NYT: College Panel Calls for Less Focus on SATs

<p>//"Do the wealthier students in your community's high school have generally lower grades than the poor students in the same high school?"//</p>

<p>Generally, yes. At least in my D's private high school. Easily 80% of the wealthy students perform poorly due either to underperformance despite high ability, or due to not having the stuff in the first place. By contrast, 80% of the low and middle income students perform extremely well. I think this is a result of the latter's lack of complacency about their futures, compared to the wealthy group. I base this conclusion on remarks & behavior by these students & their confident, wealthy parents.</p>

<p>In the area in which I used to live, the wealthy parents whose kids performed below their parents' expectations were sent to private school. I think the parents thought that Johnny or Ellen just needed some more individual attention or a more direct return on their financial resources.
Of course they were the same students in private school they had been in public school. Comfortably in the bottom half.</p>

<p>^^ Confirming danas' observations... (Same performance, or lack thereof, in the private school)</p>

<p>I think the point is that many smart students from poorer communities are able to do well and get good grades in the context of their own schools but just don't have the resources to boost their scores on the SAT by going through test prep. I suspect few, if any, students from those communities have parents trolling the message boards looking for strategies to boost their applications.</p>

<p>Yes, I wonder what this situation is like in the great majority of public schools.</p>

<p>I do not think that the supposed ability to game a GPA is a good rationale for supporting the widespread reliance on the SAT. It may be that a student can charm a teacher or two along the way, but you can't fake several years of academic perfomance and effort or the level of rigor. Admissions reps also do try to make it their business to understand the academic environment of the schools in his/her region.</p>

<p>tokenadult: Excellent point and GPA is likely to be a function of similar variables. I know of several kids who have highly paid AP tutors, not for the test alone, but throughout the year for the classes, as well as SAT coaches etc.</p>

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<p>No. Our school is very bimodal. About 40% of the students are middle class white kids, about 40% less-affluent Latino kids, and 20% a mixture of other minorities. No group is "wealthy." It's not a wealthy town, but the white and Asian kids' families are generally more affluent than the others. </p>

<p>Most of the white kids will at least put in a year or two at the local community college after HS. Many will go to a 4 year university - usually a Cal State or a UC. And the top 2 or 3 (not 2 or 3 percent; the top 2 or 3 kids), will go to HYPSM. No one around here hires SAT tutors, not even the HYPSM kids. The only kid I've ever heard of who did that was a recruited athlete who had to get his SAT up to the NCAA minimum to get his scholarship (he succeeded).</p>

<p>Most of the Latino kids will not go to college at all or only for a short while to community college. There a few stars who go on to a university, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Their grades, SATs, and their sights are generally lower than the wealthier white kids.</p>

<p>Wealth is an issue, but isn't the only factor in play here. Unfortunately many of the Latino kids have poor English skills even after many years in the US school system, having been carried along in various bilingual programs. I think that often hurts them more than wealth, per se. The same resources, the same IB/AP courses, the same everything, are availible to all students. But the difference in outcomes is striking.</p>

<p>Doesn't college board own the SAT II subject tests? They may actually end up expanding their franchise.</p>

<p>Also, didn't Fitzsimmons mention Harvard administering its own entrance exam? How on earth woud this work? Would Harvard test administrators travel the country testing applicants? And if other colleges did the same, would kids be sitting for college entrance exams continuously in order to apply to six or eight schools?</p>

<p>Finally, I am not at all comforted by the prospect of moving toward an Asian type testing culture. I don't know much about it but have read some very sad pieces in the NY Times in the past year about the stress levels kids in these countries endure. I agree with the poster who objects to the content based testing - it would lead to cramming and it would be far more coachable in my view, far more prone to expensive and effective prep courses and tutors.</p>

<p>GPAs are laughably unreliable for evaluating students. In fact here again in this apparent desire to make things fair, the push to emphasize grades would actually make things less fair for the disadvantaged. The only high schools that top colleges are familiar with to the point of understanding well the rigour of the various courses tend to be very prominent magnet and private high schools. In fact, the U Chicago admission head visited our hs a few years ago and I attended his talk - he specifically emphasized to us that he and his staff was very, very familiar with our school, our teachers, our curriculum and understood how to interpret our kids' transcripts. We are at a private hs.</p>

<p>Caltech is looking better and better to me. I'm exhausted by college admissions staff trying to play social engineers.</p>

<p>MammaLL;
Have you considered that financial aid is a type of social engineering?</p>

<p>^ You've got me on that one - Of course need blind admissions is good for the system - a good example of social engineering.</p>

<p>mammall,
Respectfully, the problem with your position is that the SAT I is less of a leveler than you believe. The reason is that it is actually dependent a great deal upon the quality of K-12 teaching (which in turn is economically linked), combined with the educational level of the student's household, which together work to prepare the student for the critical reading, thinking, writing tasks in the 3 sections -- all within a timed framework. The raw material of the student's brain is insufficient by itself to compensate for <em>indirect</em> test preparation which is fundamental to testing success.</p>

