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Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

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Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#211

Post by sfink »

nyrikki wrote: post #166
nostrademons wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the report is that SAT scores are less correlated with socioeconomic status than other metrics used by admissions like GPA, high school reputation, extracurriculars, essay content, etc. They're still correlated. One of the interesting findings of social science research is that a lot of different metrics like IQ (itself a correlation between different subtest performances), GPA, parental income, child's…

A Harvard, Princeton, and Yale alumni survey found three-quarters live in zip codes that rank in the top 20 percent by income and education. Half live in the top 5 percent of zip codes. So their efforts didn't work.

Only if your only criterion for success is diversity. I don't think the intention has ever been to recruit evenly from all zip codes or whatever. My understanding is that the idea is to have a substantial portion come from a less advantaged population. (Heck, these universities still need to have a lot of wealthy kids so their families give them lots of money. A dozen self-made millionaires aren't worth much compared to a handful of trust fund billionaires.)

If I flip your numbers around, it actually sounds pretty good: a full quarter of the alumni come from the bottom 80% of zip codes!

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#212

Post by gnicholas »

msravi wrote: post #40
ccleve wrote: post #28

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.

And this: >> Third, under test-optional policies, some less-advantaged students withhold test scores even in cases where providing the test score would be a significant positive signal to Admissions. Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than…

Will processes like this result in families avoiding (or at least not seeking out as much) rigorous high schools? It seems like some families might choose to send their kid to a not-super-rigorous high school — where they can coast in class and learn via outside enrichment — instead of a school with more rigorous academics where they'll be held to a higher bar by colleges.

This would allow students to have a lower-stress life and have an advantage at college admissions — even if they actually learned less academically than they would have at the rigorous high school.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#213

Post by nyrikki »

sfink wrote: post #211
nyrikki wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Harvard, Princeton, and Yale alumni survey found three-quarters live in zip codes that rank in the top 20 percent by income and education. Half live in the top 5 percent of zip codes. So their efforts didn't work.

Only if your only criterion for success is diversity. I don't think the intention has ever been to recruit evenly from all zip codes or whatever. My understanding is that the idea is to have a substantial portion come from a less advantaged population. (Heck, these universities still need to have a lot of wealthy kids so their families give them lots of money. A dozen self-made millionaires aren't worth much compared…

The priority is a large educated workforce while not tossing away potential talent because they were born to the wrong parents.

But note that teams built from cognitively diverse members are far more productive while homogeneous teams dramatically underperform.

https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-the...

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#214

Post by gnicholas »

pknomad wrote: post #190
elteto wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is…

How though? They're explicitly tying academic performance in relation to one's socioeconomic background. I find their claim of "doing more with less being more impressive than doing more with more" reasonable. The only way to avoid any sort of judgmental/arbitrary calls is to blindly apply academic standards (the way UT Austin does top 4% of your HS class) and that comes with its own problems.

It's not just socioeconomic background, it also includes 'how much your parents cared about your education', to some extent. For some families (think of the typical Asian immigrant family), getting the kids a good education is the first priority. They will sacrifice vacations, living in a nicer house, etc. in order to make sure their kids go to better schools and get better grades.

If you have two families that are equally poor, but where one family cares a lot about education and sends their kid to the harder school (perhaps by living in the cheapest apartment in the neighborhood that is eligible for that school), they will be disadvantaged compared to the other family, who send their kids to the less rigorous school.

To the extent that there are racial/cultural correlations that result in poor Asian kids going to schools that have higher average SATs than poor kids of other races, an ostensibly race-neutral policy like this will mean Asian students could (as a group) continue to face disadvantages in the admissions process.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#215

Post by deltarholamda »

dyno12345 wrote: post #125
rconti wrote: post #107

NYTimes "The Daily" podcast had an informative episode on the matter[1] I'm out of the loop since my college days are behind me, and I don't have kids. I had heard colleges were going to rely less on standardized testing (and many dropped the requirement during Covid when SAT tests didn't take place at all). I had also heard that there was controversy over reliance on standardized tests, because the wealthy can more…

re: grade inflation, they can statistically normalize the grades fwiw GPA and SAT scores are highly correlated anyway

People who take the SAT are self-selecting. An awful lot of kids don't take it, and a lot of schools don't require it. So the sort of kid who takes it will also be the sort of kid who gets good grades.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#216

Post by SoftTalker »

kccqzy wrote: post #155
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prepped on my own and did really good, but I was middle class and had a lot of other advantages. Prepping isn’t just about having access to prep material, but coaching that encourages you to actually practice the material.

