Bad news for the All-New, Revamped SAT: Only 27% in the most recent Rasmussen poll think that the SAT should be a major factor in college admission.
Actually, it may be even less than 27%.
According to Rasmussen,
“…most Americans don’t think the SATs are an accurate reflection of a student’s abilities, nor do they believe they should be a major factor in college admissions.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 21% of American Adults think that, generally speaking, the results of standardized tests like the SATs are an accurate reflection of a student’s knowledge and intelligence. Sixty-two percent (62%) disagree, while18% are not sure.
Somehow the American people have figured out what scholars and even the College Board, sponsor of the SAT, acknowledge: High school grades are a better predictor of success in college than the one-shot admissions tests.
And since so many affluent parents are able to pay for tutoring, the SAT strongly reflects family income.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Given the large number of colleges and universities in the country, how do we know that SAT scores are a major factor in admission decisions? I suspect that it plays a relatively small role in most institutions.
SAT scores, along with the other standardized test scores (PSAT, SAT 2 exams, ACT, and AP exams) provide useful information about a student’s academic abilities, especially for boys.
By the way, a substantial plurality (about 46%) of Americans believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. (http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx)
I suppose that the fact that only 15% believe that humans evolved without divine intervention is bad news for biologists.
Interesting data point. But creationists manage to get an occasional law passed in some states (perhaps because biologists don’t have big money lobbying campaigns to oppose them), and those who realize exactly what the SAT is can’t seem to manage any effective action in terms of changing actual policy or law. Although … many colleges make the SAT or ACT optional, which is probably not the worst situation, as it may give students who test well an opportunity to try college if they want. They may not succeed if the only way they have of demonstrating their chances for success is the SAT, but it gives a certain group of kids another option.
What law concerns SAT scores? My institution, along with many others has never required SAT or ACT scores to make admission decisions. Would you have a top down mandate that all colleges and universities be forbidden to use SAT or ACT scores in admission decisions? Would this apply to SAT 2, AP, AMC 10/12 and AIME exams as well?
TE: No law, of course, since each college has to be able to decide how to interpret data it gets about its applicants. And I wouldn’t want to throw out the SAT and ACT, either, because they do serve a good group of kids who aren’t challenged by their high schools yet can rise to the occasion and deserve to get into college.
I would be optimistic about any law, if one could be constructed, that makes the tests optional at public colleges and universities: The tests’ bias against female students (in 1994, a study found that, on average, males scored 33 points higher on the math portion than females, even though those female students earned the same grades in the same college math courses) makes me think institutions who weigh scores from the tests too strongly take opportunities away from female students, and that’s the sort of thing we can legislate if we had a big enough lobby.
I don’t want to hand universities a top-down mandate but want to ensure that our public universities are providing an equal opportunity for all students to be admitted and not using instruments or scores that deprive female students of the same rights their male counterparts have. Still, this has to be balanced with the mission of our colleges and universities, and the SAT can play a role there.
We have (fuzzily) codified how much a factor race can play in college admissions, for instance, so laws can be written to control these things. But the Fisher decision required a stricter scrutiny of the admissions policies vis-a-vis the importance race plays in college decisions. Using that as an analogy, a strict scrutiny of the weight public colleges give SAT scores and how exactly they use those scores in their admissions decisions are just the sorts of things we can legislate, if we have a strong enough voice about the biases of the test.
At my institution (a Research 1 state flagship university), standardized test scores have never been part of the admission decision for in state students, so they are given zero weight (though a sufficiently high score will give a student automatic admission). At the beginning of my time teaching, a high school diploma was all that was required to get automatic admission. Now a “C” average over a set of academic courses guarantees admission.
In schools with more restrictive admission policies based on student GPA, there is a clear advantage for female students. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (a more prestigious state flagship than the one I teach for) for example, 58.2% of students are female, 41.8% are male. There is a great deal of evidence that boys do relatively better on standardized exams than they do on teacher assigned grades beginning early in elementary school, but it is really impossible to distinguish between the hypothesis that standardized exams are biased against female students or that teacher assigned grades are biased against male students. All we can say for sure is that a male student with the same standardized test score as a female student is likely to have been assigned a lower grade in that subject by a teacher.
The SAT has never been a valid predictor of college success. High-school grades do a better job of it. And the new Common Core SAT (the SCCAT?) will be worse.
The history of the name of this test is amusing and instructive. First, they called it the Scholastic Aptitude Test. But it turned out not to be a valid measure of aptitude, so they renamed it the Scholastic Achievement Test. But it proved not to be a valid measure of achievement either. It was correlated with g–the General Intelligence supposedly measured by IQ tests–so in they decided to rename it again, the Scholastic Reasoning Test or, simply, the SAT.
