The Big Problem with the New SAT

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/opinion/the-big-problem-with-the-new-sat.html

by jack_axel • 11 years ago

32 38 11 years ago

nytimes.com

cowardlydragon• 11 years ago

The SAT doesn't correlate to grades...

And grades don't correlate to much either.

steveeq1• 11 years ago

There's a small correlation between SAT scores and college performance, but that's mainly because the types of questions asked for the SAT are the types of questions that are asked in college exams. SATs have ZERO correlation with success in life though.

fiatmoney• 11 years ago

"SATs have ZERO correlation with success in life though"

That is wildly untrue for any value of "success" that includes socioeconomic status.

pravda• 11 years ago

Did somebody get low SATs?

stephencanon3• 11 years ago

To the extent that SAT scores are used to select which students are admitted to which colleges, you remove any predictive relationship between SAT scores and grades.

I.e. even if SAT scores were perfectly predictive of "college performance" in the abstract, if there were N possible scores on the SAT and exactly N colleges, each of which accepted all students with one specific score, then SAT scores would be completely uncorrelated to college grades. This is an arbitrarily contrived example, but the same principle holds true in the real world.

smackfu• 11 years ago

Grades correlate to either natural ability OR hard work.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

More accurately, IMO, grades correlate with:

Current Effort × Current Ability (at the time the grades were earned)

And Current Ability itself is dependent on both natural ability and past effort.

scott_s• 11 years ago

High school grades correlate with college grades. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/...

exelius2• 11 years ago

This highlights a number of problems with our public education system in general. I think the problems with the SAT highlighted in the article are reacting to these problems, not the other way around as the author seems to suggest.

* There is no standardized high school curriculum across schools, and even when curriculum is standardized, it is taught unevenly. It's hard to have a college entrance exam that covers a significant amount of content as a result, because it puts kids from poor areas at a huge disadvantage in even getting in to college. It's also very hard to identify which students are from good schools and which are from bad ones, so adjusting test scores to compensate isn't a solution.

* Teacher-student ratios in public schools do not lend themselves to the kind of one-on-one work it takes to become a good writer. Unless we're prepared to say "you have a better chance getting in to college because you went to a suburban school district", this can't be a huge part of the test. Writing ability as a high school senior is largely correlated to the amount of attention you got from your English teacher. If you're a good student in a bad school, you probably get very little attention because you're not acting up.

* There's already too much "teach to the test" as it is. Making the SAT yet another test where students have to cram and memorize content is not the solution.

There are plenty of standardized tests that cover content. The problem is that they are far too basic for college entrance purposes. Turning the SAT into a content-focused test does not solve a problem that colleges have; many colleges are not looking for the best students, but for a racially-diverse selection of the most teachable students. What schools should do (and many already do) is require students from lower quality schools to take a semester of remedial classes free of charge to get them up to speed with whatever the base assumption of prior knowledge is at that school.

CamperBob2• 11 years ago

Writing ability as a high school senior is largely correlated to the amount of attention you got from your English teacher.

There's no way I'd ever buy that. Writing ability is largely correlated to the amount of time the student spends reading... reading novels, instruction manuals, technical books, Web pages, and cereal boxes. Teachers have almost nothing to do with it in my experience, and I think you'll find that any successful author will tell you exactly the same thing.

exelius2• 11 years ago

If you're talking about the ability to write a novel, I agree with you. But you have to learn how to get your thoughts down on paper in a way that is intelligible by other humans, and that's a technical skill that must be learned through repetition and critique. There's a basic technical skill to writing long form content, and many kids don't get it because their teacher doesn't have time to grade 140 papers.

saint_fiasco• 11 years ago

Colleges aren't looking for successful authors. They look for people who communicate well in writing.

I think the top writers didn't need attention from their English teachers, but the fairly good ones probably did.

walshemj• 11 years ago

Actually no for some people its not as a dyslexic I can read very very well but my writing is much worse took me 4 years to get my basic English language O level.

com2kid2• 11 years ago

There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.

The SAT is not designed to rank students. The SAT is designed to solve a supply/demand problem. There are less spaces available at top universities than there are applicants. The SAT creates a bell curve, allowing schools to go a standard deviation or two out to pick their incoming class.