My friends and I all prepped on our own. It really helped to have that kind of friendly competitive mindset among high school friends to provide each other motivation to one-up everyone else. Of course all of us were middle class, and we were all raised in the kinds of families value education above many things.

If I had suggested to my high school friends that we "prep for the SAT" I think I would have been roundly laughed out of the room.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#217

Post by Scubabear68 »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #179
ericjmorey wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a poor plan to get kids "up to speed" with their peer groups. Especially if any of those students have parents who are unable or unwilling to provide a nurturing environment for their kids.

Standardized tests aren’t a fix, they are a form of measurement to diagnose the problem. When your son has a B average in 8th grade and scores in single digits on State standardized tests, it is clear there is a very serious problem. The fix is to get proper leadership in the schools. Our Superintendent started his career as a gym teacher, and it shows. At a school board meeting when parents criticized the low standa…

Forgot to add - public schools in the US are effectively mini monopolies. You are forced to send your kid there, unless you work very hard to get your kids into a “choice” program, or can afford private school, or have free time to home school.

In our State, NJ, in theory each County has a County Superintendent to over see schools, and the State Dept of Education to oversee them. In reality, the County and State bureaucracy does little to nothing to provide actual oversight, and schools become private fiefdoms. The end result is school quality varies wildly, and housing prices are very strongly correlated to school quality. In our crappy district, real estate agents complain it is very hard to sell housing to families with children or who will soon have them because the schools are so bad. This creates a downward spiral for the school as fewer and fewer kids are enrolled.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#218

Post by nyrikki »

nick7376182 wrote: post #180
nyrikki wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Harvard, Princeton, and Yale alumni survey found three-quarters live in zip codes that rank in the top 20 percent by income and education. Half live in the top 5 percent of zip codes. So their efforts didn't work.

Is that for alumni, not incoming students?

Currently, the Ivy League institutions are estimated to admit 10% to 15% of each entering class using legacy admissions.

Add that to the zip code correlation that is the strongest indicator of SAT scores and it does matter.

Students without parents that are college graduates are also at a disadvantage no matter what their potential is.

It is one of the barriers to social mobility.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#219

Post by light_hue_1 »

1980phipsi wrote: post #80
light_hue_1 wrote: post #33

If this was a paper submitted by one of my students, they would fail. Why would these faculty members sign their names to this drivel? If you read carefully, you see how useless SAT and ACT scores really are. Here are just a few insane things. > Figure 1 shows a linear relationship between SAT scores and cumulative first-year GPA for Dartmouth students. SAT scores are grouped into 16 equal-sized bins, and we plot mea…

> Total nonsense. Figure 1 does not mean that SAT/ACT scores are predictive of academic achievement! Without seeing the variance you cannot make this statement. At all. The fact that there is a linear relationship means nothing statistically. You are putting words in their mouth from that quote. They didn't use that Figure to claim the test scores are predictive of academic achievement. They specifically say it is ev…

The knowledge of statistics on HN is astoundingly bad.

Figure 1 shows nothing. At all. Without knowing if the results are statistically meaningful, showing a linear relationship means nothing. You can draw no conclusions from that figure. The only thing it does is lie with data, to imply to an observer that doesn't understand statistics that this means there is a meaningful relationship between the two variables.

> I'm not saying their analysis is perfect, but your arguments aren't that strong...

They said "SAT and ACT scores are highly predictive of academic performance". This means that they can predict academic performance based on SAT. They absolutely cannot. Their own data shows this beyond any doubt.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#220

Post by SoftTalker »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #51
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but surely you can enroll more 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...

Space isn’t the limiter, teaching hours via faculty are. The most popular universities, research ones, have faculty that teach only a few undergrad classes a year. Changing those popular universities into ones more focused on undergrad education would make them less popular. Germany might be a better model where barebones education is easily accessible. They leave much more up to students: your homework might not be…

> They leave much more up to students ... No student centers or leafy campuses either.

Sounds like a community college.

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