<p>In my local paper, no less:</p>
<p>Same is true at Bowdoin, which has been SAT-optional for even longer than Bates - and it hasn't hurt either the fantastic quality of a Bowdoin education, or the students who still manage to graduate at very high rates! So it even "works" for Top Ten schools. I have no problem with this!</p>
<p>I thought that this part of the column by Dewayne Wickham was particularly interesting:
"The biggest beneficiary of the school's decision to make the submission of SAT scores optional turns out to be white students. By a ratio of 5 to 1, white students have outnumbered minority students who sought to enter Bates without submitting any college entrance test scores. A large percentage of these white students came from rural areas or low- income families. </p>
<p>But despite this eclectic educational mix, Hiss said, there has been virtually no difference in the way these students have performed at Bates. The cumulative grade point average for students who used the SAT to get into the school is 3.11 out of a possible 4.0. The cumulative GPA for those who didn't is 3.06. </p>
<p>Then there's this: The graduation rate of students who got into Bates without submitting their SAT scores is 86.7. The graduation rate for those who did is 86.6. "</p>
<p>They found the same thing at Smith (where they tried to find a link between SATs among accepted and entering students and on-campus performance -- I think they will go SAT optional shortly). And Mount Holyoke is about to complete its study next year.</p>
<p>Of course, the big daddy was the UC system, and what the chancellor found in his study.</p>
<p>It's very interesting to juxtpose this argument with its counterarguments, some of which were made over the last few days on CC :</p>
<p>"Teachers' recs should be done away with. They are useless. They don't really say anything about the student."</p>
<p>"Essays should be done away with. Who knows what kind of help students got in writing their essays?"</p>
<p>"How can one compare GPAs from different schools?"</p>
<p>No easy way to reconcile these views. But I would be interested to learn the volume of applications handled by schools that do not consider SATs. How feasible would it be to avoid using standardized test scores in favor of one that put greater emphasis on other parts of the application?</p>
<p>When Mount Holyoke said that they would go SAT optional for 5 years they also believed that that there would be no change in the candidates who were admitted.</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>When Mount Holyoke said that they would go SAT optional for 5 years they also believed that that there would be no change in the candidates who were admitted.>></p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>It would be equally interesting to find out whether the pool of applicants changed as a result of the SAT optional. I also picked up on the info that NSM quoted. Did minority students feel they needed to continue submitting SAT scores to bolster their applications (and to defend themselves against arguments that they were advantaged in the admission process)?</p>
<p>Here' the Mt. Holyoke link:</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>Findings from the Mount Holyoke Study:</p>
<p>First, there is no significant effect of race on the probability of submitting scores. Interestingly, the coefficients on the black and Hispanic indicator variables are positive suggesting that, if anything, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to submit scores than whites, ceteris paribus.</p>
<p>This appears to contradict the prediction that applicants with other characteristics that are
desirable to the institution would be less likely to submit their scores. If there is affirmative action for minority applicants, then one would expect minority applicants to be less likely to submit their scores. On the other hand, a minority applicant may view a given SAT score as being more meritorious relative to her minority peers than the same score as a white applicant, and she may be more inclined to submit her score. Another interesting result is that the more affluent the applicant, as measured by the family contribution, the less likely one is to submit a score.</p>
<p>This result may indicate that applicants from wealthier families either have more a priori confidence that they will be admitted, perhaps because of the quality of the high school they attend. It may also be because a given SAT score may be viewed by an applicant from an affluent area of the country as being less noteworthy, in comparison to her peers, than the same score obtained by an applicant from a less well-to-do area of the country. </p>
<p>As a result, the more affluent applicant may be more likely to withhold her test score, while the less affluent applicant submits her score. An alternative explanation is simply that the wealthier applicants may be better informed about the admissions process and perhaps more adept at playing the admissions game and making strategic choices about whether to submit their scores.</p>