<p>For example, recently immigrated Asian students without educated parents often do quite well on the quantitative section -- given superior math pedagogy in their "k-12" schools, as well as superior practice taking tests -- but they often underperform in the 2 other sections because both their U.S. high schools & their parents' lack of education (combined with language barriers) do not prime them for those sections. Fortunately, many public U's recognize these barriers, and admit them when their drive is enormous & their GPA confirms that. But generally such students will not be as competitive for the private elites as their second-generation counterparts (generally translating to more educated parents & greater wealth), or as recent immigrants from wealthier households.</p>

<p>Economics absolutely plays a part in the upper limit of achievement, while I agree that in itself it is not deterministic ultimately. </p>

<p>I think you're looking from a narrow lens because your children have done well on the SAT I. Test outcomes depend on a number of things, including raw intelligence, economics, quality of environment, and quality of k-12 education, combined. Your children were fortunate to have all those factors advantaging them.</p>

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<p>I suppose it would be an entirely computerized exam and it could test everything relevant in one sitting (reading, math, writing, and content from some core subjects). It could probably be online, administered at some trusted third party testing site that verifies the identity of a student.</p>

<p>Perhaps it would cut down the total number of applications that get sent into Harvard- but I don't think Harvard has the problem of too few applications.</p>

<p>Being a former high school student I truly do think that the SAT should be done away with. I don't see how it can be considered a good assessment of a student's ability and can help boost those from poorer families in the admissions process because let's face it, the test itself is HARD! The fact that you need to have months of test prep is a bit ridiculous and how does that help the poorer students when they can't afford to have tutors, buy the books and everything else. The SAT actually kept me from getting scholarships to colleges because I didn't do all that great on it. And I wasn't going to spend MORE money to retake it and possibly get a higher score because I'm middle class and we were already paying for my private high school.</p>

<p>That doesn't mean that my high school career was spent ass kissing my teachers either. I went to a private high school where our "lowest" courses were all college prep level and I successfully took both honors and AP classes. I was in the top 30/40 of my class of 150 and I had a 3.0 range GPA, that's how vigorous our school was. I took the test back before it was changed to the new format and I know that I would have done better if I would have been able to do essays on the SAT instead of the other sections that they got rid of.</p>

<p>My current college is very anti-tests because they want you to actually LEARN the material instead of just memorizing it. Which means lots of essays and short answer tests, which as Europe has shown us for the past hundreds of years is a better method of learning than the US has been holding on to for decades.</p>

<p>So I do think that having it be the be all and end all of the college admissions process is ridiculous. I say make the college applications themselves more difficult have these kids write essays, have them do ECs, teacher recommendations. Right now most college applications are like applications for Blockbuster, they just want to know the basic facts. And these kids are often too lazy to do the supplements for them. Make supplements mandatory, kids are more than just test scores and its time more colleges realized that.</p>

<p>mammall,
One of the advantages of need-blind admissions is to locate those poorer students who have been admitted to excellent private high schools on financial aid, and whose parents cannot afford the property values in neighborhoods with good publics. Those private schools prepare students (overall) better for the SAT I than most publics do (at least in my State!). The privates produce more critical thinkers & better writers than the publics in my State, & I see the evidence of it in my work every day. The same privates simply provide better preparation for demanding college work than the supposedly reputable publics. Doesn't mean that the students from the 'more reputable' publics can't compensate in other ways -- by supplementing that public education, and the more capable students often do just that, but that segment is limited to the relatively well-off segment, economically.</p>

<p>By contrast, in my state, the best high schools are the public high schools in, yes, the rich areas of town, and they better prepare students for the most selective colleges than any of the private high schools that admit students on scholarships. Some of the strongest students in my state in recent years have gone out of state to TABS boarding schools or have done most of high school through distance learning or dual-enrollment in public colleges and universities.</p>

<p>Actually, there are two public high schools in our metropolitan area that I would have loved to send my kids to but we are not in their districts and there is quite a waitlist to be one of the out-of-district tuition paying students at them. So we opted for the scholarship at the private hs - and it has been a very good education. No regrets in terms of that.</p>

<p>Epiphany - I'm not about to argue with you that economics affect SAT I scores. I just think that economics affect SAT II subject scores even more. Prepping for the SAT I appears to have little impact on scores. Content tests are a very different matter.</p>

<p>Vicarious - you're right of course - they could do the testing online. That would mean the typical senior at our hs would go sit for at least eight of these tests. And of course it would be one shot. Is that going to lower the pressure on these kids?</p>

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Prepping for the SAT I appears to have little impact on scores.

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<p>I disgree strongly, particularly for more right-brained kids.</p>

<p>I don't know first-hand. My kid just used the Blue Book. But the commission report contains a reference that typical prep class gains on the SAT I are just 20 to 30 points. This isn't a game changer for an applicant.</p>

<p>mammall:</p>

<p>yes, I've read CB's self-serving report, but I just don't buy it (the conclusions nor the study design). Just too many anecdotes for my lyin' eyes....our HS typically has the top 5% of each class exceed the NMSF cutoff, nearly all of which participate in extensive prep (Friday evenings, all day Saturday, for 8+ weeks priort to test date). Coincidence? Perhaps.....</p>