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Cal Schools May Nix SAT In Admissions Process

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the news-for-the-college-bound-nerd dept.

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?)

3 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. It's a feedback loop by vectro · · Score: 5

    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.

    1. Re:It's a feedback loop by JeffL · · Score: 5
      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 people who study and work hard to perform better on the SATs will tend to get better scores on the SATs than those who slacked off. Guess which two skills are extremely important in relation to getting good grades in college? Studying and working hard. In general (always exceptions) people who study and work hard in college make better grades than those who slack off.

      I have a list of words that have appeared on SAT tests in the past, and you have a different list. We take the same test, and just by chance 10% of my words were on the test, but 20% of yours, so you do a little better (because otherwise we are pretty equal in our abilities). This is called error, and anybody using the results of the test should take this into account. If we both took the test again (another version) maybe I would do a little better because this time my words are all over the place. The admission committees knows this, and won't (unless they are stupid) think that somebody who scored an 1150 is clearly a better student than somebody who scored an 1130, though they both will probably do better in school than somebody who scored a 1000.

  2. Re:Political Logic by JeffL · · Score: 5
    We don't like the SAT test, since its results disagree with our vision of a fair and perfect world. Therefore, the test is defective and must be eliminated.

    Yes, this is exactly it. These tests, and standards based admissions, and GPAs, and grades themselves all suggest that people are different. Because so many people take literally the statement "all men are created equal" they think that these tests are somehow evil. Of course what "all men are created equal" means, is that all people should be given equal opportunities. Everybody is allowed to go to high school, but some people blow it there (or, through lack of ability, fail to do well), so they are then not given equal access to college. This is how a merit based system (such as our educational process) is supposed to work.

    I am not saying this is a perfect world, of course people are not given equal opportunities, which is the whole point of the civil rights movement. The SATs and other standardized tests do not judge equally across different minority groups, and the reasons for this are not understood. Is it possible to quantify hundreds of years of keeping a group down into a few bonus points on a test?

    Many Americans seem to have a problem with the suggestion that some people are smarter than others, and that some people have a better shot at doing well in society than others. The logical conclusion to this thinking (because we can only make people smarter to a limited degree) is to make everybody dumber (which is much easier than making people smarter).