Lloyd Lofthouse, a frequent commenter, offers advice about how to beat the SAT and ACT: Apply to a college or university that does not require applicants to present scores from either examination as a part of the admission process. There are good reasons to do this: First, it is unfair
Here is Lloyd Lofthouse’s advice:
All is not lost to the SAT/ACT profit monger machine.
There are colleges and universities that do not use the SAT/ACT scores for admitting substantial numbers of students into Bachelor degree programs.
Pull Quote from site: “More than 800 four-year colleges and universities (almost 28 percent of total) do not use the SAT or ACT to admit substantial numbers of … applicants.”
http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional
In 2010, there were 2,870 4-year colleges in the US.
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
There’s still hope.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I appreciate Lloyd’s sentiments.
But avoiding the SAT/ACT “obstacle course” is not so simple.
Students are told by their parents, guidance counselors, teachers, and administrators that the ACT and SAT are “important.” The top “selective” colleges say they’re important. And financial aid is given to those with high test scores. News reporters cite the ACT’s “college readiness” report as gospel. Students and parents and teachers and administrators (and school boards) buy the false notion that the College Board’s AP courses are “better.”
Both the College Board and the ACT are tied into the STEM craze. So are public schools.
And STEM is tied tightly to Common Core, which is tied tightly to the ACT and the College Board.
One doesn’t easily undo a problem that’s pervasively embedded.
Don’t you think the anti-excessive testing people at the K-12 level have been really effective as advocates, though?
I do. They don’t have any big money foundations or political backers, yet they’ve brought attention to the issue and some schools and even states have made changes as result of that: NY, TX, FL. Presumably this obedience to and expansion of testing in K-12 would have gone on forever, completely unexamined or questioned had they not intervened. Maybe they can have the same effect in higher ed. I never thought Texas would admit they were testing too much, yet they have. That was parents and teachers. They did that, and no one helped them. In fact, they met a lot of resistance.
Chiara,
There may be some minor headway gained in the fight against excessive testing. But that seems to be mostly in state-level high-stakes testing.
But I’ve seen nothing so far to indicate that parents and educators and the general public are overly concerned about reliance on the ACT and SAT. The numbers of those tests given is increasing each year.
Moreover, there is a steady drumming for Advanced Placement courses, even though the research is clear that AP courses are more puff than meaningful product.
Where, exactly, do you see the slough off in ACT, SAT and AP testing?
Thank you. I want to add that even Stanford—usually listed as one of the top five unvisited in the world on lists that rank colleges—doesn’t even take the SAT or ACT that seriously.
“Stanford University is one of the most selective colleges in the country. In the graph above (click on link to see graph), you can see that the blue and green dots representing accepted students are concentrated in the upper right corner. Most students who get accepted to Stanford have “A” averages, SAT scores (CR+M+W) above 2100, and ACT composite scores above 30. Also realize that a lot of red dots are hidden beneath the blue and green — many students with 4.0 GPAs and extremely high standardized test scores get rejected by Stanford. …
“Stanford has holistic admissions — the admissions officers will be looking for students who will bring more than good grades and standardized test scores to their campus. Students who show some kind of remarkable talent or have a compelling story to tell will often get careful consideration even if grades and test scores aren’t quite up to the ideal.”
http://collegeapps.about.com/od/GPA-SAT-ACT-Graphs/ss/stanford-admission-gpa-sat-act.htm
If you read that short piece and study the chart, you may notice that nowhere does the word “grit” appear or even “high self esteem”?
Sorry for the automatic spelling correction that I didn’t catch before I click post comment. “Unvisited” should have been “universities”.
If Stanford doesn’t take the exam scores seriously perhaps they should stop requiring SAT or ACT exams and suggesting the applicants submit SAT subject exams.
Maybe Stanford should just drop the exams altogether and rely on the rest of their holistic process without them.
