This is why abolishing the SAT is bad. It’s poor kids’ tickets out of their cycle of poverty. Ignore the profoundly anti-intellectual, dishonest test abolitionists. They are the definition of toxic performative virtue-signaling. Fortunately, the trend of restating them has commenced.
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Great with kids and great with adults are two entirely different constructs. “I don’t know why everyone is so crazy about Beth as a principal. She wasn’t that good in the classroom.” The teachers who say this don’t grasp that relating to adults is a different skill set.
A data point urban teachers unions don’t want you to know: in middle class and suburban school settings, a kid can academically survive two consecutive bad teachers. Not so with poor urban kids; two consecutive bad teachers takes them right out. I deal with a teachers union that will spend a quarter million dollars to defend a member they wouldn’t have their own kids in front of. That’s about power; it sure as Hell isn’t about the kids. But I digress.
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I agree completely. We have incredible talent here, with the full desire and dreams and ability to be our teachers, nurses, engineers, mail and delivery people, public workers, pilots, computer coders and IT managers, child care providers, athletes, accountants, store managers, professors, bus drivers, Police officers, restaurant chefs, cooks, servers, librarians, soldiers, fishermen, artists, bartenders, farmers, musicians, and so many other people we need here, But who we don’t want to support, respect, or pay living wages to. We, in this country, because of our politics, policies, and bigotry, are destroying what we always used to refer to as “the American Dream.”
I have experienced and fought this my entire life, and worked hard. I’m a white, well educated (3 Master Degrees), high achieving woman, from a lower-middle class family of origin. And have spent 30+ years providing health care access, research outcomes, and working to train others in underserved rural and urban health facilities. I will never stop working for our people who come to and live in this country.
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I agree with much of this. BUT, the SAT tests are still biased in many respects against POC and other cultures. I think we need different tools to screen applications, and (maybe most importantly,) more diverse interviewers and “judges” for admission. We need diversity, Every single one of us is a member of the one and only race: the Human Race. We need to get that.
Out of my many years of Algebra, Calculus, and Trigonometry, now at the age of 70, I still remember many of the formulas and ways to solve actual problems, including calculating board feet and heights of trees. However, the only one I ever use in my everyday life is still algebra. And it comes into play the most in my KITCHEN! 
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Who needs SS? They could have called Roger Stone at the Willard and he could send over a golf cart to pick Mr. Marky up (.06 miles from Willard to WH,) and then schlepp him back to the Willard/Trump War Room. Or, that fat, lazy Mr Marky fucker could have walked – it might have taken him about 10 minutes, tops, and, since it was cold, even less time.
We have NO idea how lazy and entitled these people in DC Federal Government are. We should start tracking them, and we should STOP enabling and excusing them.
Maybe that’s why he likes it. Was this a one time thing?
Nope. The SAT is disappearing because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to: predict who will succeed at college and do so with equal accuracy for all races. I did a study for the local state U. SAT scores has basically no correlation with retention, GPA or really a anything. The studies are easy to do, because the data is all on computers anyway. A grad student can do it in a day or two.
Even for colleges where SAT scores have some predictive power, if they aren’t equally accurate for all races and genders, that’s a problem.
The Accuplacer tests for math do have predictive power.
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Definitely telenovela material.
Actually, no, they are not. That conversation ended by the late-Eighties. SATs benefit children of color and poor children the most. “Bias” is not a matter of opinion, when you’ve done your statistical work; on item analyses, run through every gender, race/ethnicity, urban suburban, rural, low- middle - and high SES and a dozen others. Their very tight specifications mean reliability and predictive validity, all comfortably int he .9 range, which is pretty unassailable. SES only accounts for 14% of the variance. Having been in the business a while, that is quite good. .
It is unlikely all the testing companies around the world all conspired so that. . . Asian kids do the best. If you don’t want admissions officers to have more power - and actually they do better than most understand - then you don’t want the SATs not in the mix. This goes to the heart of the profoundly anti-intellectual, know-nothing anti-testing crowd. And isn’t it interesting that testing companies from around the world all see pretty much similar trends? You know who talks about this fact? African-American intellectuals, educators. As they have for half a century or more.
“We need diversity” yes, of course - who seriously argues about that? For the Freshman class at Harvard, African-American students account for 18% of the population. African Americans overall account for 14% of our country’s population. The same is true, also, for our federal workforce, 18% African-American. The river keeps moving.
I apologize in advance if I’m being a bit twerky. But I do this work, have done it for decades, and the level of cluelessness and dishonesty in some corners is infuriating.
