Posted on 06/22/2008 3:03:32 PM PDT by neverdem
The revamped SAT, expanded three years ago to include a writing test, predicts college success no better than the old test, and not quite as well as a student’s high school grades, according to studies released Tuesday by the College Board, which owns the test.
“The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said.
College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success.
“The SAT continues to be an excellent predictor of how students will perform,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of operations at the board, and general manager of the SAT program. “The 3-hour, 45-minutes test is almost as good a predictor as four years of high school grades, and a better predictor for minority students.”
But critics of the new test say that if that is the best it can do, the extra time, expense and stress on students are not worth it.
“The new SAT was supposed to be significantly better and fairer than the old one, but it is neither,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at FairTest, a group that is critical of much standardized testing. “It underpredicts college success for females and those whose best language is not English, and over all, it does not predict college success as well as high school grades, so why do we need the SAT, old or new?”
The reports, called validity studies, are based on individual data from 151,000 students at more than 100 colleges and universities who started college in fall of 2006.
Plans to revise the SAT were announced in 2002, the year after the University of California president, Richard Atkinson, threatened to drop the test as an admission requirement.
“Given the data...?”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
With a national test like the SAT you get compared to your peers, not against your classmates at podunk high. Bottom line, getting rid of the SAT is a bad idea, and is really only about increasing the power and discretion of admissions officers to do the social engineering they so want to do.
Ever notice the stuck record pattern developed by the libs? Anything that requires more work, study, effort, or intelligence “won’t work”. Of course, this is coming from the group that has an unparalleled record of things that didn’t work.
Ah, a gender and English as a second language is the issue. So we throw it out and forget standards. They'd rather have quotas on gender, race and English as a second language. They don't want ANY standards because that would discourage their arbitrary social engineering based on anything but MERIT.
I think there is PC at work in this summary of the results. This sentence is imprecise and misleading. The predictive power of standardized tests applies to high grades from poor performing school districts. The PC argument is that high grades alone should determine suitability for top university education. The corrolary is that race will be used to determine financial aid. There is no question that standardized tests predict differently for high performing schools than low performing schools. For high performing schools, standardized tests do not matter. For low performing schools, standardized tests indicate grade inflation and lower academic achievement. Dropping standardized tests removes the large difference between high performing and low performing schools. The effect is a backdoor quota for certain underperforming groups.
The mostb unethical thing I have ever done was take the sat test for someome else. It wasn’t too difficult thirty years ago when I did it.
It was for a friend who was a brilliant artist but a bad student. She wanted to attend suny purchase which was/is a NY State college known for its art dept. Without the grades she wouldn’t have gotten in. She was not book smart is all.
I scored a good score for her and she got in.
Last year I saw her at my thirtieth hs reunion. She is a very successful photographer in NYC and I don,t have a moments regret about it. By the way, she did something equally unethical for me in return but what I did helped her life in a way we could not have imagined. We had a big laugh about it and agreed we were crazy to do it and you probably clould not get away with it today!
Also, you will notice that they use freshman college grades in the comparison. As you move on in college and the coursework becomes more difficult, sheer intelligence becomes more important than it was in freshman year.
An awful lot of people would like to deny the role, or even the existence of intelligence--about 50 percent of the population, as a matter of fact.
I did horrible on the SAT, but I had great grades from a good high school in Dallas. I also took hard classes in high school.
I got a degree in computer science from Texas A&M. I was originally a chemical engineering major. Most of the class flunked out of chem E after their freshman and sophomore years. These were even National Merit Scholars. I never flunked out (but I did change out of Chem E my junior year because I hated it).
I know that I had to work hard in college, and the people that didn’t work hard didn’t do well.
And yet, contrary to your assertion, high school grades remain a better predictor of success than the SAT.
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luckystarmom: I know that I had to work hard in college, and the people that didn’t work hard didn’t do well.
I think you're both right, to some extent. The SAT is a good measure of a student's background knowledge, but grades can be a good measure of a student's work ethic.
For success in college, I think students need a good basic academic skill set and a good work ethic.
I’m all for getting rid of the new test and reverting to the old. It’s beyond retarded to have a writing section on a standardized test. In what way is that possibly standardized? Granted, everyone is asked the same question, but I refuse to accept that the reading of that question by a grader is a very revealing fact about someone’s future, particularly in a timed environment.
Go back to the old bubble sheets. Save the kids money. Let them get their results back earlier. Don’t make them sit so long writing essays.
Interesting story, though. There was a fairly well known character who got rejected at top 3 law school with an LSAT of either 178 or 179 (perfect is 180). Can’t remember which. In any case, there’s an essay section on the LSAT that is roundly ignored by admissions committees. Apparently this guy chose to draw stick figures stabbing themselves with knives. ;) (Which frankly, most of us would have rather done than complete the pointless exercise)
In speaking to the AdComs about why he was rejected, they said they had but one: and it was that essay. It may be the first admissions decisions ever made off that worthless exercise futility. :)
The SAT stopped being used as a valid indicator of intelligence after 1994. Mensa and other high IQ societies find it not indicative of intelligence after then.
Females proportionally take far more opinion-based classes in college than males. It's a lot easier to get an A in women's studies, for example, than physics. We cannot have people designing overpasses who BS'd their way through college, but in many classes, no one even knows what is learned.
In fact many college classes no longer give a final exam, preferring a paper. I believe that the profs don't want to know how little actual knowledge their students have acquired.
Yes, but aren’t those college results at least partly based on students who were matched to appropriate colleges with the help of their SAT scores? That is, take an A student from your average inner-city school and drop him/her into Harvard and it’ll be a much bigger challenge than one so placed from a top competitive suburban school.
That may be the case. But nevertheless, grades are a better predictor of college success than the SAT. So the point remains, why bother to use it as a benchmark?
The difference is slight. But give the SAT a break. It has a couple of hours to assess someone. A high school GPA has four years.
Considering that, the predictive value of the SAT is pretty impressive. Furthermore, if you removed from the calculations some of the college courses that are not predicted well by the SAT because they have little academic content (e.g. art, dance), the predictive value of the SAT might very well be above the h.s. grade point average.
Interesting. Does Mensa no longer accept SAT scores for membership, but still use the GRE, LSAT, etc.?
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