When our daughter—who didn’t have stellar SAT scores and thought that would kill her chance of being accepted—applied to Stanford, I sent an e-mail to Stanford asking them how much weight they gave to the test scores and the reply indicated not much and in some cases none depending on other elements of the holistic process.
Then again, maybe when two applicants are equal in every other way, the test score is used as a tie breaker.
Lloyd,
I think the most important factor for your daughter was that she was a D1 level athlete. Stanford fields a large number of teams and must fill those slots.
But when she reached Stanford, she didn’t join the pole-vault team. She said she would have to do much better than 13 feet in her jumps to earn that invitation, and she never did. She broke some league records in HS, but never broke any state, national or international records, and it is performances at those levels that make the difference.
In addition, she was not approached by any of the Stanford coaches. At least, she never mentioned it.
She didn’t join any sports at Stanford. Instead, she focused totally on academics and eventually joined the Stanford Salsa Dancers and ended up being that group’s non-academic and non-credit earning choreographer (or some other title) during her last year or so.
But her GPA for HS graduation was 4.65, and she had been on TV and radio as part of her mother’s lecture series during national and international book tours a few times.
I think it likely that the admission committee took not of the pole vaulting. If I have the dates approximately right women were new to the sport.
You are correct though that a sizable percentage of Stsnfords addition seats are reserved for recruited athletes.
@ Lloyd,
So how do you undo a testing regimen (ACT, SAT, AP) that is so embedded in public education?
Most of the people I’ve talked to in education– including teachers, parents administrators, guidance counselors, and school board members, and students — think the ACT and SAT measure something important.
When they are informed of the drastic limitations of those tests, they still cling to their belief that they must be “good” or why else would colleges use them? As I’ve cited here and elsewhere numerous times, colleges use them for their own nefarious purposes.
And AP? Students know the game….they have to try to “look good” to get into a “good” college.
Seriously, public education is plagued by an awful lot of BS, some of it self-imposed.
I question “self-imposed”.
An estimated 42.1 million Americans still smoke cigarettes. That’s 18.1 percent of all adults.
ACT and SAT have been around so long, they have become a acquired habit. How many people do you know that managed to kick an acquired habit—for instance, a bad diet that is killing them with heart disease and diabetes?
The husband of one of the teachers I worked with ate himself to death. His doctor told him what he had to do with his lifestyle and he refused. When his wife tried to feed him healthy food, he threw it on the wall. He lost his legs to diabetes and still refused to change his lifestyle. My brother died the same way—he refused to stop drinking, smoking and eating fast food. The week before he died, I visited him, and he was eating a gallon of vanilla ice cream. The entire gallon to prove he could do it against the doctor’s advice.
Most American’s, by now, know that the traditional American diet is not healthy but the U.S. is still the fattest nation on the planet with a third of Americans obese and about 79-percent overweight. How much of a profit does McDonald’s make annually? How much does Coke and Pepsi make? How much sugar does the average American consume each year? What is the leading causes of death?
Did you know that 84 percent of diseases or life style diseases? You may be interested in the annual gross earnings of the top 10 potato chip brands and then compare that to sales made by the book publishing industry. Lay’s, #1, took in almost $1.6 billion. Total book sales for 2013 took in $15.05 Billion from the entire industry.
ACT and SAT just like NCLB, Race to the Top and the VAM Common Core Agenda are just more lifestyle diseases and Americans don’t have the will to shake them anymore than they can change their lifestyle choices.
I appreciate the idea, Lloyd. BUT, be aware that at least in Utah (and I’m sure that other states do this as well) REQUIRE that juniors take the ACT. I’m not even sure if I can opt my children out of this one. A full half day of school is cancelled for sophomores and seniors while the juniors take the test, and even after the test is over, kids use the rest of the day as a study hall, meaning that an entire day of school is wasted. The same thing happens with the ACT-written Explore test for freshmen and the Plan test for sophomores, all of which are required testing for the state of Utah (although my son opted himself out of those tests by refusing to go to school on those days!). This year, he’s a junior, and I don’t know yet if we can opt him out of the ACT.
