Be prepared for a shock, warns John Rosenberg at Discriminations: Elite colleges are admitting students with very high SAT scores! According to a paper presented at the American Education Research Association convention, “highly desired, highly selective elite colleges actually strive to enroll the brightest students and that as a result the proportion of their entering classes with high SAT scores has actually been increasing!”
When the elite colleges were admitting students with 600 verbal SAT scores, they were still plenty competitive, (researcher Catherine Horn) said, and the increase wasn’t necessitated by some terrible academic failings of those students or a national rise in scores. Rather she viewed it as part of a sense that higher numbers are always better (since U.S. News says so). If colleges stepped back a bit, she said, they would find they could attract very talented (and more diverse) students by focusing on admitting students who are very strong, but not necessarily part of the most elite (and less diverse) group out there.
“What we’re talking about is a reconceptualization of merit,” she said.
Why is it a problem if elite colleges admit the best-prepared students? There aren’t many black and Hispanic students scoring above 700 on the SATs.
By the way, most high-scoring students display “merit” in every possible way that impresses admissions officers of elite colleges. They know how to play the game.
Eduwonkette has the AERA quote of the day (overheard at the Sheraton New York): “You know you’re in trouble when the number of authors on the paper exceeds the sample size.”
It’s easy to rag on people who oppose the prominence of the SAT, but it’s also a bit facile.
First, the US News thing is a major driver. Insofar as its prominence is impelling colleges to focus on SATs and the other ranked qualities rather than, eg, the student experience, that’s a real problem.
Second, a lot of those scores are kind of fake. I used to teach SAT prep and it was really very coin-op — put money in, get increased SATs out. Those students aren’t any smarter or better-prepared than less wealthy students who scored 100 or 200 points lower, sans test prep; they’re just richer. And yes, you could get similar results with a book and some self-discipline, but that requires knowing that there *are* test prep books and the system can be gamed, a fact which I didn’t know when in high school in a non-affluent, non-college-oriented area. There are already so many ways the field is tilted in favor of wealthy people; a strong focus on the SATs tilts that even further.
Third, there may not be many high-scoring minority students but, as you doubtless know from writing your book, many minority students have had to overcome a tremendous number of obstacles which many white students never had to face. Equal amounts of talent, discipline, and drive can yield very different resumes because of those different starting points. There’s an extent to which the actual amount achieved in high school matters and those people who had more to overcome are out of luck, but there should also be an extent to which potential to achieve matters. Surely “merit” means “potential” as well as “past achievement”. (I’m strongly guided in this paragraph by A Hope in the Unseen, whose protagonist had really crappy SAT scores by any normal Ivy measure, but who also demonstrated genuine passion and ability for learning in other ways.)
Fourth, of course, what *are* colleges selecting for? Some people (particularly those with high SAT scores…) would certainly like them to be selecting solely on the grounds of maximum academic merit (for an often narrowly-defined concept of academic merit). But colleges can make a legitimate case that they’re looking to provide a richer academic and social experience, and are looking for people who can contribute in a variety of ways, many of which the SAT does not measure or indicate. I believe in our decentralized higher education system; I would be sad if *all* colleges made that argument, but I would also be sad if all colleges were driven solely or primarily by GPA and SAT.
I do think the SATs have some meaning. I have to; I’m the beneficiary of Johns Hopkins’ CTY program, which selects by 7th grade SAT scores, so my own ability to test high has had a huge positive impact on my life, and I see from my experience that using SAT scores alone can lead to an environment full of highly capable people. However, that doesn’t mean I believe the opposite — that highly capable people can only be found via high SAT scores.
Unfortunately for this parent of a high-scoring kid with so-so grades, the elite colleges aren’t admitting students with high test scores and nothing else. They’re admitting students with top scores, top grades and astounding extracurriculars. The admitted students to top colleges this year have amazing qualifications.
The real scandal, in my opinion, is the admitted students who have pretty good grades and scores, but who are top athletes.
It’s poor logic to define “elitism” down while at the same time admiring “elite” schools with all the accompanying perks and assumptions that go with them. Send your less test ready students to the state university. They’re not elite, but they try hard and do have other assets. Just give the university a new name that sounds more elite.
