SAT: Part hoax and part fraud?

<p>"Correlation of SAT scores with family income and parents’ education:
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/03/05/these-four-charts-show-how-the-sat-favors-the-rich-educated-families/“&gt;http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/03/05/these-four-charts-show-how-the-sat-favors-the-rich-educated-families/&lt;/a&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The SAT doesn’t favor the rich, educated families. Rich, educated families are just smarter in general than poor, uneducated families so they do better on the SAT. That’s one of the reasons they’re rich. It’s really pretty simple.</p>

<p>EarlyAction95, I think that’s the exact problem. Education is so decentralized that every town–hundreds and thousands of them, and every state, all 50 of them, has its own system. The standardized test companies are private. But many Americans don’t think the federal government has any role in education whatsoever, much less a national test to measure achievement at graduation.</p>

<p>1) All rich people aren’t smart. All those who are poor aren’t uneducated.
2) It’s not a family that gives the SAT, it is an individual. One’s parents bank balance doesn’t indicate ones “smartness”.</p>

<p>By “4.0/2400 type applicants”, I meant students with near perfect stats. I did not mean literally 2400 in a single sitting, without considering ACT scores. That said, I’d expect the number of 2400 superscores to be considerably higher than the number of single session 2400s. I haven’t seen any actual numbers, but my guess would be well above just double the ~500 single sitting 2400s in 2013.</p>

<p>@oldmom4896…I see the logistical problem, but isn’t it high time someone did something? Being so disorganized only helps companies like the college board to use it for their own benefit!</p>

<p>@MaynardGKrebs - I am not too sure I would go as far and say rich, educated people are smarter, per say, since I have not seen IQ tests to really compare. But, what I would safely say is the rich, educated families are doing different, specific things that favor making more money, as well as doing better on the SAT. And there is nothing saying that it is a particular set of behaviors that favors both results. </p>

<p>My kids’ high school does not weight the GPA; therefore, kids in AP classes, etc., have their As on the same footing as those taking Regents-level courses. What’s more, the AP classes are pretty strongly curved, so by no means are everyone getting As and even Bs in those classes. To me, this explains why “the top 20 national universities and LACs do not even report an average HS GPA,” because GPA without reference to rigor is essentially meaningless. Throw in the occasional kid’s difficulty with a particular teacher (or subject), and you can see why GPA cannot be the only criterion for admittance. The SAT/standardized tests offer some additional information for the admissions committee to use, that’s all. I really do believe that the tests offer merely a threshold, a starting point from which to assess the kid’s potential, but that it is useful for that, or for a corrective to an otherwise shining school report, I also believe.</p>

<p>It also seems clear to me that the whole SAT-correlates-with-income thing is both true, and deceptive. It seems perfectly reasonable that well-educated parents, who tend to have higher incomes (not necessarily the highest, but upper-middle-class, perhaps), will produce children who perform well on the tests, not just because, and not even primarily because, they have the money for tutors and they live in good school districts, etc., but because a belief in the value of education expresses itself in many, many life choices that affect a student’s performance. There are exceptions to this, on both sides of the ledger, so to speak, so that you don’t have to be educated yourself to believe in its value, nor, for that matter, does education automatically lead to higher income! or a value for education, either. Rather than rail against the SATs’ unfairness, I would rather address the issue of income inequality more largely: our society does not value adequately that which I would like to see it value, in terms of investment in people and in education. If we as a society valued education more, our kids would be better prepared, overall. </p>

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<p>It’s a state by state thing here. In Ohio all have to pass the “OGT” - Ohio Graduation Test. In NY, it’s Regents exams. And so on.</p>

<p>Perhaps with the Common Core there will be a national graduation test but in general the US prefers this sort of thing to be more local, at least state by state, than national. </p>

<p>In response to @marysidney comments - I posit that people are different, therefore, values are different. Cultures are different, thus, behaviors and traditions, as a group, are different. Income inequality is not issue; it is what is valued is the issue. </p>

<p>Raising someone’s income and lowering another’s income to have income equality will not change what those specific people value. Unless you change the fundamental culture of people, whoever that might be, there is no way another issue will solve what you want to solve. </p>

<p>It is not an accident some people are rich and some are not. It is not an accident the same rich group does better on the SAT. There is something ingrained in them that has nothing to do with money, it just happens to get them more of it (even if they start from zero), and higher test scores too.</p>

<p>It would be interesting to see the real numbers of 2400 superscores. I agree that one careless mistake in math can prevent a student who could score 800 math from scoring 800. On the other hand, I think that a student probably needs to be within “striking distance” of 2400 in a single sitting, in order to superscore 2400 (generally speaking–I am sure that there are a few exceptions). Among students who score 2350+ the first time around, I doubt that many of them take it again.</p>

<p>The data of real interest in the SAT correlation with income don’t show up in the tables. The New York Times Magazine had a table showing that students from families with annual incomes of $200,000+ averaged 1714 out of 2400. If evenly divided, that would be 571 + change per section. That’s unlikely to get anyone in that income bracket into “top” schools, absent some “wow” factor. </p>