ACT and SAT were just part of the process until I started to learn what was going on. I didn’t pay much attention to them through the years. I taught and kids took those tests.
I think cancer works the same way. It’s stealthy and spreads until one day the victim feels sick and goes to a doctor to find out why.
But once a parent is aware of the ACT and SAT cancer, then it is that parent’s duty to fight back and discover every legal means possible to protect their children from the testing mafia. And if there is no legal means, then that parent—if they have the courage—should launch a class-action court case with other parents and take the war to court, launch Blogs, launch support and education groups, etc.
In World War II, if the United States had given up before defeating Japan and Germany, what do you think would have happened to the U.S.?
This is a war and if most parents and teachers are unwilling to fight, then they deserve what they get when the democratic public schools are gone and they have to deal with corporate CEOs who run schools that aren’t even half as good as the old public schools that will be dead and gone.
Instead of going in front of an elected school board or a principal who has to answer to a school board, parents will have to call customer service through a toll free number and then wait for someone to come on the line.
And when all the legal and political means are exhausted, parents should take out their firearms, load them, and start a revolution.
The United States did that against the British Empire for mostly the same reasons.
A caveat to Lloyd’s post… Test optional can sometimes be more of a marketing decision by colleges. Low scorers will not report. High scorers will report. Makes the college look better with their average SAT scores. Plus, if a student wants money, report the scores. Read the fine print at every test optional college. Careful of SAT Optional. Especially if you want money. Especially if you are an athlete wanting money. No such thing as test optional for NCAA athletes.
One of these years, probably far into the future, people will look back on this era of standardized testing and psychometrics as we now look upon astrology, phrenology, palmistry, physiognomy, or transfiguration and laugh at the thought that such ill founded beliefs could prevail and hold sway over so many.
ACT and SAT, part of the pseudo-scientific psychometric tripe that attempts to pawn itself off as a legitimate means of “measuring” the unmeasurable, suffer from so many epistemological and ontological errors (errors in the conceptual basis on which the whole endeavor is built) that render any results COMPLETELY INVALID and the usage of said results COMPLETELY UNETHICAL.
Will I be laughing from the grave Duane?
I hope so! May the ground above you swell with laughter!
To understand why the SAT and ACT are COMPLETELY INVALID and COMPLETELY UNETHICAL read and understand Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
Ohio is changing their high school graduation requirements to include an ACT route:
“Students who do not earn the required number of graduation points can still meet the requirements for a diploma if they earn a remediation-free score on a national college admission test. This assessment will be given to students free of charge in the fall of their junior year starting with the graduating class of 2018.
Students also can qualify for graduation by earning an approved industry-recognized credential and achieving a workforce-readiness score on a related job skills assessment. The selection of those assessments is in progress.”
They’re also putting in an end of course exam requirement to replace the state graduation test they use now. I assume they will use the CC tests, because they’re already paying for them and the students will already be taking them in math and english. It makes the most sense to use the CC tests, especially if they’re as fabulous as we’re constantly told they are.
Of course, you’re not allowed to mention how CC tests will be used by states, because all discussion of the CC must be limited to pretending it doesn’t come with a test in actual states and schools and is instead a wholly abstract idea 🙂
Insanity thy name is standardized testing (no matter which one).
One of these years, one of these years we will “grow up” and get over this obsession with numerology and the accompanying psychometrics.
Chiara,
didn’t you just contradict the comment you made in your response to my post above??
Duane Swacker
September 20, 2014 at 11:25 am
Insanity thy name is standardized testing (no matter which one).
They never should have promised parents that the CC tests wouldn’t be used in high-stakes decisions for students. It’s a hollow promise. The honest answer is “we don’t know how the tests will be used”. They don’t. It’s up to states.
