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Oh god. The original idea sounds good on paper, but, oh god.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
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studying is gaming the system?
Being able to afford $100+ an hour for a pro to teach you exactly what you need to know to do well on the SAT is gaming the system
This is actually a serious question. I want to get an understanding of the mind-set that creates this class wedge.
Soon we will have SAT advisers suggesting how to game the "adversity score" as well. - Get a summer job "because your family needed money" - Move out of your parents house for a summer "bad living conditions" - Adopt some non-binary gender temporarily "bullied for identifying as x" - CEO dad drops salary to $20k for a year and instead gets stock vesting equivalent "poor family" etc. etc.
> It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
None of those suggest they're linked to individual actions like your examples are -- and that makes sense since the SAT can know the student's schools and addresses but little else.
And I don't think sending your kid to a worse school is gaming the system... because they'll probably do worse.
If the SAT correlates too strongly with wealth, then Collegeboard should make a better test. Make one that changes significantly every year so direct test-prep is hard. Choose different types of critical reading passages and questions each year, vary the style of the math questions - make the test different enough each time so studying past tests isn't valuable. Then, if you eliminate the advantage direct prep gives, the correlation to wealth should weaken, and the test should get closer to measuring aptitude.
But instead, Collegeboard continues to shoehorn political objectives into an already broken exam. This is a mistake.
This seems fine if you wanted to use the SAT to measure an outcome for a given level of inputs . If all you actually care about is the actual outcome though, then this doesn't actually help. I guess there could be both use cases for test scores, given that higher education might actually find itself more concerned with showing improvement as an important metric. They might prefer students that show more aptitude for…
Past adversity is in the past. So if someone grew up in a poor environment but you're thinking of admitting them to a good college on full scholarship, they'll soon be progressing at the rate they're capable of without the adversity. So the best predictor of future success in a good environment probably does include a correction for past adversity.
The same gaps that appear on these undergrad tests show up on the grad school tests such as the LSAT, GMAT, GRE etc.
So I think that it is OK to be taking these factors into account at the college admissions level, but I am not sure if the "neutral test administration organization" is the correct place for this to be at. This is a very thorny issue, and I am uncomfortable with a centralized organization influencing it to such a large degree. Whether, and how much, to take into account these factors should be a local decision made b…
The problem with doing it at the admission level is you have to adjust ALL admissions processes. Doing it at the SAT level avoids the problem where disadvantaged kids are cut off by hard score limits right at the start of the process. It could also be used to signal to schools which kids are likely to need some remedial classes in the first year despite what they scored on the SAT. Of course one can imagine a scenari…
If a college wants to not do that, fine, I just don't want a centralized organization short circuiting the issue and making decisions for the college.
I wonder how much of the correlation between income and SAT scores is due to wealthier people's children just being more intelligent, rather than due to having access to better education.
They do control for that when they study the correlation between the two, so none.
> It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials. This sounds like affirmative action only at a much more granular and non-racial level. Even better if it can take into account a student's whole academic history (e.g. if a s…
I wonder how, 4+ years after it's implemented, the results of the test's predictive accuracy are shown.
Soon we will have SAT advisers suggesting how to game the "adversity score" as well. - Get a summer job "because your family needed money" - Move out of your parents house for a summer "bad living conditions" - Adopt some non-binary gender temporarily "bullied for identifying as x" - CEO dad drops salary to $20k for a year and instead gets stock vesting equivalent "poor family" etc. etc.
None of that’s going to make any difference. Let’s be real here, it’s going to be based on race alone (and perhaps being gay or trans). White or Asian? You don’t suffer any adversity. Black or Hispanic? Congratulations, your score just improved by 200 points. This just sounds like the SAT board doing what school admissions boards already do: decreasing or increasing scores based on race. https://www.latimes.com/local…