<p>Sybbie:</p>
<p>I have the same interpretation as you. It would thus make sense that there is no difference in terms of grades or graduation rates between students who submit SATS and those who don't, if they have similar SAT scores. We assume that those who achieved stellar SATs would submit them, even though aware that they do not need to.</p>
<p>The Smith study was different, as all students were still required to submit SAT scores. Rather they asked whether there was an association between higher SAT scores and greater academic success. The answer was no. The second question was whether the use of SATs worked against Smith's commitment to economic diversity. The answer again was yes. (In other words, it could be said that low-income students who were admitted had lower SAT scores, but did as well academically. Of course, it could be interpreted differently. However, I'd also be willing to bet that, over the long-term - and it would require a longer-term study - fewer of these low-income students went on to medical or law schools, as they had fewer expectations of being able to pay for it.)</p>
<p>I think the only reasonable conclusion from the bulk of the studies is that the required use of SAT does not serve the institution's interests, unless the institution's interests are to admit higher percentages of high income students (the Prez of Williams, in his airline analogy, argues precisely for that - knowing that having lots of high income students does not prejudice them against admitting - and paying for - a certain percentage of low-income ones.)</p>
<p>But let's add even another caveat: Bowdoin's policy has not resulted in significant changes on their part in their entitlement index (percentage of students receiving no financial aid, private school students, Pell Grant recipients.) In other words, maybe the SAT doesn't matter one way or the other. (And if doesn't matter one way or the other, why have it get in the way of other stuff? Isn't the key line in the Mount Holyoke study that students who didn't send in their scores "were rated more highly than they would have been otherwise"?)</p>
<p>The reason that SATs (or other standardized tests) should be a part of the application process is the same as the reason that any other individual item of the application should be a part of the application process. By having multiple formats for assessment, there are checks and balances in the system. Discrepancies or anomalies warrant clarification or explanation. No individual item is as valid as the whole, each of which have their flaws if used as a sole indicator.</p>
<p>There are many students at our school who aim for education in the UK or Australia. They are taking IB and their preliminary acceptance(in the UK- Australia is different as they follow a southern hemisphere calendar for school) is based upon their predicted IB scores. Then, over a series of weeks the students take individual IB exams. Sometimes, they do as well as predicted, sometimes they do better, sometimes they do worse. If they do better- they cannot reapply to programs requiring higher IB scores than they were predicted to acheive, and if they fall below the acceptable range for their given course/college, then they are out of luck.</p>
<p>There are other elements of their applications, but fundamentally it comes down to how they do on one test on one day. As flawed as the US system might be, it still takes into consideration a more wholistic view of the student, and gives them a chance to have more "good days" should they have one bad day.</p>
<p>If some schools can achieve their objectives in admissions without referring to any objective standards, then more power to them. Certainly we don't have to have all universities or colleges behave the same for admissions, as they are not all the same and do not aspire to be.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to see a school try the obverse and do away with recommendations, grades, and other subjective evaluations. I daresay the result would be equally satisfactory. In a way, the non-ranking movement is a step in that direction. Is it not?</p>
<p>The reality is that the applicant pool for most selective universities is replete with kids who are rejected, but whom by any standard could do as well as those kids who are accepted. It would be interesting for schools who use the SAT as part of their admissions process to post the SAT ranges for those students they reject as well as those for the students they accept!!</p>
<p>In the year I was a college senior and applying the medical school the MCAT was radically changed. We really didn't know how to prepare for it, and we were advised to "not worry" too much as it was presumed that the medical schools wouldn't know what to make of it either. Essentially, we all were evaluaded based upon grades, recommendations etc.</p>
