testing program their parents pay money for, and they score better. Is the wealthier kid more worthy of receiving a college education? What does that say about how we educate our society then, and what we are actually valuing and giving privilege?
> Is the wealthier kid more worthy of receiving a college education?
Not to mention, what about us test-disabled people?
I didn't know I had ADHD and its "friends" when I took the ACT, and I could have potentially benefited greatly from the reasonable accommodations the test allows for. However, it's not like every child is required to have some kind of psychological evaluation while in school.
I find all of this standardization in testing to be nothing more than Goodhart's Law in full swing.
Just what we need, more "Teaching to the Test" and route memorization in our education system...
I know. Sarcasm aside though, there is a growing movement of HS and elementary school teachers looking to remove all KPIs from schools. It is very worrying that this protected class of workers are arguing they are special compared to every other problem in the world and their performance and those who they are teaching should never be measured.
Readit News
>> 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.
>> 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.
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.
This would allow students to have a lower-stress life and have an advantage at college admissions — even if they actually learned less academically than they would have at the rigorous high school.
Since I encountered a similar approach just three years ago in my son's High School application in the Chicago Public School System I can say this leaves a lot to be desired non low-info,e families. Here's a high-level summary of how it works:
1. Chicago is neighborhoods are assigned one of (if memory serves) four levels, which represent socioeconomic levels.
2. With the thought that the economic level is proportional to school quality (this is more true in most places in the US than other countries, since a big chunk of school budget comes from property taxes, so neighborhoods with low taxes get school with lower budgets) scores from the entrance exams for kids from different levels are boosted by different multipliers.
Now, of course, (2) is a travesty of the US but that's another long discussion. The problem with (1) is that the neighborhood to level assignments are not revised each year. So you can be affluent in a district that has gentrified in the past 2-5 years and your kid will get the low-income boost unfairly.
Additionally some neighborhoods are highly bimodal, eg take Lakeview. This is considered a low-income neighborhood but there are many high-income high rises and single family homes within its borders. Alternately, there are many rental condos in our neighborhood which is the highest income level, so these middle income kids get slammed.
Still another problem is families purposefully gaming the system. We had friends who changed their rental condo during their child's 8th year so they can get a lower-info,e address sin their application. This is widely known and done.
Perhaps a better approach would be to use the family's income rather than communities.
Edit: I had more time to research and found the following, in case somebody is interested:
* What I referred to as the four levels are actually called tiers
* The tiers are actually updated every year, so I was wrong above. Still, the community average criticism stands. See the discussion about the update that was done last Feb here: https://chicagoschooloptions.com/forums/topic/when-are-cps-t...
* You can see the distribution of the tiers from a few years ago on this site: http://cpstiers.opencityapps.org, owners say it's no longer maintained. It seems currently there's no map showing all tiers, you can check only a single address at https://schoolinfo.cps.edu/schoollocator/index.html
> 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/
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.
> 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.ht...
There are other non-academic tests like CogAT, Wechsler, etc. that may be even better since they evaluate abstract reasoning and scale from young to old without significant modification. Those are used by gifted programs and organizations like Mensa. It’s possible that these would be adequate replacements for college admissions as well, but you may get a bunch of mildly on-spectrum kids who have never had to work hard for academic success (from my personal experience).
However, it sounds like their system works around this problem by weighting the test score based on the average score at the school. So they can still down-weight the application of a poor Asian student from a more challenging school, compared to a different minority student who goes to a school with worse SAT performance. If Dartmouth's percentage of Asian students doesn't tick upward materially in coming years, I would assume this is what they are doing.
To steelman the argument for this process, it's effectively boosting the scores of kids whose parents didn't care as much about education, or who had no avenue into a challenging school. On the other hand, this process dings students from families that prioritize education, who work really hard. Those kids would probably succeed at Dartmouth, and beyond.
Standardized exams are the most fair and transparent.
Materials and tutors are available easily for free or cheaply on the internet nowadays.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MyD0m7JXgjA
TIL. I only knew the other definition, "the quality of being religious or reverent".
Dead Comment
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Why is every parameter of admissions open to change despite tradition, except that one?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What did you have in mind?
Trade schools make a lot more sense for most. Get a good job and you can self study from a position of safety...
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
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.
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
Except legacy admissions and pay-to-play donations. After all, pedigree and wealth are merit (or proof thereof) - no need for pesky test scores in the face of such overwhelming evidence.
How many of those cultural and socioeconomic factors were almost directly related to racism though?
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This might be true in aggregate, but I’ve seen data that says otherwise (buddy owns a test prep school). The keys are that the student wants the test prep and that the student has room to grow (i.e., not already near the top, where increases are capped).
Middle of the pack students can gain 50-150 points per skill (this is a lot).
> 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
Is this implying that Asian immigrants do better because of genetics (nature)?
The non-agenda-based research on this topic is pretty clear that Asian immigrant success is mostly about a culture of schooling and learning in Asian communities. This includes things like tutoring, “cram schools”, and test prep.
Here is an example of research/views from outside the US:
https://www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth/vol2no1/setsuo.html
Almost all academic success is built on a culture of learning of some sort (e.g., parental involvement in schooling, reading to kids, etc.). Note that this is true regardless of race. The higher quality (non-agenda-based) research in this area all focuses on how this culture of learning can be fostered, with special focus on low SES (low socio-economic status) families regardless of race.
> destroys the basis for trillions in social programs
> Standardized tests effectively threaten the entire house of cards
Programs like Head Start in the US have measurable positive impact:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-long-term-impact-of-t...