<p>It would be really interesting to know how high in the income ranges the monotonic rise of SAT total with income still persists.</p>

<p>It has not been my experience that rich people have “something ingrained in them” that makes them do better on the SAT. Wealth is not, in my experience, necessarily correlative with intelligence, as I understand intelligence. You can be very rich and quite stupid–which is not the same as cunning, or shrewd. You can also be poor and stupid, of course. Where income inequality comes in is the opportunity one has, if one is poor and intelligent, to do as well as those who are well-off and intelligent. Addressing income inequality, by the way, does not involve a mechanical raising of one person’s salary at the expense of another’s, but a recognition that the richest should not pad their salaries at the expense of the poorest. </p>

<p>@OHmomof2, my original comment was that the SAT is of some value to colleges when they are confronted with rampant grade inflation. Grades are said to be a better predictor of college performance, but when they become too inflated, they don’t mean much anymore. I said that at our high school, half the kids applying to 4-year colleges have a weighted 4.0 or higher. You said colleges will unweight. </p>

<p>But from the weighted grade ranges, I can estimate what the unweighted grades of our students must be. I found that for a student who takes the highest possible honors track in all 5 major subjects, which in our school will include 10 AP classes, that student has to get straight A’s to be in the top 10% of the class. Of course students can and do get B’s and C’s but this means our school must be graduating roughly 10% of students with 4.0 unweighted averages. And that’s not even including students who took less demanding schedules and got straight A’s. This is actually even more inflated than I had been vaguely aware of. Of course, it is possible to take more than 10 AP classes and thereby “cancel out” the weighted GPA effects of receiving a B. But it’s not really feasible for most students to add more than a few extra AP’s to that schedule. </p>

<p>Seems like you either have a lot of very good students or a lot of grade inflation, or both.</p>

<p>@marysidney - You may not use the word ingrained, but culture and values are very, very hard to change. It is all intertwined, right down to the differences in food that different cultures eat. </p>

<p>As for income inequality - you state, “Addressing income inequality, by the way, does not involve a mechanical raising of one person’s salary at the expense of another’s, but a recognition that the richest should not pad their salaries at the expense of the poorest.”</p>

<p>I really do not even understand the statement. People get paid relative to the value they produce. If one produces more and causes more production, then one gets paid more. But, I have no worry this will ever change because Hollywood and movies stars will not give up their big paychecks once they realize it would include them, even though they hate corporate people who actually make less than they do. They are the classic examples of saying one thing and doing another. It reminds me of Ted Kennedy voting and railing for years about how great wind farms are, until one was going up in his backyard, then it was 100% reversal. </p>

<p>According to the SAT Total Group Report for 2013, 91% of test takers reported a GPA of B or better. <a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2013/TotalGroup-2013.pdf[/url]”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2013/TotalGroup-2013.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>48% reported grades in the A range. </p>

<p>Yes, there is grade inflation. In such a setting, colleges need an independent method to establish how inflated a school’s grading system has become. </p>

<p>@ucbalumnus, I’m sure our top 10% are all very good students, but we do have a lot of grade inflation. You only need 90% for an A. Some teachers will curve the grades up if they seem too low. I know from the curving that kids have gotten A’s with 84%. Some teachers make sure to include plenty of group projects and even group tests to ensure that weaker students have the opportunity to get at least a middling A on some assignments. Sometimes they allow the class to take the exam again if enough people did poorly. It is a little frustrating because it makes it harder for the best students to stand out, particularly since the percentages are wiped from the record so when the GC writes a recommendation, all they see is all those A’s, and they don’t know if they’re 90% A’s or 105% A’s. But on the whole, I think it’s a better than the alternative where grading is harder, kids are super-stressed, kids are being individually ranked, and a cutthroat competitive attitude prevails.</p>

<p>Of course families with higher income send their kids to better schools, public and private. So the kids learn more in school and do better on the tests.</p>

<p>^^ Learning is not by osmosis, so just better schools cannot be it. The kids are doing something actively different at those better schools, which results in higher scores and, eventually, higher income. </p>

<p>Sean Reardon had an interesting article in the New York Times last year about why children in high-income families are doing increasingly better: <a href=“No Rich Child Left Behind - The New York Times”>No Rich Child Left Behind - The New York Times;

<p>I came to this thread late and have not read all the posts. Sorry if someone has already made this point:</p>

<p>There is a common misconception that SATs do not predict college outcomes very well. From the college perspective (as opposed to the individual student perspective), the average SAT score accounts for 60%-80% of the variance in graduation rates depending on which subset of schools you look at. This is the relevant statistic, not the correlation based on individual students.</p>

<p>For example, the correlation between SAT math 25th percentile and graduation rate is +.88 among private research universities (R squared = .77). The behavior of freshman classes is much easier to predict than the behavior of individual students. You have to use the correct unit of analysis.</p>

<p>What this means is that colleges can raise their graduation rates by raising SAT scores (although they may not be sure which particular students will graduate).</p>