<p>I daresay that my classmates and I, attending a highly selective and well known university were at a huge advantage that particular year over students attending less well known or well thought of schools. Given the lack of a single tool to judge all students by- much had to do with the prestige of the institution the undergraduate student attended.</p>
<p>If there was not a single objective standard (flawed as it may be), kids attending less well known HS might be at a disadvantage. The student from an unknown school in a sense can validate their great results by subjective review by doing well in objective testing.</p>
<p>"If some schools can achieve their objectives in admissions without referring to any objective standards, then more power to them."</p>
<p>The question is, and always has been, what is being "objectively measured". The College Board puts forward very limited claims for the SAT. They do not claim it measures "aptitude" - in fact, they took the word out of the title so as to make sure people wouldn't think it did. They do not claim it measures "achievement" (in fact, they set up an entire set of "achievement" tests for that purpose.) They make one single claim: the SAT measures first year college performance. It is a limited claim, but you could argue an objectively useful one.</p>
<p>Only problem was that their largest customer - the University of California discovered it was, for their students, false. They could not find a correlation between SAT scores and first-year college performance. What they did find is that it screened out qualified minority and low-income students who otherwise might do fine in their first year. That was "objective". It is not a matter of a flawed "objective standard"; it is an objective standard that works, but not for what was claimed for it.</p>
<p>That's the whole point: study after study shows the same thing. SATs objectively measure 1) NOT parental income, but average income of the geographic area surrounding the school and/or that of the entire study body (for private schools); and 2) highest educational attainment of one parent. It IS an objective measure, just not the one that is claimed for it. But (and this is the kicker) schools without a public mission like the University of California might actually LIKE what it is the SAT objectively measures. (Remember the Williams Pres' airline analogy - in this case it screens for qualified, full-paying customers.) And they are allowed - it is their money.</p>
<p>Anyhow, their largest customer rebelled. And so they are back to the drawing boards. Consider the investment they have made, not only in the tests, but in test-prep services. Losing their biggest customer was a BIG thing.</p>
<p>I think perhaps the most disturbing fact, is that black students coming from families earning $70,000 and more are doing worse on their SATS, on average--it's always on average--than white students and Asian American students from families in the lowest income group. You want to cry hearing that figure. It's a terrible fact of life that has not been explained.</p>
<p>The POOREST Asian Americans from families incomes of less than 20k/year with parents with a high school diploma or less outperform on the SAT I and achieve higher GPAs, and take more difficult courses than the richest blacks from family incomes of 100k/year and parents with college and graduate degrees. In fact, the poorest Asian Americans living in the poorest neighborhoods outperform whites in more affluent neighborhoods. </p>
<p>That's the well known DARK secret that the politically correct flaming liberals refuse to acknowledge.</p>
<p>Source; The College Board</p>
<p>Fact #1</p>
<p>Black children from the wealthiest families have mean SAT scores lower than white children and Asian Americans from families below the poverty line.</p>
<p>Fact #2 </p>
<p>Black children of parents with graduate degrees have lower SAT scores than white or Asian children of parents with a high-school diploma or less. </p>
<p>From the College Board data, you will discover that Asians mostly sit on top of the heap; that whites, Mexican Americans and blacks follow in that order. Some details prove interesting. For example, whites enjoy a verbal advantage over Asians that disappears at high levels of income and social advantage. Regrettably, the College Board no longer discloses these data. In 1996, they stopped publishing performance by income and parental education disaggregated by race and ethnicity.</p>
<p>Check out;</p>
<p>See APPENDIX B. SAT 1995 DATA AND GRAPHS</p>
<p>for the actual data to verify the facts above.</p>
<p>The solution for closing these racial gaps of lower average achievement among ALL blacks and latinos is not the Band-Aid approach of race-based affirmative action.
It is solved by improving the K-12 schools for the lower economic classes which are disproportionately Black and Latino.</p>
<p>The question is , 'Why is this so ??". </p>
<p>What are the root causes for this OVERALL UNDERPERFORMANCE AND UNDERACHIEVEMENT of all blacks, including the most affluent blacks?? </p>
<p>That's the crux of the problem, and until you find the reasons for this, the racial gaps in academic achievement will never be narrowed or closed.
