"BIG SCORE: When Mom Takes the SATs" by Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker, March 3, 2014)

[ucbalumnus]

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@QuantMech

Given the variability in average grades in courses in different majors, the SAT’s aggregate predictive capability for freshman-year grades seems like a pointless statistic to me. If there are studies of the predictive capability within majors in the same university, that would probably be useful. For quite a while at my university, faculty members used to provide academic advising for our undergraduate majors. I had only a small sample of that group, but can say that generally speaking, it seemed like an uphill trudge for a student with SAT M below 650 to major in physics or chemistry. The overwhelming majority of students in that group shifted majors, even when they were encouraged to stick with it. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if their GPA’s shifted up when they changed majors.

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<p>Perhaps relevant to what you observed: <a href=“[1011.0663] Nonlinear Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics”>http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.0663&lt;/a&gt;
This paper describes the relation between the SAT math score and how well physics and math majors did. They found little success in those majors for SAT math scores <600 – not exactly a surprise that students who have trouble with the low level high school algebra and geometry on the SAT math have trouble with the more advanced math encountered as physics and math majors. No similar threshold was found for other majors, and they found that SAT scores were quite “noisy” as predictors of college performance.</p>