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The Value of Standardized Testing
It has become fashionable in the world of higher education to advocate eliminating the requirement that prospective students take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the ACT and then submit their scores to the admissions offices of the colleges and universities to which they apply. Janet Napolitano, the President of the University of California (UC), has even proposed that at Berkeley, UCLA, and the other elite institutions in the California system such scores be ignored altogether.
The faculty senate at UC has come down on the other side after conducting, at Napolitano’s direction, an extensive study of the question focused on the utility of the tests and on the question of whether they are a source of racial discrimination. The faculty study concluded that the tests have been useful for distinguishing those who could profit from the courses of study at these elite schools from those who could not and that the existing racial disparities in their student bodies had to do chiefly with poor preparation and not with the tests themselves.
What, you might ask, is this all about? The answer is simple enough. High school grades no longer mean much. Grade inflation has ensured that. The SAT and ACT tests may not be infallible. There are able people who do poorly on standardized tests, and these examinations reveal little about the grit and determination of those who score well. But, on the whole, they do a pretty good job of measuring what they purport to measure – the quality of the young person’s preparation for college and his or her aptitude. And in the aggregate, as the faculty senate at UC discovered, they do an excellent job of predicting academic success.
The same can be said for the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Forty-six years ago, when I was a graduate student at Yale, the history department’s Director of Graduate Studies, a Bahai from Iran, did a study seeking to find out whether there was a clear correlation between GRE scores and academic success in the department’s Ph.D. program. And, lo and behold, he found that this was so.
So why have universities, such as the University of Chicago, made the SAT and ACT optional? And why has Janet Napolitano rejected the recommendation of the UC faculty senate?
The answer is simple. If one requires that prospective students submit SAT or ACT scores, one cannot practice “affirmative action” – a euphemism for systematic racial discrimination – without it being obvious that one is doing so. The lawsuit brought against Harvard by an Asian-American coalition has embarrassed that venerable institution, and embarrassment of that sort we cannot have.
The shenanigans now being contemplated by college and university administrators all over the country have nothing to do with a genuine concern for the well-being of African-American and Hispanic students. They have to do solely with virtue-signaling.
The truth is that “affirmative action” harms its supposed beneficiaries. Long ago, back in the 1940s, as Gail Heriot once pointed out to me, a series of studies were done testing whether athletes of talent recruited by elite institutions with little regard for their scholastic aptitude profited from the education on offer at these institutions. The conclusion reached was that they had actually been damaged. They could not compete with their fellow students, they associated almost solely with one another, and they tended either to fail and drop out or to major in the least demanding fields: sociology, education, playground management, exercise science, and the like. Had these young people attended less elite schools, as their less athletically-talented academic peers sometimes did, they would have had an opportunity to make up for poor preparation in high school and they might well have prospered (as many of their peers did).
I mention these particular studies – because the athletes in question were white. What pertained to them in the 1940s pertains today to African-American and Hispanic students inadequately prepared for high-level college work who are recruited by our elite institutions. At less demanding schools, those like them do compete, they make up for lost time, they advance, and many of them enter the professions.
This is no secret, and the college administrators intent on allowing high school students to apply without taking standardized tests are not ignorant. They merely want to signal to their peers that they are virtuous, and they do not care what harm they do to the supposed beneficiaries of the policies that they want to institute.
The people who run most of our institutions of higher learning are profoundly corrupt. For the better part of a century, for the sake of pleasing their alumni and their teams’ fans, they have averted their gaze from the damage they have inflicted on the athletes they recruit and then shamelessly exploit. For a long time now, they have taken advantage of minority students for a similarly cynical purpose. Now they have hit on a scheme for concealing their lack of scruples. You have to admire their cheek.
Published in Education
Where the double aich ee double hockey sticks have you been? Hmm?
In quarantine.
I did really well on the tests, but I wasn’t given an education. I took it.
I found mention of another standardized test and linked it in a post but I think it’s relevant here.
BLUF: Very badly.
In other words, what Gail Heriot found is that affirmative action—whether its “beneficiaries” are earners of the traditional gentlemans’ “C”, (who were often legacies of well-to-do alumni,) talented athletes ill suited for the university in question, or favored minorities (in the case of women these days, majorities) is for the financial benefit of the university.
The universities don’t care whether the students it elevates beyond their level of competence succeed in life.
If anything it’s worse now that Uncle Sam is the deep pocket and not Uncle Scrooge.
A sad side effect of allowing students to go to schools they’re not qualified for is they usually end up with no degree and a pile of debt they can never pay off. No wonder the Democrats’ siren song of school loan forgiveness sounds so sweet . . .
I’m sure if they accept public employment in an essential field such as
Stasi informantsocial distancing enforcer or contact tracer debt that forgiveness will be forthcoming.I’m sure that if voluntary compliance doesn’t work, machine guns down the empty lanes would work nicely.
Ah yes, Michigan.
The SAT measures how hard the student studied for the SAT.
How hard the student studied for the SAT is a good predictor of how hard the student will study in college.
Makes sense, really.
This is one of those subjects that tends to ruffle my feathers a bit. Thankfully, I just had an encouraging thought:
If administrators got their way, could this be a pivotal moment in buckling outdated academic hierarchies? Might certain Catholic, Southern, or Midwestern universities benefit if they refused to go along? Or at least not go quite as far along?(Surely, Hillsdale, which is also enjoying a head start with its essential online catalog, won’t.) I could see opportunities for some schools to narrow the gap – outside of the STEM fields, anyway.