.</p>
<p>My D3 is currently in the application process and her top choices are all Canadian schools. The admissions process there is very different than in the U.S. There is no requirement for SATs (except for American students). There are no letters of recommendation. There are no essays (except for a very few special programs). In Ontario, there is a central clearing house for applications. It's all done online, with the application and transcripts flowing through this clearing house. On the ONE general application, students specify which universities that they want their information to go to, and there is one charge for three choices of university. Each one over three has an additional charge. For Ontario students, the admission decision is based on the marks achieved in specified final year courses. This has changed in the past year as a result of Ontario eliminating the fifth year of high school, but they used to be called Ontario Academic Credit courses, and the universities would average the top six and go from there. So, basically the decision is grade driven. Programs publicize what grades they're setting as minimums and so applicants know what is expected. Ontario schools do not rank their grads.</p>
<p>This is the system that has been in place for years and it seems to work just fine. I'm not saying that it could be easily implemented here because the system is different in that the 'quality' (for want of a better word) and uniformity is more equal in Ontario universities than it is in the U.S. The differences are smaller, would be another way to put it. I just wanted to point out that it is, indeed, possible to make admissions decisions without the quasi-benefit of SATs, letters of recommendation, class rank, etc.</p>
<p>Mini, you have the same take on this stuff repeatedly. Let me pose a hypothetical, but simple question.</p>
<p>If we were able to eliminate all income differences in the country, does it then follow that all SAT scores would fall into a very tight, statistically non-significant range? I say that they would not. Your mischaracterization of the SAT as a proxy for income is balderdash, or whatever the appropriate smack word for today would be. </p>
<p>As Robrym noted above, the SAT is a big help to put the kids from the unknown, non-favored places (high schools) on a more equal footing with the ones where there is a bias towards them to begin with, based on past experiences. I was a beneficiary of the SAT. It was instrumental in getting me admitted to a top university as a first generation college student from an Appalachian family background; and it sure as heck didn't measure my family's income... or those around us. It does correlate with certain cultural values and behaviors that might also correlate with incomes. This is the point that has been made often by Asian students in response to this "income proxy" argument. </p>
<p>In any case, I don't think that the UC chancellor found that there was NO correlation between first year performance and SAT scores. The arguments that they make tend to be that the scores don't significantly add to the other information. Actually, they are only able to contort their study to get to this result by designing it so that grades also have little predictive ability. They ought to be ashamed to refer to this garbage as a study. </p>
<p>Here is a decent argument against the Atkinson UC idea.</p>
<p>To give equal time, here is a link to another set of viewpoints with which I disagree.</p>
<p>I note that the examples in the fairtest article indicate poor predictive ability for nearly all data, including grades. This is because to get the correlations low enough to conemn the test, you have to throw out the grades too. If you believe these studies, what we should do is simply throw darts or have a bingo drawing, since the highest combination of predictors only accounts for 20% of the variation in freshman grades. </p>
<p>To me, this is a simple issue of whether one wants to put on blinders to useful data, or face up to realities and deal with them accordingly. So far most schools have been doing the latter, but the imperative to transmogrify the university from a learning institution to a priviledge rectifier seems to be all consuming for some academic administrations. Fortunately, there are more than a few administrators that agree that such tests are useful. For those who don't feel so, they have the option of going the Bates route. </p>
<p>I suspect that if the no-test route became widely popular, schools would find that their success in admissions decisions deteriorated. Right now it works OK at those schools because they get a good self-selection from a unique policy.</p>
<p>Just wondering, if some schools use SAT scores to ensure a higher percentage of high income students, why would they need the SAT scores to do that? Couldn't they just look at high schools and do pretty much the same thing? Without SAT scores, might kids from less known or less wealthy high schools, or less traditional settings, have even LESS of a shot? And aren't SAT scores used more heavily at many larger universities and honors and merit programs than they are at some elites?</p>
<p>Mini:</p>
<p>Just try admitting the freshman class to CalTech without the use of the SAT I and SAT II tests. It is exponentially more difficult to achieve a 1540 (mean score for Caltech) than a a 1200+ for Bates. An 1100 or 1200 scorer, if admitted to Caltech, would more than likely not graduate, or if he/she graduates, it would be at the bottom of the class taking the LEAST rigorous courses. If you looked at the SAT I distribution of Caltech, I doubt there are many 1100 or 1200 scorers, simply because Caltech, refuses to lower standards in admissions to their most rigorous courses of study. You can't GUT your way through Caltech, as you can GUT your way through Bates, Mt. Holyoke, or Smith with the liberal arts.</p>