Slashdot Mirror
Cal Schools May Nix SAT In Admissions Process
An unnamed correspondent writes: "The University of California school systems is considering to stop using SAT scores in college admissions. Story at Yahoo." The usual double-edged sword here: the SATs, ACTs and similar tests may be close to worthless, but other factors (like how GPAs [?]
are calculated and weighted) varies wildly from school to school. (What might a GPA of 3.9 at Stuyvesant High be worth elsewhere, for instance?)
OR, is it the kids whose parents pay for $900 Kaplan courses who will do better? There's a huge industry around preparing people for these tests, and it's not at all fair to poorer students who just can't afford that sort of resources.
No, I'm not saying that smart kids can't do well without such courses - that's how I was myself. But the existence of high-priced prep courses definitely does bias things towards people who can afford them.
There is no easy magic bullet when you come to testing. Every test is going to be unfair to some group or other, and you will have to take that into account. That said, there can come a time when it becomes clear that a certain test's flaws outweigh its utility, and you should ditch it.
I don't think the tests are worthless. Granted, they gauge a very limited area of knowledge and are not be all and end all evaluations of intelligence. I think eliminating the SATs entirely is a mistake. They should include other tests in other subjects as well as other types of testing rather than "multiple guess". This will allow universities and colleges to get rough assessments of a person quickly while giving students who may not perform very well in certain conditions the opportunity to demonstrate that they can excel in other situations.
Humorless sig goes here.
The whole school system should be setup to push each student to the maximum of their potential, regardless of how high or low it is. Sucks if my kid isn't as smart as that other one, but don't stop teaching calculus in high school, just because some of the kids won't do well in it.
In a letter Dr. Atkinson sent to the University of California's faculty senate today and in a speech he will give here on Sunday to the American Council on Education, an advance copy of which the
school released tonight, Dr. Atkinson criticized the reliance on SAT's to rank students for admission to schools, saying that they are "not compatible with the American view on how merit should be defined and opportunities distributed."
How will they define merit? Will this "holistic" approach consider test scores and gpa's from highschool take differences between schools into account? By no account will that remove bias. Both the schools that grade students and the ways those grades would be weighted in university admissions processes will be biased. That could lead to the wholesale exclusion of students from certain regions from the best schools, due to a lack of any universal ranking factor that disregards the quality of their highschool educational systems.
Furthermore, stuff like advanced placement tests are not a good solution. It takes money to train teachers to teach administer the yearly AP classes.
Unless the poorest schools, in the poorest regions, get federal money to introduce a better universal standard of measuring highschoolers, lets not replace the one we've got.
Goat sex free since 2001
Place 30 high school students in a class room. Throw some computers in there. Maybe some books on philosophy, and some beakers, chemicals and a few classic text books. Observe the kids, watch which ones play with the toys. If a kid needs more equipment supply it. Also note the students who complain about the sitution. Ask them what they would rather be doing. If they say i'd rather be outside playing football, they probably don't belong in college.
The students who enjoy playing with ideas, inventing and learning are the students who belong in college.
There is nothing wrong with those who don't belong in college there just differnt and for them to pretend to be something there not would be a tragedy.
Time is Change
It's possible to design a good standardized test. But the test won't stay good.
The problem is that tests like the SAT are based on the idea of correlation - you can find various things, such as the ability to make word analogies, that corelate well with the thing you're trying to measure, in this case, university aptitude.
But the problem is that once you've done this, everyone who wants to do well on your test will start studying the things that are on the tests. Over time, the cumulative effect is that your corelation is distorted.
The SAT has come to the point where teachers focus on it far too much. So, either drastic changes are needed now to the form of the test (e.g. different types of questions), in addition to ongoing periodic changes, or another method of identifying aptitude is necessary. It appears that the University of California (the Santa Cruz campus of which I am writing this from) is taking the latter approach, perhaps because ETS was unwilling to take the former.
The next time the Doctor says my blood pressure is too high, I will tell him the test is unfair and that he should use an instrument that only produces normal readings.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I went to a prep school for my last three years of high school, where I continued to slack in my classes. I did well in extra-curriculars, but I was a mediocre student. However, I rocked my SATs, SAT IIs, and AP tests. I used this to show schools that I was a capable individual and got an opportunity to attend an elite school.
Does this jive with America's sense of the Protestant Work Ethic and working hard to achieve? Absolutely not. Did I do reasonably well in College? Yes, although a little more effort and I'd have done well. However, my grades alone wouldn't have gotten me in.
I'm a middle-class white student, I'm NOT who he wants to help, I'm who he wants to hurt.
Here is the problem though. I went to a prep school with a decent reputation among many schools throughout the nation. As a result, the entire top 20% of my school attended elite schools. My school's reputation got relatively dumb kids with high GPAs at a respectable school and mediocre test scores into good schools.
Those same kids in a local Public school no doubt would have had high GPAs and low test scores, but not been considered, because the low test scores would show that they weren't that swift.
All in all, this sounds good, right?
No. Without test scores, the only means of evaluating GPA is to look at the schools reputation. While this is fine for Private Schools or elite Public schools (magnets focusing on education in the South, special enterance exams in northeastern metropolitan cities, for example), but what about the poor kids from unknown schools?
Yeah, they'll get a 4.0 unweigthed GPA and rank in the top five or whatever at their school, but do you accept them? At a school you've never heard of in a poor area, you can assume that a 4.0 isn't of reasonable caliber for your school. What do you use, AP classes? If you're from a middle class suburb or attend a private school, AP classes may be the answer. If you're from a poor school area, you don't have that option.