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The mullahs always do have a minister for arts education or some such that they can trot out to explain through her burka/chador that she feels no oppression whatsoever, don’t they?
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See my other post. By the way, the SAT is being widely reinstated. The SAT used to have poor predictive validity, but that was some time ago. The same holds for the ACT. Then there are all those tests Pre-K through Grade 12.
With all due respect, that’s just nonsense.
See my piece on item analysis. They are equally accurate. Their reliability numbers are comfortably in the .9 range.
FWIW, I’ve had to work with the College Board. Absolute bastards, liars. Constantly pleading poor-mouth. They have a 9 hole golf course on their property. But they got their numbers down. And why shouldn’t they? They and the other testing companies have rounded up the best psychometricians in the world.
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In the 80s, it was hard to do the analysis of predictive ability and bias, so the SAT people did them Now, it’s not. Any university can run a regression on their own data. I know, I did one of these, informally (ie not published).
No university likes to publicize that one of their admission criteria was biased or meaningless, so the studies don’t get published, but they get done and universities ditch the SAT as a result.
Bias is also a problem. If one group is more likely to study for the SAT and another less likely, then it SAT will over predict the studiers and under predict the non-studiers. To use the SAT, the university would have to discount scores in the over predicted group and accept lower scores in the under predicted group. This makes people in the overpredicted angry and claim discrimination, so it’s much easier just to ditch the test.
I think admissions tests are a reasonable idea, but the SATs are just awful tests. I mean, testing writing with multiple choice questions?
I don’t know where you live, but in Texas art classes have been reduced or eliminated. Some schools dropped physical education - the kids might get to run around a bit at lunchtime but that’s it.
Starting in 4th grade, my art teachers worked on our cursive handwriting. That makes way more sense than a reading or English teacher trying to do it.
Bias, poor predictive validity were real issues in the early-Eighties, but by the end of the decade the landscape changed enormously. In the 80s I started working in a large urban testing and evaluation department. The river moved. Was there a quarter century, until around '14, but assessments of all kinds remains a main area of my current work.
Universities have been publishing their admissions grids since the 70s. Testing companies have published untold thousands of rigorous research in the past 40 years. They are easy to access. Untold number of books on diversity. I still have a bunch of 'em.
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They got their numbers to work. But times change.
For a lot of people. For a lot of poor kids of color, it’s their ticket to the middle class. Anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea what they are talking about.
I’ve gone feral, more or less
@drtv when an extroverted friend asked how I could bear it during the first shutdown, I reminded her that I’m an introvert: “I was BORN for this!”
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The testing companies have a motive to prove a lack of bias and they use large averages. Individual colleges can do a quick regression on their own data. I’ve done this, while working for an Educational Policy Research group. The college for which I did this showed the SAT had very little power to predict who would do well in that college. It was a state university with a fairly diverse student body, albeit probably not typical of the country, because the state’s demographics aren’t. The study was never formalized or published, but I know the report was circulated internally and that a few months later, the university announced it was going test-optional. Over the years, I’ve seen news articles suggesting that other colleges have done the same thing, the same way — quietly.
I was in favor of the SATs before I did the research. But a good hard look at the data made me change my mind. While I did not look at racial bias (my remit was predicting success in the college, based on admissions data and the SAT was so useless I promptly discarded it as a predictor), my bet it that if colleges find an underprediction based on one demographic group (and there’s gender, race and hispanic/not) then they have a potential court case if it gets out. They could get sued for discriminating against other groups, because they accept the underpredicted group with lower scores. If they don’t correct for underprediction, the underpredicted group can sue, if they can prove the college knows of the underprediction. This is why I think the SAT is disappearing. On average, it might be a decent predictor, but unbiased prediction for every demographic combination in every college? I’m skeptical.
We need to find ways of identifying kids who will be well-served in college (and make it affordable for them), but using a test as bad as the SAT is not a good way to do this. The SAT subject tests are far better.
Using the Accuplacer tests would be, for the college I looked at, a pretty decent metric. Kids who could pass the Accuplacer Algebra test were much better prepared for college. The thing that makes me mad is that kids go to mediocre schools, get Bs in math and fail the Accuplacer Algebra test, meaning they have to pay college tuition for remedial math that earns them no credit towards graduation. If they wanted to do any subject that requires basic math (most of the better paying majors), they start a year behind and won’t graduate in 4 years.
If the Accuplacer tests replaced the SAT math test, then high schools would be far more motivated to ensure their students could pass it. Because the real disgrace is the education these kids get.
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