I agree that SAT/ACTs are a good equalizer. Heck, even in my kids’ high school there are teachers that are known to be difficult and teachers that are known to be easy. I see it with my senior and my sophomore. An A for each in, let’s say, geometry, with two different teachers really isn’t an equal A. One of them worked a lot harder (and really learned more) had more assignments/quizzes/tests than the other. They didn’t even cover the same material. Teachers have favorites, some classes have long term subs that don’t really teach and just give out high grades to all, some teachers don’t “teach” at all and the kids have to go it alone… there are all sorts of reasons one A doesn’t equal another A. And that’s within the same school, so something adcoms can’t see. I think standardized testing helps show a broader picture of a student’s abilities.
@taverngirl I agree.
Many post that the admissions officers are familiar with the high schools in their regions and I am sure they do understand it at a very high level but I do not think they come close to knowing it at the teacher level. As you point out, an A in one teachers’s class could be easy to come by whereas this is not true in a different teacher’s class. I think the SAT/ACT are worthwhile and as others have stated, it is not that difficult or expensive to find help through a book or online at KhanAcademy, etc.
Re: employers hiring based on GPA and interview, as noted for some positions, there is some sort of “test” whether just asking questions in interviews etc. If science and engineering departments got to ask prospective students to do problems in interviews, admissions would look fairly different (I think the closest example for this might be interviews at elite UK universities).
But mostly, employers absolutely do not treat GPAs equally across different schools, or even across colleges and departments within schools. One of the biggest reasons for the fight to get into elite schools, is that the most prized (high paying) companies recruit much more extensively at elite universities, or special departments in other universities. One could argue colleges could do the same in recruiting students from high schools, but do you really want elite colleges to recruit mostly from say ten high schools the way the most “elite” companies primarily recruit from a small number of colleges? HS is an enormous and messy system with kids going to school where they live.
A last way to look at it is how do colleges know one HS is stronger than another? If it is nearby, they might have experience with a significant number of students from there. But otherwise, it is somewhat through the typical standardized test scores. At the college level, the incoming selectivity serves as a strong signaling device for this.
An additional comment: my kids’ school is only about 800 students. The majority go to in state unis or OOS big unis. My daughter is applying to almost all OOS small LACs. Naviance shows only a couple of kids, if that, applying and/or attending, so those adcoms aren’t really familiar with their high school/the types of kids that attend.
You do ignore the growing # of test optional colleges that agree with me…
The good news is there is less and less a “one size fits all” mentality to college admission but still the amount of time and money wasted on ACT/SAT prep and exams is staggering.
And I continue to argue that SAT/ACT in aggregate help the top 10% much more than the bottom 30% of the socio-economic ladder. But we are not going to agree, obviously.
It’s amazing the # of people who believe things “cause my school” but not “cause data.”
You can argue against @data10 data, like @SatchelSF but if you believe the data, and GPA is an accurate predictor, then what?
So to all those SAT is the great equalizer, I posted a graph showing income relative to SAT. How does that equalize anything?
Seems like you are describing the most elitist employers in consulting and investment banking.
According to NACE, about 70% of employers use cutoff GPAs to screen college applicants to go on to interviews, and about 60% of them set the cutoff GPA at 3.0. Obviously, this includes many employers that are much less elitist in their hiring practices.
@CaliDad2020 The growing list of test optional schools is a marketing ploy just to get more kids to apply and hike application numbers and make schools seem more competitive. It’s just like sending daily or near daily emails/mail to kids with certain SAT/ACT scores just to get them to apply, thinking they have a shot at a school with a < 20% acceptance rate. It’s all about matriculation and acceptance rates at the top. But not everyone needs or wants to go Ivy or top tier and pay $70K/year. And not everyone spends absurd amounts of money to prep. There are plenty of kids that want to go to the very best school they can get into that makes the most sense for the path they want to pursue. If there were no need for SAT/ACT scores, why do so many universities tag their merit money to them? Maybe they don’t out west, but they do in the midwest, east, and south. I understand this is another way for schools to boost their profiles, but it’s also a great way for kids to go to college without paying a ridiculous sum of money. Two of my three kids will or have taken advantage of strong test scores resulting in very healthy merit aid. This affords them the opportunity to go out of state or private and keep the price tag competitive with in state peers. And yes, this means they turned down acceptances to higher “ranked” universities, but at the end of the day, there are fewer and fewer people that think paying $280K is reasonable for an undergraduate degree. So, I will stick with the notion that testing has value. Very tangible value.
The same end game is visible in subject test land where a similar ‘backing off’ has been going on for some time. The SAT is likely to end up like the subject tests–boutique exams for a small minority of college bound students. Too bad I cannot short the College Board.
