41–50 of 451 posts
Here's the money quote: >> Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts. Precisely. SATs aren't about hurting the poor or disadvantaged. It's about giving them a chance.
So, students entering Dartmouth with a higher SAT score also have higher first year GPAs. Which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone considering they are both basically testing the same thing. The fact that over the last couple decades employers at large have stopped asking for college GPAs (and by extension SAT scores) on their job applications should instead tell you that all these numbers have very little relevance i…
Here's the money quote: >> Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts. Precisely. SATs aren't about hurting the poor or disadvantaged. It's about giving them a chance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the universities were sincere about that, they would figure out how to increase enrollment. Why is every parameter of admissions open to change despite tradition, except that one?
You can't enroll infinite people.
I can't imagine theres a dearth of physical space or qualified educators near any university. The fact that they are not growing to accommodate the demand has always boggled my mind...
if dartmouth took sat scores into account in the admissions process by precisely the right amount, then within the set of people they actually admitted, sat scores would have no predictive value with respect to academic achievement, because the students who were admitted despite low sat scores would have been admitted due to some advantages detected by admissions that turned out to matter precisely as much as the higher sat scores would have
if, across the entire population, higher sat scores had no predictive value with respect to academic achievement, dartmouth could get this result by preferentially admitting students with lower sat scores. (for example, maybe you would need a high school gpa of 4.1 or higher to get in if your meaningless sat score were 1500, but this hypothetical bizarro dartmouth would let you in with a high-school gpa of 3.1 or higher if your meaningless sat score were only 1000; if the 3.1 students in high school continued being 3.1 students at dartmouth, it would make the meaningless sat scores highly predictive of academic achievement at dartmouth, among the people who actually got in.)
of course that would be an extremely unlikely thing for dartmouth to do, and they mention a lot of other evidence that sat scores predict academic achievement in general, not just among the students they admit
r-squared of 0.22 is still not a great predictor, though
if you want to read this report, it may be useful to open it in two separate browser tabs, scrolling the second one to the figures, which begin on p. 9
Here's the money quote: >> Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts. Precisely. SATs aren't about hurting the poor or disadvantaged. It's about giving them a chance.
Then they should be publicly run and free to take and send to universities.
this says more (good stuff) about Dartmouth than it does about the standardized tests. If scoring higher on something that is close to an IQ test doesn't predict higher academic performance, what does that say about the coursework?
The fact that SAT scores are directly proportional to how much time, effort and money you have spent in preparation should tell you that it is very different from a general IQ test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
Given that that test has a limited number of questions and the nature of the test it seems that anyone who is good at remembering lines could benefit from coaching. In fact they've come out with versions of that test which are different from the standard test because the standard test is too well known.
My perception is that there is a psychologist who administers the test and another psychologist who administers test prep, but a lot of people hang onto the idea that Alyssa Milano must have really gotten a perfect score on Raven since everyone successful must be really smart, the system is fair, etc.
We know because our kids were two of those students. We took them out of public school into private last year. The first six months were hell as they had to catch up from their deficits and learn how to study for real. 18 months later they are getting real A’s and B’s (and a few C’s) that are real grades.
We need standardized tests because more and more school districts are going the social promotion route
To measure academic achievement they use First Year GPA. It makes sense they're correlated, both require studying known material for a test. But is GPA the best measure, especially first year? I would be interested in other metrics like 3rd-4th year GPA or placements into jobs and such.