I’d bet money Ohio will use them for high school graduation. Why would they set up and pay for a whole new elaborate system, outside the new system they’re currently paying for, which is PARCC testing? How many tests can they possibly administer?
I taught kids who were poor, first-in-the-family college attendees (a fair number of their parents has little secondary education), and mostly had English as their second language (Spanish, Haitian creole, Albanian, Cape Verde creole, Igbo, Lithuanian being among the firsts). These kids had great success in being admitted, with solid financial aid, to well respected colleges which did not require SAT’s or ACT’s.
Teachers and guidance counselors made a coordinated effort to create the realization among the kids that 1) they were more than a number and that 2) they didn’t want to pin their hopes on colleges which saw them as nothing more than a number. We matched kids with appropriate schools. We helped kids to tell their stories (many of them hair-raising) in their essays and every time a kid was admitted to a good school, we sent more applicants to those places the following year. We created a pipeline to campus, which made admissions counselors more aware of our school and our kids’ strengths. Most of all, once on campus those kids rocked! They also were willing mentors to the next class below them.
Do high school GPAs and class standing count as “a number”?
There will always be numbers, but when those numbers become more important than the individual ….
Who you are is more important than your birth date number, your weight, the nubmer that represents your age and all those other numbers we each have.
Have you forgotten the numbers that the Nazis tattooed on the arms of the concentration camp victims? Those are the numbers—and the thinking behind those numbers—that I think Christine Langhoff is talking about.
And the test crazed corporate fake education reformers think of numbers the same way the Nazis did.
Lloyd,
Perhaps you will be as vocal in your opposition to those numbers as you are to the SAT and ACT numbers.
What other numbers are you talking about?
For instance, the meaningless numbers being used from standardized tests to rank and yank teachers—-thanks to what Bill Gates thinks—in addition to using those numbers to close public schools while ignoring the real problems that explains why some kids, who mostly live in poverty, are not graduating from HS reading at a higher literacy level that would help them be college ready if they ever wanted to go to college.
That is the rub. The choices people make regarding going to college or not going to college—the results of standardized tests have little or nothing to do with those choices.
Here are a few facts [numbers, mind you] that render 100-percent college career readiness B*** S*** as mandated by NCLB, Race to the Top and the Common Core agenda of rank and yank testing.
1. 26 percent of the jobs in the Untied States don’t require a high school degree.
2. 40 percent of the jobs in the United States only requires a high school degree.
3. 8 percent of jobs only require an AS degree or specific job related certificate from a community college or technical school.
4. 26 percent of jobs require a BA or better, but there are almost three college graduates at this level for every job that requires a college education—South Korea, Russia and Japan—-three countries that graduate more college graduates than the United States— like the U.S., have high levels of unemployment and underemployment for college graduates.
In fact, choice is very important, because all through life parents and children make choices. Isn’t that what this is all about—individuals making choices?
Like the choices parents make not to read to their children at any time before those children start kindergarten and then they leave it up to teachers without supporting them. A long list of studies show that these children fall behind and stay behind because of the next choice that they might make.
Like the choices children make when they don’t read outside of the classroom—ever—don’t study, don’t do homework, don’t cooperate in class.
That brings me back to those useless numbers from standardized tests that are part of the Common Core agenda to rank and yank teachers, close public schools and then turn those children over the corporate Charters that, according to several Stanford Charter studies, mostly perform worse or the same as the average public schools and that is after the Charters cherry pick the students and get rid of the most at-risk kids.
The numbers crunching behind NCLB, Race to the Top and Common Core are the Numbers I’m talking about—using these numbers to destroy the public schools and send kids to corporate schools that will do no better than the public schools.
Numbers used to label and destroy.
Here is the truth: Public schools, for the most part, already offer the classes that lead to college readiness if the kids cooperate with highly trained and supported and supportive teachers, and those children who decided to do the work and read for enjoyment daily outside of school for a half hour or more will be ready for college if that is their choice. Then they can join the unemployment lines if the colleges keep churning out almost three graduates for every job that requires a BA or better.