Yes, money helps. You can't change that. What you CAN do is give people without money an opportunity. The kids with the expensive education and test prep have an advantage on the tests, but it isn't a guarantee.
In a scenario without the tests, the kids HAVE a guarantee. They are the only ones from high schools that schools have heard of. Without the tests, your poor kid with the 4.0 but no APs because they aren't offered and no SAT scores to back him up doesn't get in, but the kids from the private schools with 3.6 GPAs with a reputation for excellence do.
That isn't useful.
Admissions already adjusts for background. The UC system is absurd, allowing admission by test scores alone, which reduces their paperwork, but doesn't help. Their admissions process is too numeric, but they are processing too many applications for hands on evaluations. Schools normally have some kind of cut where they reduce their applicant pool by screening out a certain GPA range. Then admissions officers can make decisions. The poor kid with a 4.0 from a crappy school with a 1300 GPA is probably the equivalent of the wealthy kid with a 1400 GPA based upon the extra training and education. They CAN take that into account. They can't take race into account, but they can figure out the student's background. A poor white kid OR poor black kid should have that taken into account. A rich white kid OR rich black kid should have their background into account.
No, test scores don't substitute for discretion. But they allow you to justify things. If the kid with a 4.0 GPA had a 1000 SAT, he probably doesn't get in. But with a 1300, he does. Why? In the first case, you can't confirm his aptitude, in the second you can. Without the tests, you CAN'T confirm his aptitude AT ALL. You'd assume he is a 1000 SAT kid because he's from a crappy school and admit the known candidate from the prep school.
This man HAS NOT thought through his situation. They need to add more discretion, but they don't need to scrap the best means for helping people out.
I think the SAT is the least of our problems.
First of all, all us Slashdot readers are well aware of the whole "Hellmouth" scenario. That is, if it is absolutely crucial to test an adolescent's intelligence, high school is NOT the place to do it. High school is full of distractions: bitter teachers, bullies, thugs, social cliques, athletic competition, emphasis on passing state-based "dummy" aptitude tests, joke courses, pressure NOT to be the big nerd, extracirricular activities, etc. I'm not saying that all these factors are worthless to the education of a person... as a matter of fact, they ALL get us ready for the real world (bitter bosses, criminals, adult cliques, drinking games, taxes, insurance papers, and other bureaucratic forms, out-of-work interests and hobbies). But, by god, the high school system is so damaging today, that it's a horror that anyone would put any weight on the performance of a person who is currently dealing with it. I mean, what about the SAT scores of all those kids from Columbine... I bet the whole thing of "Our school was nearly bombed and some of my friends and teachers died" surely weighed down on more scores than helped them for the next year's SATs. I mean, that was at least a 3 month lapse in studying ridiculous lists of obscure vocabulary words....
Also, university admissions are already a mess today. I went through it myself... I applied to 7 schools, and they all had ridiculous-length admissions forms that needed to be hand-typed. I didn't apply to U.Penn simply because I didn't wanna type out another 20-page booklet! Nowadays, colleges are overcrowded, there are so many people trying to get in with all kinds of merits, there are no really reliable performance measures (the SAT is the best thing they've got), colleges are always trying to fill minority and culture quotas, and in the end they wind up with a bunch of party animals anyway.
And think of other priorities too. My best friend got into MIT with less than a 1300 on his SATs... he was 3rd in his class though, in a not-too-easy high school. But why did he get in? He'll even admit that he thinks it's because he was a good Division 3 football prospect, and he had a "good enough" brain to go with it. He didn't recieve a lick of scholorship money, though, and he needed the money, so he didn't go. He hardly regrets it, too.
I always think of how Princeton won't accept a lot of kids from New Jersey, being they don't want to be pegged out as a New Jersey school... but how they'll BRAG about how they let a student in who attached a picture to his application of him standing with his prizewinning cow in a corn field in Iowa. As it stands today, it's so much easier to get into an Ivy if you're from North Dakota than if you're from an East Coast metro area simply because the competition is a lot stiffer in those latter-mentioned regions. Schools want diversity, and they don't care if you're more than good enough for their school if they've already got enough kids from your area to attend.
And, to think, that many kids apply to 6-10 schools today just to make sure they get in somewhere. The flood of applications is overwhelming, and enrollments are not guaranteed based on acceptances. Some schools are picky and yet get jilted because students will pick a better scholarship deal elsewhere... other schools, like mine (U. Delaware), try to deal with overenrollment by cutting admissions... and they consistently get HIGHER enrollments every year anyway, simply because a higher percentage of admissions wind up enrolling every year.
Enough ranting, though. You get my point.
Any college admissions system worth it's salt has a multiple regression model that predicts the likely success of a student based on a variety of parameters - including the results of a standardized test like the SAT, the GPA, what school that GPA was attained at, what courses and track the student was enrolled in, and the extracurricular activities the student participated in, etc.
Questions like 'what is a 3.9 at Stuy' worth already have answers.
Blanket regection of standarized tests is stupid, for the simple reason that they provide a useful predictor of the likely success of a student.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Why, I wonder, is this considered? What about the SATs make them unbalanced... favored AGAINST minority students? It's not like the math questions involve how much insurance on Bentley's will cost, or finding the average price of Evian water over a three year period. I've always thought that these accusations of standardized testing being racist were unfounded.
Does anybody out there actually understand why they're often considered racist? I can't think of one solid reason.
--
--
RumorsDaily