Same elite colleges are digging into their multi billion dollar endowments to give students a break on tuition.
Up until now, “sprcial students” (minorities with lowere scores; those with “lerning disabilities”; etc) have been funded with someone else’s money.
When they are paying the bills themselves, they will likely expect a return on thier dollars:
They WILL be more selective. They are unlikely to continue funding these “special” students.
Some comments:
1) The SAT is the best single predictor of performance in college, far better than high school grades in our era of grade inflation.
2) IQ scores and SAT scores are tightly correlated (Frey and Detterman). For the typical kid who has a normal education, studying for the SAT has quite limited returns (the College Board plays down the relevance of the IQ-SAT correlation, natch).
3) The SAT is not “fair” except to distinguish and rank people by brainpower. Unfortunately, we can’t have meritocracy and equality at the same time.
4) Colleges have only one reason for being: to get people to pay them money. They do this via tuition or alumni loyalty. That’s all colleges exist for. Any who fail at this game go out of business. “Education” has nothing to do with the game, and is all smoke and mirrors.
5) As the world moves into the information age, it becomes more divided between haves and have-nots (that is, the cognitive elite and others) than ever before. Thus this elite has more filthy lucre than they know what to do with, and the “alma mater” factor is larger than ever. Colleges have a serious financial need to grab people who will be successful and make lots of money later. It’s their bank. And many now have so much raw cash going this route they can make tuition pretty much free.
6) Schools must absolutely keep this “alma mater” bank paying out at all costs. So they seek two very different kinds of people: those with the needed social connections to stay rich and powerful (think George Bush), and those with the top 5% of brains who will make the next pile in the information age (think Bill Gates). There are simply not that many people who are “connected” and most are already spoken for, so the big fight is over the top brains (who at the very least will offset the low scores of the dumb wealthy who must be accepted).
7) The SAT remains the best legal way of finding brains in the worldwide talent pool. Activities and GPA? Not so much. Heck, the fastest way to examine a school’s quality is just to look at incoming SAT/GRE scores. Summary: the SAT is the new worldwide ISO 9000 standard, and it’s only going to get more important in the future.
Vital Core,
ETS (publishers of the SAT, GRE, etc.) have developed another screening tool, the SRI (Student Readiness Inventory) that, in claims to our university (an online, non-traditional university) they claim is a better predictor of student success (about twice as effective). So while the SAT is emphasized, don’t be surprised if ETS pushes a new tool to sell to its real clients (Post-secondary education).
Half, they claim is a better predictor of student success (about twice as effective
The only SRI metric I’ve seen is if the student will finish college or not (correct me if I’m wrong here).
For example, Bill Gates (est. IQ 160) didn’t finish college, so he would be considered a student “failure” by this method of analysis. Yet he gave many millions to Harvard after he made his pile for a mere half-education. Harvard done good!
Remember, what good colleges are interested in is cash, primarily from the alma mater piggy bank. They do this by selecting high-SAT (thus high-IQ) types who are likely to make big money later, not by merely getting high graduation rates - they can do this just by dumbing down material, like public schools do.
No one’s mentioned the recentering of the SAT? On this table, we can see that a 640, prior to recentering, is now a 700: http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/equivalence-tables/sat-score. The kid who scores a 600 today scores the equivalent of a 520 in 1994. It’s arguable that they’re admitting very similar students, once you take into consideration the effect of the recentering, which had its greatest effect on verbal scores.
If they’re selecting applicants with higher SAT scores, it’s most likely that they’ve largely stopped accepting the legacy kids with below-average test scores. I’d point out that there’s also a funny sort of discounting going on for kids from middle- and upper-middle class households. I think the elite schools will expect the students to have had SAT prep, if the family can afford it at all. I’ve also seen course catalogs for high schools which have listed SAT prep as an academic course.
I remember the SAT prep that my parents signed me up for in the late 90’s. The stuff they had us doing was easy since I had been doing it in my English and math classes since 5th grade.
I hear about the “advantage” that SAT prep programs give you, it looks to mostly affect a student’s confidence and error prevention. That is, of course, assuming that they have been attending a decent school and actually paying attention.