We did away with using class rank, other than for valedictorian and salutatorian honors as graduation speakers.
As to GPA’s, which research demonstrates to be the most reliable predictor of university performance, yes, they were reported to colleges which required them. But, in context. As in “My GPA for the January 2012 term fell off. The Haitian earthquake killed many members of my extended family and my step-father died of his injuries.”
Christine,
I don’t know who you mean by “we”, but class rank is alive and well in my local public school district. At my institution it is ACT scores that do a better job predicting college performance for Pell eligible students. It is likely because GPAs have a much narrower range than ACT scores at my institution.
Why do you think an ACT or SAT score can not be put into the same context as a GPA?
By “we” I mean the faculty and administration at the high school where I taught.
SAT’s and ACT’s are a snapshot of a student’s performance on a given task on a given day. As all of us are aware, they are most closely correlated with socioeconomic factors. Moreover, because my students were predominantly non-native English speakers and poor, those two factors would likely yield less valid scores on these tests.
The GPA is more like an album of photos, giving a more nuanced, longer view of a student’s performance. A student who gets off to a slow start or suffers a setback like a death can also demonstrate growth and tenacity over time. The colleges where our students flourished seem to appreciate characteristics like personal growth and tenacity more than data.
The gap between standardized test scores and grades is also a function of gender. Boys get higher test scores than their grades would predict, girls get higher grades than their test scores would predict.
There is a large problem comparing grades within the same school, an even larger one comparing them across schools. Not long ago there was an Onion headline that high school graduates are not well prepared for high school. What was interesting to me was that many here agreed that high school graduates from some high schools were, in fact, not well prepared to be freshman in other traditional public high schools. What does the GPA of those students tell you?
What does the GPA of those students tell us?
That they probably come from poverty and the schools they attended have high levels of children living in poverty, and the classes that are offered match the student level of literacy and growth for the majority of students who attend those public schools.
It would be absurd to offer calculus and Moby Dick to students who live in poverty and never read anything outside of the classroom—-ever—-students that don’t do homework and don’t ask for help.
The schools adjust to the children who live in poverty and the state requirements for high school graduation don’t require the children to be college ready when they graduate—most states never have.
In fact, high school was never intended as a path to college but to graduate 17/18 year olds with minimum level of literacy and math skills. In California, for instance, back in the 1980s, minimum competency tests were developed as a way for a child to prove they read at the minimum level of competency and the schools adjusted to offer support to those students who had trouble passing those reading and math tests—tutoring, night classes, community college classes—all designed to bring those children up to the minimum.
The path to college starting in high school is a choice the child makes. If a child isn’t interested in going to college—like me at that age—then there is little to nothign teachers can do to get that child to work harder.
Children are not machines.
The teachers and schools did not set those minimum competency levels. Some of the states did at the legislative level and some states have no minimum competency levels.
It wasn’t until NCLB that it was decided at the federal level that all children had to be college ready by the age of 17/18, but that decision was made without taking into account what poverty does to children and that teachers can not overcome that handicap those kids bring with them when they start school.
Proof of that is the fact that most of these corporate charter schools are cherry picking students and getting rid of the ones that are the most difficult to work with, because they offer behavior challenges, learning disabilities, hate to read, refuse to do homework,e tc.
This is the reality—not the fantasy cooked up by President Obama and Bill Gates and all the other fake education reformers.
Christine,
GPA in my local school is rather compressed. A 3.85 (we do an unweighted GPA, so the maximum is 4.0) puts a student outside of the top 10% of the graduating class. Valedictorians of the high school have not taken a sufficient number academic classes to be admitted to any of the state colleges and universities. How informative can a GPA possibly be?
