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Michael's avatar

For a certain kind of person, who is overrepresented in the chattering class, the SAT is a test you can only fail. It’s so right-censored you can’t distinguish yourself — if you get a 1600, who cares, that’s just what you were supposed to do. But at the same, if your score is even a little low it’s a shameful disaster. This obviously produces resentment.

I wonder if this isn’t a factor in the “get rid of SAT” discourse. Maybe a lot of people involved just personally resent their experience with the test.

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Education Realist's avatar

Good lord, this is like an index to my writing over the past ten years. I agree with almost everything said, although I'd quibble here:

"which is apparently undesirable for social reasons and for fear that these Asian students represent stiff academic competition"

It is *definitely* undesirable for social reasons, and there's not much fear that the Asian students represent academic competition. Asian education culture is extremely unattractive to Americans (of all races) and as you say, colleges want rich whites to donate. They're fine with rich Asians donating, far less fine with admitting hundreds of recent Asian immigrants with unwealthy parents who spent 8 years prepping for the SAT while simultaneously in three years of prep for the SHSAT. I wrote about white flight from high school test-based admissions schools. Many others have noticed that all the schools that ended testing have or will become much more white. Far less mentioned is that whites aren't *interested* in the schools. This is most clearly observable in NYC, as they show the testing rates. Whites and Asians have very similar admissions rates and represent the same percentage of the NYC public school population, but Asians test at twice the rate of whites (and it's a safe bet that a good chunk of the whites are immigrants.) So while people bewail the change as cynical, it is to me a fair question why any community should spend a lot of money on a test-based school that is primarily used by immigrants. The next question is why bother having test-based schools at all, of course. Article: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/08/01/white-flight-from-admissions-test-high-schools/

While I'm a fan of tests, I've stopped believing in the granular scores. Kind of like IQ. The difference between a 600 and 800 SAT math score is irrelevant until you tell me how much each one prepped. But the difference between a 400 and a 600--even a 500 and a 600--is much more relevant. In much the same way that the difference between a 115 and 130 IQ isn't something I'd bank on, but 90 and 115 is relevant. Asian test prep did much to kill my faith in high scores as an absolute indicator. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/09/18/false-positives/

One of the undercovered aspects of the college fraud story was the College Board couldn't promise the reliability of its test scores. Proctors were bribed to complete the test. Moreover, the College Board doesn't like spending money creating a separate international test, so it just reuses old American ones--that information gets out very quickly the day of the test, and the international prep companies have provided their kids with all the old copies of the test to memorize. So the day of the test, the info on which test is sent out to millions of testers, who just regurgitate the answers they memorized for that test. (Or they are just sent the answers to copy down if they pay extra for a jijing). Wrote about this here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/the-sat-is-corrupt-no-one-wants-to-know/ and here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/the-sat-is-corrupt-reuters-version/

I found this appalling, because the College Board and other academic tests were about the only ones that were left to be somewhat secure. Microsoft and other tech companies pay a fortune to kind of sort of protect the integrity of their certification tests. Whenever someone says we should end college and just use certification or credential tests, I laugh. Reliable tests cost a fortune to produce. To make tests really safe, you'd have to be sure that no questions got out, no format got out, and everyone taking the test was only interested in the certification. And even then, you'd have to isolate the testers for 24 hours after the test so they couldn't brain dump.

While the failure rate of students who take on huge loans is a tragedy, at least those people are doing it by choice. Far worse societally is the fact the college degree is becoming ruined as any sort of academic marker. Freddie mentioned remediation--but colleges are doing away with remediation. the entire state university systems in California and Tennessee had done away with them several years ago, but the push to abolish the SAT will make that even more prevalent. I wrote about it here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/corrupted-college/

This is hands down the largest issue. Its's getting worse, too. We need far fewer colleges.

The fixes are all impossible and would fail disparate impact tests:

1. Use federal oversight to stop all colleges from accepting unqualified candidates. Congress should set a minimum demonstrated ability level federally guaranteed loans--say, an ACT section score of 23, an SAT score of 550 (or even 500). Pell grants, too, should have a minimum. If you don't think this will make a difference, you are unaware of the depths of illiterate that colleges are stooping to.

If we could couple it with federally financed vocational centers that are NOT about sexy skills, but boring stuff like learning to be a short order cook or nurse's aide, or dental hygeniests, and then give loans to that, it might pass muster. I'm skeptical,though. Wrote about vocational ideas here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/vocational-ed-advancing-the-debate/(by the way, people always overrate our history of vocational ed. We've never had a golden age: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/vocational-ed-and-the-elephant/)

2. The big fix that might work is at the state level. I would love to see some red states require a minimum ACT/SAT score and get past the lawsuit. If things get as bad as I fear, college degrees are going to become worthless, and a graduation from a school with a baseline score will start to be one of the only indicators of ability.

3. Stop preventing high schools from teaching remedial classes. We get a kid reading at 3rd grade level, we still have to put in in a standard 9th grade class reading Romeo and Juliet. Ditto math. In fact, we should dramatically expand the high school options to be less college bound and more fun.

Well, this is enough. In fact, maybe I should just turn it into a blog post, given my writer's block!

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