The thing has been a joke from day 1. But the College Board has been unflagging in its insistence on the importance of having kids take it. Now, they are saying, uh, that test we have been telling you was so great for decades and decades is really a piece of crap and needs to be completely redone to align with the amateurish “standards” created by our new boss, Lord Coleman, who, as you know, was, before he became He Who Must Be Obeyed here at the College Board, was appointed absolute monarch of the English language arts in the United States by Achieve.
The whole thing is a ludicrous, psuedoscientific farce. A variety of numerology.
According to administrators at my institution ACT scores do a good job of predicting success for Pell eligible students while high school grades do a poor job. One issue might well be that we use the old fashioned 4.0 grading scale.
“As the national push for college diplomas skyrocket, College Board is reaping in the profits. According to a Huffington Post article, “College Board’s net revenues… hit $65.6 million in 2010–up from $53 million the year before”. It does also help when states are paying for your tests. The same article revealed that “eleven states [Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon and Texas] and the District of Columbia have each agreed to pay the College Board anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to more than $1 million a year to test students”.””Yet, the increase in profits is not solely because of every American trying to go to college. You’ll never guess what could be going on but here’s a hint: it involves money and politics. Since 2009, the College Board has spent $1,485,750 attempting to influence legislation. The organization has three separate lobbying firms with seven registered lobbyists. As well, the College Board has tried to require AP classes in every California high school. With all of this evidence, you have to wonder who the College Board wants to help: the students or its already enormous bank account?”
http://daily.represent.us/sat-collegeboard/
Much of the survey detail is behind a subscription wall, alas. If only 27% of respondents felt the SAT should be even a minor factor in college admissions, that would raise my eyebrows. But I’m guessing that a majority (probably even a substantial one) feel the SAT/ACT should play some role in admissions decisions.
In addition to the good points teaching economist raised above, I’ll throw this in: GPA isn’t necessarily a good predictor of college success. A lot of it depends on the quality of the high school, and what the high school grades mean. Refer to this study from UT Austin, which automatically admits any student who finishes in the top ten percent of their high school class: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/27/study-finds-impact-attending-poor-high-school-follows-one-college.
I can think of plenty of friends and kids I knew growing up who were bored to death in high school and whose SAT scores far outpaced their HS grades. They got into colleges where they were appropriately challenged and could have far more of a say in what they studied, and they thrived. There’s also just too much variability in how HS teachers grade.
Unfortunately, on the same page was a survey that reported that 68% of those surveyed think the US does not provide a world class education.
I think the failing school rhetoric is still very strong. A friend of mine is strongly contemplating sending her child to a cyber school because she perceives that she is not being challenged enough in the local school. She apparently thinks she will in cyber, but I doubt it. I an’t seem to shake the mindset that the local school is “failing”
It’s shameful that so many of our education leaders have perpetrated this “U.S. Schools Are Failing” meme. Achieve led with this one its website for a long, long time. That notion runs like a toxic river through the Common Core website. And it’s talking point No. 1 in just about any speech from Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee.
But the truth is that if you correct for socio-economic status, U.S. students perform at the top or very near the top on the very international tests that are the deformers’ preferred measures. So, what they are saying is just a crock.
Yes, children of the poor in the United States perform badly on standardized tests. That’s what the stats actually tell us.
Maybe colleges should apply a “poverty correction” for students’ SAT scores, if they use SAT scores in making admissions decisions. This was a nice thought until I realized that rich people, who can lobby for laws that serve their own purposes, will never allow it, and neither will the College Board with all its new found “college ready” money.
I think you will find that many schools do, in fact, consider SES status in making admission decisions.
Some of the oligarchs are saying to themselves that because college completion rates are so low, there must be too many entering college in the first place. But they are neither a) working to create more post-secondary alternatives to college b) putting a lot of study into college retention. Why do kids drop out? Well, it’s not always lack of ability or lack of the oligarch’s favorite new character trait, gritfulness.
But a recent study by Public Agenda found that overwhelmingly, kids drop out because of the stress of balancing school and work, because they are going it alone financially, because they don’t see a direction for their lives and are unsure about why they are doing what they are doing, and because they have insufficient understanding of the impact of their decision on the rest of their lives.
We need to figure out, as a society, how to lift that financial burden from kids, how to make it possible for them to get advanced schooling without being weighed down, the entire time, by financial stress. And we need to provide better, cheaper vocational training alternatives. A lot of colleges are now doing a much better job than in the past of providing counselling for their students. That’s a very good thing.
Of course, one alternative would be to create the Common Core SAT (SCCAT) and make it tougher to get in, so only kids who have parents who can pay or are exceptionally talented academically or kids who are both can get in. Some seem to think that an Eloi/Morlock world like that would be just fine.
Of course, the plutocrats and the politicians are looking for a cheap way of dealing with the problem. More tests to limit admissions. Online “training college” for the proles. That kind of thing.