I imagine Harvard grads are expensive, and the decline has to be catching up already. Whether or not this is materializing yet on the employer end, I haven’t a clue, but doesn’t it seem possible that the day might come when a CEO says, “I’m done hiring Ivy League kids.”
Or maybe that’s naive.
No, it doesn’t, or at least it didn’t used to. I don’t know about the more recent versions. Study can help somewhat. It’s pretty close to an IQ test.
Wellllll, depends on what you mean by “studied for the SAT”. I did pretty well on it, and the only “studying” I did for it was to take the PSAT. I don’t think that, at that time, there were any study courses available.
I did study hard for my high school courses.
Very interesting. I did not know about this test.
I think the kind of kid who could slack off in school generally, but then study for a couple months and score well is an especially bright kid to begin with.
Overall retention is key though.
Whereas if they’d gone to schools for which they were qualified, even if lower prestige, they’d have a degree and the satisfaction of achievement that came with it (and maybe a pretty decent career to boot).
I’ve mentioned before, my late father in the 1980’s (then a professor of mechanical engineering at one of the campuses of the University of California) did an informal study of students admitted to the engineering schools of the various University of California and California State College campuses. He found that almost all of the racial minority students admitted to the high prestige campuses by affirmative action (which was still legal then) (UCLA and Berkeley) either dropped out completely, or switched from engineering to some fluffy no substance major like Black Studies. But the students who rejected the siren call of the “prestige” campuses and enrolled at a campus befitting their preparation (say UC Riverside, Cal State Fullerton, or Cal Poly Pomona) for the most part came out with degrees in engineering and from there embarked on careers in the field. So the students who enrolled at the less prestigious campuses ended up in better places than those admitted by affirmative action to the “prestige” campuses.
Yes, affirmative action hurts the very people it purports to help.
This is why we face serious danger in a contest of technology with China. Our “elites” have let us down badly and have spent 25 years practicing virtue signaling, not education.
When I took it in the fall of 1955, we were told only that we were to take another test. We were marched down to the study hall and given the test. To this day, I do not know my score. It was high enough to make me a National Merit Scholar, but that is all I know. The same is true of the MCAT, the Medical College Admission Test. My roommates were going to take it and they suggested I do so to learn what it was like. I did so, then they suggested that, since it only cost $20, I apply to USC medical school and go through the interviews even though I was still only in my first year of pre-med classes. I did so, and in December was accepted. That spring I took 28 units of premed including Organic Chemistry to get the requirements done. Neither of my room mates ever got to medical school.
More like forty or fifty years. Bakke v Regents of the University of California. Or as a fairly salty black lady of my mother’s acquaintance said in response to a school meeting about the city’s integration plans:
“Some black child craps in the hall and a white liberal wants to put a toilet there.”
Sad . . .
I never studied for the SAT. How could you?
Ohhh, that’s right. There are courses now where students can prep for the types of questions they’ll see, but they weren’t available way back when I took it (I don’t think).
I forgot about the MCAT.
Wow. There is a PBS Newshour on this right now.
Um. It’s interesting.
Oh brother, now we need a linesman to put white social distancing lines on all the turf in the city.
I wonder what the hourly rate for that job is?
Right. Elite colleges would do better keeping testing as part of admission, and providing for generous alumni donations to provide SAT prep classes.
Or maybe community minded alumni would lead SAT prep classes for free.
My only objection is the testing company has not only control of SAT, ACT, but now local school curriculums, via the AP series now being pushed on kids in grade 9-12. Kids are now taking 8-15 AP courses in English, history, math, science, foreign language, over 4 years of high school. (9=1 human geography.
10=2-3 English, history, math.
11=3-5 English, history, math, math, science.
12=3-6 English, history, math, science, science, foreign language.)
One thing that kills me are how kids are able to have high school GPAs above 4.0 . . .
I used a friend’s SAT prep coursework. He used the same as me. Our SAT scores were disparate enough that I don’t think the prep course made much difference other than giving me confidence to not freak out over it.
There were some testing skills that I’ve carried on through school and in taking post grad certification tests and how to do analogies.
I did horribly on the ACT. I’m a slow reader so I had the same problem with it that I had with the FCAT… i couldn’t finish any of the sections.
IQ tests, the SAT and the ACT are highly predictive of grades in college and performance in upper level occupations like engineering, science, medicine, the law, etc. All three are predictive of future earnings.
It would behoove universities to accept students who are likely to be able to earn enough not only to pay back loans but to contribute money to the univerisity. They also need to give them an education that will earn them a good living. Accepting marginal students and graduating students with degrees in grievance studies are self defeating strategies because they promote alumni poverty.
I’ve never taken it but was always afraid I’d test positive for stupidity. My defense? Its a false positive.
What’d they say, what was their slant? I know the basic data and have thought about its implications; that much is something of a constant – no new surprises are likely. But I have trouble tracking the threads of opinion.
Is that the Lake Woebegone Effect?
In my high school while I was there it was possible due to weighted classes. Accelerated classes carried more weight in the computation of GPA. It was a little squirrelly.