@Data10@CaliDad2020 My apologies for triggering you into defensive paroxysms with my Dartmouth remark. If you change Jared’s grades to B+ (or A- whatever) or change the name “Dartmouth” to wherever the B- Jareds go, my argument still stands. Yes, Dorothy’s intelligence will be revealed in various ways in her application – not by being a Siemens semifinalist, however, since they don’t hail from podunks – but for adcoms who have doubts it will be confirmed by the test.
@CaliDad2020 Statistically, Jared will have a higher SAT than the inner-city tuba kid. Again, that’s why the tuba kid has potentially more to gain from the exam than Jared does.
@Data10 I found this remark of yours very clear & helpful: “Highly selective colleges want students to be successful and get mostly As (or equivalent), regardless of high school attended. It’s better to be an A student at a small public HS that offers few AP/IB/DE classes than to be a B student at a rigorous private HS while being stressed out taking 10 AP/IB/DE classes.” And yet I’m not sure how comforting straight-A Dorothy would find this, since (from what I read) the students admitted to the top universities all have As… and the As from the “rigorous private” HS are more valuable. If only there were a test.
You mean “if only there were a test that did not tilt the playing field toward higher socio-economic kids of college degree holding parents who go to schools that offer the PSAT and good test-prep during school hours…”
"Here’s a simple question to ask any student: If colleges told you your admissions results would be the same with our without SAT/ACT would you still take the PSAT, SAT, ACT, and/or SAT?
Let me know what they say."
That’s a strawman lol, what if you told the kids, taking APs would not affect college admission, would they take them? And to answer your question, quite a few kids would take the PSAT because of the scholarship. PSAT scores are not considered in admissions and are not required, yet 3.5M people take them, so that’s your answer.
Brings me back to my question - why the same kid would get a 6 point spread just a year and a half apart, if that test “really” measures intelligence.
ACT has never claimed to measure intelligence, in fact when I was in hs in the 80’s, the GCs said that ACT is more an achievement test and sat as the name implies an aptitude test. College board did position SAT as intelligence with the implication that studying for it wouldn’t help. Which of course was disproven, on the verbal where you can study vocabulary and math where enough practice would benefit.
Neither the current SAT nor ACT supposedly measure IQ yet Satchel is saying that’s not true.
You can probably raise your score on both tests with study but most get easier/faster results by learning some basic tricks around guessing, reading comprehension strategies, ACT science graph reading, etc.
Life in America tilts “toward higher socio-economic kids of college degree holding parents who go to schools that offer the PSAT and good test-prep during school hours…” Removing the SAT won’t tilt it back.
I’ll use Boston Latin as an example since they used to post college acceptances by GPA. In their 2013 list (the most recent I have seen), no students were accepted to Ivy-type colleges with less than an 3.75 GPA. If you change Jared’s grades to B+ or A-, he still isn’t likely to get in to an Ivy. If you change the names from Dartmouth to where the few 2.67 GPA students go, then you’ll start getting in to unselective colleges, which are unlikely to put much weight to school name, so again little benefit.
Yes, there is some benefit to being among the few top students at a high rigorous high school while taking a challenging curriculum over being one of the few top students at a smaller, public that doesn’t offer a challenging curriculum. However, this doesn’t mean the smaller, public kid is out of luck or has no options to display “intellectual vitality” or take more challenging courses.
For example, I attended a public high school in a small town. It wasn’t Podunk level, but there were only 3 available AP classes. I was in the unique situation of being at advanced level because one of my 9th (might have been 8th) grade teachers recognized that I’d do better with independent study at my own pace than going at the class pace. I worked the teacher and my GC to support this, and did quite well while studying textbooks + other material independently instead of going to class and having homework/quizzes, going at double or triple standard class pace. I also worked with the GC and a nearby university to help setup a half-time type schedule between the HS and university where I’d take morning classes in HS, then drive to the university for afternoon classes. As far as I know, nobody form my HS had done anything like this before. The classes I selected at the university weren’t just the usual continuing math sequence to multi-variable calculus and linear algebra. Instead I took several classes in electives for no reason other than they seemed fascinating to me. For example, I particularly enjoyed a class called biopsychology and behavioral neuroscience. I received A’s in all of these classes. One of my professors mentioned that he was quite surprised and impressed that I was a HS student when I asked him for a LOR and seemed quite enthusiastic to write it, so I suspect my LORs and GC recommendation stood out more than the would have at a selective private HS, as did my curriculum rigor and “intellectual vitality”. When college acceptances came, I was accepted to Stanford, MIT, and Ivies; even though my stats were below average for all the schools I applied to.