If the test was an absolute ranking, you'd end up with a large number of people scoring 100%, and the test becomes worthless to colleges as a filter.

majormajor• 11 years ago

The article is making the claim that the test is already pretty worthless to colleges as a filter because the differences that separate, say, a 99.9th-percentile score from a 98th-percentile score (number picked by myself at random, as the article didn't mention any that I saw) don't actually correlate to much of anything of use for selecting who should get into the top schools. Especially if those differences are largely "had more time and money to spend on preparation." It reports that research shows that grades are a better predictor. (Though high schools are also hardly immune to grade inflation pressures, for the same reason that the huge test prep industry has sprung up—parents don't care about merit or fairness, they care about doing whatever they can to get the best-perceived college for their own kids. I find it doubtful that changing the SAT in the way suggested would do anything to address this root issue.)

It also makes an interesting side point about year-to-year results for tracking overall education progress.

stephencanon3• 11 years ago

On the contrary, "had time and money to spend on preparation" is extremely valuable information to colleges, especially those with ostensibly "need blind" admissions policies.

com2kid2• 11 years ago

The article is making the claim that the test is already pretty worthless to colleges as a filter because the differences that separate, say, a 99.9th-percentile score from a 98th-percentile score (number picked by myself at random, as the article didn't mention any that I saw) don't actually correlate to much of anything of use for selecting who should get into the top schools.

Apply multiple filters. The more bell curves you have, the easier this gets. Bonus if those bell curves are not correlated to each other! (I'm not going to comment on how useless this becomes)

Want to be an exclusive college? Use SAT scores to remove 87% of applicants right off the bat. (OK most people below the left half of the curve likely don't bother to apply.)

Now filter out kids who didn't go to enough AP classes. (You've instantly removed children with parents who "didn't care enough" to move to an area with a good AP program! bonus!) Now filter out kids whose parent's didn't have enough discretionary free time to shuttle them to and from multiple extra-curricular activities.

Alright, next up, who can afford to pay for a good essay? Drop anyone who can't.

Congrats, you've just cut down the number of papers you have to read by a lot.

In fairness, once the number of applications become's unmanageable, what else is a college going to do? Spend 1/2 of tuition money on entrance examiners?

thedufer• 11 years ago

The article is making the claim that the test is already pretty worthless to colleges as a filter

I'm not convinced this is true. A few years after the writing section was introduced, college admissions were refusing to use it on the grounds that it didn't seem to correlate with any future performance (overall grades, English grades, foreign language grades, graduation rate, etc).

Presumably they wouldn't be saying this if the rest of the test also failed to predict anything.

WillPostForFood• 11 years ago

It's only worthless if the colleges assume that the test indicates a meaningful difference between 99.9 and 98. If they assume that the test is good and not perfect, and use it as a broad filter, then there is no problem.

qmalxp• 11 years ago

The purpose of the SAT is to be a unbiased barometer; say what you will about it, but everyone takes the same test. Unfortunately, a 4.0 GPA from an obscure high school may tell you very little about a candidate.

I don't know how much admissions officers care about 96th versus 99th percentile, but if someone has an otherwise amazing resume yet ranks in the 40th percentile on their SAT, that's a bit of a red flag.

falsestprophet• 11 years ago

You can see from class profiles of leading schools that they admit at least 75% of their class from the 99th percentile.

JoeAltmaier3• 11 years ago

Only reason I got into Stanford is, they make (made?) a point of offering admission to all the 99th percentile each year. I was one of them.

However there're only a few hundred of these nationwide, right? Not enough to fill several leading schools.

Aloha• 11 years ago

The problem with the SAT is it mostly judges what you've learned, not how well you can learn. If we're going to have a test for college, it should judge your future potential and ability, not just how well your high school taught you.

danieltillett3• 11 years ago

I am surprised how nobody here seems to have drawn the obvious conclusion here which is these changes (making the test less g loaded) is a massive bias in favour of the rich over the poor. Kids who are naturally smart, but who attend bad schools will struggle with any test that is not heavily g loaded.

gwern2• 11 years ago

Rich/poor is itself heavily g-loaded. What's the net effect here?

danieltillett3• 11 years ago

It is not that rich/poor is directly g loaded, just that g is highly correlated with income. Quality of schooling is directly related to the income. The more you make the tests reflect past education quality the more you bias it is favour of the rich and dumb against the poor and smart.

The Big Problem with the New SAT

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