Does anyone know of any “secret methods” that test prep companies actually give to students, or do they just still go over general test-taking skills?
It is certainly possible to learn to take tests like the SAT. My wife is a whiz at standardized tests, and I saw her get in the 650’s on a practice test without reading the questions — just by looking at the answers (it was the GRE and not the SAT, but not so different — she took the GRE shortly after we were married and scored 800 on all 3 sections, which went with her 1600 on the SAT). She wasn’t able to explain to me what it was about the answers that meant they should be rejected, but clearly it’s possible to game these tests.
SuberbSub — My son took a privately tutored SAT prep-test program. We found it very helpful from the stand point that the totor helped him understand how to read the question and then determine the best answer for the question. In our case it was well worth the money and yes it does raise test scores. What I think the test prep does is help calm the concerns/fears of those students who do not do well on timed/pressure tests. It gives them a tool to understand how to better focus, move at a measured pace, etc. while taking a five hour test. Just my thought –
“It’s arguable that they’re admitting very similar students, once you take into consideration the effect of the recentering, which had its greatest effect on verbal scores.”
The initial post was about elite schools. If you look at the students the elite schools (MIT, Cal Tech, the Ivies, Stanford, Amherst, Williams, other top schools) are admitting, you quickly realize that those students are amazingly well qualified. Most parents I know whose kids are now applying admit that they (the parents) wouldn’t now be admitted to their top alma maters. I know I’d have no chance at my school nowadays. All of the admittees have top scores, top grades and excellent extracurriculars.
Vital Core, I’d be interested to see the cites for how the SAT is the best predictor of college performance. I’ve heard that GPA is better (yes, it’s inflated, but it’s inflated for everyone).
Some time ago David Owen wrote a book called “None of the Above”, about ETS in general, and the SAT in particular. The book is perhaps a little hard on ETS, but it seemed that Owen did at least cover the topic. Anyway, the idea that the SAT is a great predictor of college success is probably overblown. According to this book, it provided a marginal improvement in prediction of “success” (which was the freshman grades of students) over class standing, which in the book meant 1st, 2nd, 3rd in the class (not even 1st out of how many). Since this measure provides no information on the kind of classes the student took, how big the high school was, etc., that’s pretty weak. My take on it at the time (which was reinforced by later going over applications to a graduate program) is that the primary value of standardized tests is to provide a relative scale and sanity check for transcripts and letters of recommendation. The “best student I ever had” from a school you’ve never heard of is hard to interpret, but if the student’s GRE scores are in the 450 range, it probably means they aren’t ready for a Ph.D. program in Physics at Princeton, even if the nuns at their tiny Catholic college in the midwest are enthused. (I didn’t go to Princeton, by the way.)
From the point of view of an admissions department, standardized test scores are useful as a rough screening tool, since they can toss out a lot of applications without much effort, and but when they become a crutch, the results aren’t so good. (One department in the university where I was a grad student tried letting their grad students handle graduate admissions, and the result was that subsequent classes were selected on the basis of grades and scores, and they had to stop this because they were getting lots of “good students”, but not so many good researchers.)
Cardinal, I’ve heard that GPA is better
You are probably referring to the 2001 Geiser/Studley study, done by the UC.
Here is a good analysis of what’s wrong with the study.
In the end, admissions directors could use a student’s zipcode + income + GPA to get good correlation to talent and potential. But grades independent of school quality are really a joke. And what about international students?
And in the end, schools don’t care if students finish college. What they care about is if they make good money in the real world and send them some of it. The SAT, being merely a poor-man’s IQ test, is the best tool for this job. That’s why it’s the best.
Andromeda: “Second, a lot of those scores are kind of fake. I used to teach SAT prep and it was really very coin-op — put money in, get increased SATs out. Those students aren’t any smarter or better-prepared than less wealthy students who scored 100 or 200 points lower, sans test prep; they’re just richer.” That’s funny, because I scored 1590 out of a possible 1600 without any prep aside from doing the practice questions booklet distributed by SAT at home, and I’m smart but no genius (about 120 IQ). If a SAT prep course makes a difference, it must be because the kids just weren’t trying in school.