It is not really about race and ethnicity as much as it is about parental educational attainment.
San Francisco and San Jose have similar populations (San Jose around 15% larger). San Francisco is about 42% white and 33% Asian, while San Jose is about 29% white and 32% Asian (2010 numbers). Median household income is similar in both cities. So if you subscribe to the race and ethnicity explanation, the two cities should have fairly similar numbers of students in the NM lists.
In actuality, the 2017 NMSF count shows that there are about 7 times as many NMSFs in San Jose (224) as San Francisco (32). This is not surprising when you look at the large number of people working in San Jose area computer companies who originally immigrated to the US as PhD students or skilled workers (i.e. high educational attainment). So it is no surprise that they, regardless of race or ethnicity, have educationally high performing kids. Of course, some think that this is all genetics, but high educational attainment parents also tend to provide home environments that promote intellectual development as well as being engaged with schools, so one cannot really dismiss nurture as a component of the kids’ achievement (though both nurture and nature, in whatever proportion, are to these kids’ advantage).
If environment does not matter to someone’s intellectual development, I would expect the devotees of this notion, when shopping for houses to buy or rent, to disregard “K-12 school quality” as a factor in what neighborhood to live in. Indeed, that would probably save them considerable amounts of money, since they are confident that their kids’ intellectual development will not be affected by such environmental factors rather than just by their genetic inheritance.
Absolutely the “it’ll be over before you’ll feel a thing” issue is what tends to keep this a persistent problem.
But that doesn’t mean it should not be examened and highlighted.
It’s just interesting that so many students and parents willingly allow colleges to outsource admissions work to them, in exchange for them paying SAT/ACT admins lots of money.
But if parents and students are willing to do it, for sure SAT and many Colleges aren’t going to willingly stop…
“It is not really about race and ethnicity as much as it is about parental educational attainment.”
If this were true, we would see similar scores between races when matched for SES. Of course, we don’t even see anything close. Linda Wightman’s law school study is worth reading for the data presented, even if her arguments are weak and uncompelling. Blacks from the highest SES group - meaning both parents had graduate or professional degrees - scored a full standard deviation lower than whites from the lowest SES group - parents with no college and often not even high school diplomas. See definitions on page 41 and data table on page 42 here: http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawReview-72-1-Wightman.pdf.
This is an even worse showing than on the SAT, where highest SES blacks tend to score just a tiny bit lower than the lowest SES whites. The reason is obvious. After four years of shared college experience, the environments have become more equalized between the two groups, which allows the innate differences to predominate. If environment mattered so much we would expect gaps to close with schooling, but in fact we observe just the opposite.
It’s about intelligence. It just so happens that intelligence is correlated with race, ethnicity, and parental education, and many people have a supremely difficult time accepting that.
“In actuality, the 2017 NMSF count shows that there are about 7 times as many NMSFs in San Jose (224) as San Francisco (32). This is not surprising when you look at the large number of people working in San Jose area computer companies who originally immigrated to the US as PhD students or skilled workers (i.e. high educational attainment).”
The parents in the bay area (San Jose in your example) don’t have high educational attainment if you mean doctorates. Many of them also come from traditional households in Asia where the mother only got an undergrad and is staying at home to raise the kids. The fathers are skilled sure, but they do not have Phds out here, they have a masters, and that’s about it. The PHd students came in the 70s and 80s while the parents out here came in the 90s in the tech boom and only have a masters or bachelors.
In any case, the NMSF difference between San Francisco and San Jose is not about racial superiority as seems to be commonly claimed in this thread (and household incomes are similar in both cities).
Housing decisions aren’t that simple. Using your logic, no one should pay more to live in areas with good public schools when they send their kids to private schools. But many people do just that.
