Sophia’s Reviews > Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing > Status Update

Wealthy children of alumni/donors and athletes “are not obviously less academically credentialed than the overall applicant pool. Applicants from less advantaged backgrounds already receive informal preference at selective colleges …denying a place to someone with superior credentials… for social-justice reasons.” The battle over affirmative action is whether race is the only offensive admissions preference

“The etymology of these terms is telling, because "aristocracy" and "meritocracy" mean literally the same thing: rule by the best. Back in 1958, Young felt he couldn't use the word
"aristocracy" because of the strong association with inheritance it had taken on over time, so he simply substituted a Latin prefix for the original Greek one to get across what he meant.”

^this is an oversimplification of etymology

“Test scores add to the predictiveness of the high school transcript, but not by much; the transcript is the best predictor of college performance. Testing, rather than negating the effects of background as was originally intended, appears now to enhance those effects, far more so than high school grades.”

“In the larger set of less selective public universities, there is rarely any significant relationship between SAT/ACT scores and graduation rates...” (Bowen, Chingos, McPhearson, 2009)

^SAT not designed to predict public school grad rates! Designed for elite admissions.

GPA vs test scores:
- “GPA is actually a better predictor of academic performance than test scores”
- the SAT adds ~3% to the predictiveness of the HS transcript (bc GPA reflects years of sustained effort)
- GPA is more predictive than test scores (esp after the first year), and test scores modestly improve predictiveness
- background factors explain >a third of variance in SAT scores, <10% of GPA

Is the SAT biased? Tl;dr: no. The SAT is validated against academic performance in college. (With predictiveness highest for first year grades)

“…on average, admissions tests overpredict Black students' first-year grades. …the more common view is that the grade gap is caused by an unwelcoming atmosphere on campus and by underpreparedness.”

“…there have been many validity studies of the SAT… that measure its relation to first-semester college grades, first-year grades, and, sometimes, graduation rates, across a broad range of institutions.”

Tl;dr: “…the SAT's predictive validity is highest for the short term; it falls off over the full length of college. …the SAT predicts [~15%] of the variation in short-term grades.”

“…affirmative action was a direct result of the civil rights movement and was aimed at racially integrating universities. The diversity justification for it dances around that obvious fact and so generates… cognitive dissonance.”

“All [US] schools that take race into consideration claim to do so because it's crucial to their 'diversity' efforts. This isn't quite hogwash, but it's close.” -Jamal Greene

“[Clark Kerr, chancellor of the UC system in the 1950s & 60s] believed in both the democratic promise of higher education and the importance of protecting the high end of the system from democratizing impulses. To his mind these were not inconsistent beliefs, though combining them seamlessly was challenging.”

“But, almost alone among prominent eugenicists, Brigham [Carl Brigham, the SAT’s inventor] had a change of heart. In 1928, only two years after the debut of the SAT, he renounced his former views publicly at a convention of eugenicists, and in 1930 he issued a formal retraction…”

I didn’t know this!! He’s improperly besmirched these days…