The reasons are different. The SAT subject tests (formerly Achievement tests) were never the primary college admission tests, even though they were probably more predictive of college performance than the SAT. So requiring the SAT subject tests meant that the college lost potentially admissible applicants who had not been informed of the need to take them.
I don’t know. Our large midwestern state universities find them useful tools to help sort through the very large number of applicants, and allows the universities to let the tests tell HSs how they are doing with their students rather than coming directly from the universities. On the other hand, if enrollment becomes a challenge, they’ll drop the tests as fast as they can.
Also, this idea of a huge amount of time spent on test prep applies to a small slice of high achieving kids. The median student at our fairly highly ranked public school probably spends no more than 10 hours total on the tests, counting taking them.
Have absolutely found this NOT to be true! Nursing schools have told us time and again the average SAT for admission (and its high for those schools we are looking at - Villanova, BC, UPitt etc). Also the next most important thing after getting accepted is…MERIT…which is based on your SCORES! We have been either accepted or deferred from 9 schools so far and to a one, each deferred school when contacted (Admissions Office) said that my child’s SAT while very good, was at the average of those accepted and if it had been higher would have been an acceptance (most likely) versus the deferral.
Colleges were saying this back in the 1980s/90s when I was applying! The reality we are seeing with acceptances and the “free” money is totally the opposite.
These schools being the selective to most selective schools…
Agreed, which is why blaming test prep is focusing on second order effects, not core issues. Putting so much emphasis on it feels somewhat misguided. Schools are the key. Given that there are strong correlations between high performing schools and income, it could be argued that affordable/free test prep is more of an economic equalizer than being presented here.
Yes, and I thought the general movement was to go this direction. Wasn’t the new SAT and the ACT in general a step in this direction vs the old SATs? Instead of dropping tests, improving them seems a viable alternative. A very large portion of the world (europe, asia, name the world zones that we like to emulate to improve our education system) uses tests. I’m unclear why we in the U.S. feel so confident that we found some secret sauce that the rest have not.
I disagree that these conclusions can be clearly drawn out. I think they are being overstated to mold them for people’s purposes. Merely because HSGPA ?> SATI (somewhat) in terms of predictability does NOT mean that a set of metrics which best describes a student should drop SATI. The studies really show otherwise (and conveniently hide comparisons that can determine the effectiveness of GPA for example) Why is dropping the SATI the goal and all this energy being spent trying to crucify it? (and claiming it is redundant to data collected from CIRP surveys doesn’t really fly imo. That method is begging for bias and manipulation, and is not practically feasible for admissions. Ithaca’s method puts rigor purely in the interpretive hands of their admissions officers) The reality is: it costs WAY more money to send kids to “great” high schools, which indeed will create greater income diversity issues.
Finally, regional officers change all the time. There are so many we’ve run into that are either a few years out of college or just out of college. Plus HS teachers change, curriculum rotates, students fish for easier graders, game which classes to take or avoid, on and on… how much “knowledge of the HS” is really present, and how much is merely heresay? The shortcomings of trusting HSGPA really hasn’t been explored here enough.
I’m still wondering how the testing advocates treat kids who score differently at different times…
I’d think the same way people treat kids who dunk a basketball: once they do it, you know the potential is there.
^^^^ I assume they would understand that the student has better digested and added to the material previously learned. I also assume they factor in maturuty and familiarity with the test.
@lastone03 @chippedtoof Ideally yes…but is that how test scores are actually used in these studies? Highest composite? Super score? Average of all test scores? Is there some weight for taking it 1-2-3 times?
Maybe my kid’s 6 point spread is unusual, but including her score in a study does beg the question…which score.
Without an answer to that it seems the ability to predict performance based on a test is pretty shaky.
Or the ACT revokes the scores if they think the differential is too large.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/sat-act-tests-test-preparation/1987200-act-testing-wrongly-accusing-cheating-2017-p1.html
Just because someone dunked a basketball once does not mean that it is his/her optimal shooting tactic in most situations. Or if s/he made a heave from back court once ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve2sD3sV858 – note that these examples happened as the clock was running out at the end of a quarter).
I don’t recall if that was covered in the studies, but since the “usual” method in admissions is to take the highest/superscore, I’d wager they did one of those two. If the test is well designed I think while it is possible to score below one’s abilities, it is hard to score above one’s abilities. So taking the highest sounds like a good method.
I think that if a kid does not have the opportunity to take the test twice like your child did, then it does present a situation where an initial “low” score is an unfair burden. But the solution of removing testing from admissions opens up a pandora’s box of issues. I’m in the camp that says: offer solutions to allow second or third testing, offer opportunities to study how to take / familiarize oneself with the test… all in the name of raising the effectiveness of testing.
Dropping testing forces us to have to find ways to weed out biases without visibility, which is a much harder job.