You clearly have a bee up your bonnet about standardized tests. And apparently think everyone else should as well. Though if you talk to friends and read threads here I think what you will see is most people applying to colleges are struggling with a process that is complicated, confusing, intimidating and frustrating. And on the list of complaints that people have about that process, having to take standardized tests (assuming they don’t already need to take them for other reasons – such as to satisfy graduation requirements) is pretty low on the list. That combined with the fact that there is nothing they can do to change it leads to so few people complaining about having to submit standardized tests.
Again, what is their alternative? Should they submit applications to colleges that require tests but just not take the tests and expect to get in anyway? Should they march in the streets over the “injustice” of it all? Should they write letters of their government leaders demanding change? To college presidents and admissions officers? Should their kids hold off applying to college until standardized tests are abolished from the face of the Earth?
Let’s look at a hypothetical parent of a freshmen in high school. Like you, they despise standardized tests and view everyone associated with then as evil incarnate. But their kid wants to go to college in 4 years. What would you like to see them do? What is your advice to them? What would make you happy with respect to this issue?
“In any case, the NMSF difference between San Francisco and San Jose is not about racial superiority as seems to be commonly claimed in this thread (and household incomes are similar in both cities).”
I just did a quick perusal of the SF list and looks like 50% are Asian, 50% white, while in SJ it’s 80% Asian, 20% white, and the SAT demographic data have Asians and whites having the highest scores. NMSF scores support the racial superiority theory not reject it.
"It’s just interesting that so many students and parents willingly allow colleges to outsource admissions work to them, in exchange for them paying SAT/ACT admins lots of money.
But if parents and students are willing to do it, for sure SAT and many Colleges aren’t going to willingly stop…"
And parents aren’t going to stop paying for private counselors, or tapping their powerful friends to get their kids app pushed to the top of the pile or asking grandparents to pay for elite prep/private schools to gain that leg up on another student.
The two cities have similar populations and similar percentage Asian (SF has higher percentage white and lower percentage others than SJ). SES is similar. So what explains the 7 times difference?
Note that going by your percentages, there are more white NMSF in SJ than all NMSF in SF.
This is OT, but still wondering what you thought about those UCSD GPA numbers?
I wonder what the reason would be for = or lesser SAT-scored women to earn GPA averages so consistently higher in Engineering.
Interestingly, someone pointed out a recent MIT study found similar results:
“Graduating females have statistically higher grade point averages (GPAs) than their male counterparts, controlling for major.2 Furthermore, while an average of 94.0% of females in the 2001 to 2009 fall cohort years graduated within six years, only 90.6% of males graduated in the same amount of time.”
Why would male students consistently record 30 point higher SAT math scores on average, yet not perform better than women earning equal or lower SAT scores in math-intensive programs or Colleges for GPA or graduation rates?
Is it possible at the top end, SAT Math is not a great predictor of collegate success?
@nikolateslaxi
“Validity” studies dating way back to at least 1975 have shown the limited, short term value of SAT scores in predicting college freshman and sophomore GPA performance. HS GPA/RIC were always much better predictors of college GPA results than were the SAT. By the third year of college, the secondary school test score variances were not significant predictors of the variances in college GPAs.
NOTE: The scores used in these analysis of variance studies were not comparing 400 level SAT scores to 700 level scores, but were comparing scores over about a 150 point range from about 600 to 750. These were engineering student performance studies where the verbal scores did not play a significant role in the typical math/science freshman/sophomore course load. These test used classical econometric analysis of variance which is a more reliable analysis than simple correlations.
Many students from the top 10% of their secondary school class are disturbed when they do not achieve a stratospheric test score. It bothers me that these students are judging themselves by these test scores and doubting their own abilities because of a day’s test. Such a conclusion is bad science!
Armed with this knowledge, students, parents and guidance counselors should take a fresh look at the HYP test fever and understand better why many admissions offices are no longer using them as a primary means for selecting their freshman class. The quality of the secondary school and the rigor of selected courses should not be pushed aside in the name of a higher test score.
When only 5% of applicants are accepted by a given school you will find little quantifiable evidence as to why one student was selected over another, but we beat ourselves up trying to determine the logic of the process.
Pick a school that challenges you and mentors you to grow in the direction you want to go and stop anguishing over the test scores. These scores are NOT predicting your future! There is strong evidence that the HYP set is not even guaranteeing your future.