Fwiw, I actually agree that a lot of research in education is non-replicable, agenda-based bullshit, but your comments here go against both the better research and fairly substantial anecdotal evidence (my buddy’s test prep program).
Yes, that is very likely true. I would go as far as to say that the "nurture" side of this coin is to a large extent an indirect result of nature as well.
Something can have an unjustified basis, but have a measurable positive impact. Just because the unjustified basis of race was correlated with income. But using the justified basis of income and wealth will not only lead to even more measurable positive impact, it will also be fair.
The is a simplified way of putting it by I would roughly agree with this statement. However, I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from the fact that "poor Asian immigrants were able to outscore other demographics". It is absolutely about nurture, but not in a way that the "academia" wants to emphasize. I think the main reason these poor kids achieve better is the support and, yes, the tremendous push they get from their families on topics related to education. I'd wager that having a two-parent family that places importance in education correlates most with academic performance.
I have many beefs with SAT and standardized testing in general, but the link with IQ is not (anymore) one of them. IQ is a horrible and racist concept that should remain along with phrenology as a pathetic attempt to use science to explain racist beliefs. SAT used to be there. But we have to give them credit for having moved on.
How then do you explain IQ's strong correlation with positive life outcomes like work success, educational achievement, happiness, etc
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=74943....
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...
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
back then being against eugenics meant you were a crazy religious nutcase who couldn't accept scientific fact about evolution and genetics
I suppose this shouldn't be surprising. School does not train you to be a good office worker.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/does-college-gpa-predict-job-...
Job performance is subjectively measured by your bosses which has political implications. It is inherently a terrible metric.
A pretty useful model for life is that it's a series of contests, and doing well at the previous contest gives you an advantage for the next couple contests, but only the next couple contests. By the time you get to mid-career, nobody really cares what your high school GPA was. However, because each contest determines which set of subsequent contests you'll face, performance early on can have outsize effects on eventual life outcomes. You typically won't be applying for CEO jobs if you worked retail your whole life, unless you lie your ass off and bullshit convincingly to executive recruiters.
I know some really, really unintelligent people who got good grades in college. They just ate books.
I suggest these effects are because being a good student aka "eating books" is correlated with conscientiousness. They show up to lectures, prepare, and test well.
And conscientiousness is very highly correlated with lifetime achievement, AND fufillment [4]. So measuring conscientiousness, and signalling high conscientiousness is a really good idea.
IQ is great, but conscientiousness is how you get things done [5]
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9004755/
1.b (edited) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/20/heres... might be better. I thought this was "common knowledge"!
2. https://mpreiner.medium.com/what-is-the-impact-of-your-high-...
3. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/
5. https://docs.iza.org/dp8235.pdf
If that figure were about anything else, people would be screaming bloody murder about misleading figures and overly generalized interpretation.
I'm in favor of allowing for the use of test scores but they get abused and the language in this report is a good example of how this happens. Scores have these real but modest correlations with real world situations, but then get used as rulers of atomic precision without any context or recognition of their massive limitations.
It makes the authors of this report look either deceiving or ignorant of statistics or both.
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of course but how would these be measured
Which means: you don't have the same stats for 3rd and 4th year 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.
"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."
When I went back and was paying for tuition out of my own pocket as opposed to magic sky money falling into my lap from the US Dept of Education, things were a LOT different.
Note I am not saying that people who don't do particularly well on SAT/ACT can't also succeed on college and beyond, I had a pretty average score myself and consider myself fairly successful. But all the people I know who had the highest scores on SAT's were also the people most motivated to study and work extremely hard whether it be based on family pressure or just an inherent drive to be better than everyone else, and even to this day these people I knew who had scores in like the top 95+% are for the most part the most successful people I know primarily just due to an inherent drive to succeed at all costs.
Of course this will also depend on what metric you use for success. Also of course there will be people who do extremely poorly in traditional education but become wildly successful.
Anecdotal evidence, part 1:
I grew up in the suburbs and went to public schools that, at the time, were good-not-great within the state. In that setting, I was a high achiever by any sensible metric. I was friends with a lot of the other "smart kids," and I definitely worked harder than some of them, but outside of school, I was also working on different things. My hobbies and extracurriculars weren't strictly academic, but they certainly set me up for academic success better than sports or video games would have.
Anecdotal evidence, part 2:
One of my classmates was "freak of nature" levels of gifted. I shared math classes with him for three years of high school, and to my knowledge he got one math test question wrong in that entire time period. He was also one of the school's best tennis players, and he made it into so many state concert bands/jazz bands/choir groups that their schedules overlapped and he couldn't do all of them. Last I checked, he was finishing up a PhD in neuroscience. But get this: he was our salutatorian, solely because someone else who did no sports and few clubs took more summer classes, and thus had the same GPA with more total credit hours.
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.
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-wa...
fwiw GPA and SAT scores are highly correlated anyway
The SAT and the ACT are standardized tests, meaning that everyone in the country writes the same test on the same day, and the tests are designed to make the test results comparable between different sessions.
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.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
Not to mention, what about us test-disabled people?
I didn't know I had ADHD and its "friends" when I took the ACT, and I could have potentially benefited greatly from the reasonable accommodations the test allows for. However, it's not like every child is required to have some kind of psychological evaluation while in school.
I find all of this standardization in testing to be nothing more than Goodhart's Law in full swing.
Just what we need, more "Teaching to the Test" and route memorization in our education system...