There are a number of ways to demonstrate ability, and I think standardized exams are one of the ways. Rather than a single snapshot, students can construct a mosaic of exam scores over time. My middle son took the PSAT, the SAT, three subject SAT exams, AMC-10, AMC-12, AIME, and 9 AP exams over three years in high school.
It’s great that strategy worked for your son. I don’t think it would have been effective for my students, none of whom had a parent teaching economics at a tertiary level.
Christine,
My point is not that it worked for my son, it is that standardized tests can provide an alternative mosaic to teacher assigned grades.
Thank you, teachingeconomist, for continuing to bring up the point that it is only fair to measure student abilities in various ways. I read this blog every day and have learned so much; now I am asking my fellow readers to open their minds to the fact that some students need the opportunity to show what their GPAs don’t show. There is a field of research on the gifted underachiever, and some, like my son, are helped by the ACT and SAT. Since I can’t seem to get this message through to many readers of this blog, I will ask my son to explain this personality type on this blog. It hasn’t been an easy road for him or us.
There are always going to be some students who do better on tests than getting the classwork, homework and reading done.
For instance, while at Stanford, our daughter struggled in one math or science class she shred with Steve Job’s son, who, our daughter said, didn’t put out the same effort she and other students did to take notes, study and get all the work in on time, but when it came to the exams, he was usually the first one done and scored higher than the rest of the class.
Maybe some children are aware of this ability and think they don’t have to do the work to earn a high GPA, because that’s what it takes to earn a high GPA—do the work, do all the work and get it in on time.
Here’s a research paper that explored and studied this issue:
“Since having a higher GPA leads to higher levels of income
immediately after graduation, students may benefit
financially from taking easier classes in order to get
better grades. This is because employers often use
GPA as part of the screening process for employees.
However, taking more challenging classes may help a
student develop more human capital which would
increase productivity.”
Click to access oehrlein.pdf
Then there’s this that was reported by USA Today
New study says high school GPA matters more than SAT scores
“Test scores are a number that can be a shadow over the rest of your application and it shouldn’t be like that,” Bastille says. “A GPA is also just a number but it takes into account so many different things like all of your classes and studying.”
http://college.usatoday.com/2014/02/26/new-study-says-high-school-gpa-matters-more-than-sat-scores/
You see, a high GPA indicates a hard worker who is more disciplined and this demonstrates the ability to set goals and accomplish those goals on a timeline. On the other hand, it’s possible that a low GPA but a high ACT or SAT score reveals a lazy student who is not disciplined and who probably doesn’t set many goals.
Here’s the bottom line: The ACT and SAT are extremely limited in predicting college success and completion.
College enrollment specialists know this. As one prominent consultant noted, his research (and that of others) finds that the SAT explains between 3 and 14 percent of the variance in freshman-year college grades, and after that nothing.
To say that another way, the SAT does NOT explain between 86 and 97 percent of the variation in freshman-year grades. As the consultant (the head of ‘an enrollment-management consulting firm”) says, “”I might as well measure their shoe size.” The ACT is only marginally better.
So why do colleges still use them? It’s all about prestige and rankings and “looking good.” They use those scores to dole out – and to deny – financial aid to students. The truth is that “the ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply.”
The result is that “low-income students suffer in this process” because they create a “drag on both revenue and academic profile.” The “elite” schools “are chasing the small number of students who have the money or the test scores that help an institution get ahead. As those students command higher and higher tuition discounts, they leave a smaller and smaller proportion of the financial-aid budget for poor students, who are increasingly at risk of being left out of higher education.”
Now, what is the proposed “fix” for this mess? The Common Core. And it just so happens that the ACT and the College Board were major players in developing it. And it just so happens that groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable support the Common Core. And STEM has been tied inextricably into the Common Core (there is NO STEM shortage or “crisis”).
Meanwhile, there are plenty of educators (and parents) who don’t like the Common Core or are unsure about it, but they pledge their allegiance to AP courses and to the ACT and SAT.