This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the Times article about this yesterday. I also applied to college last year, so I have a pretty recent knowledge of the process.
I spent a grand total of $28 and managed to get a 99th percentile score on the SAT. To claim it’s impossible to score high on that test without money is absolutely false. There are many free or low-cost resources out there, including Collegeboard sponsored Khan Academy prep (free for everyone). All it really requires is time and discipline (as do other things in life). Sure, it’s not perfect, but GPA and extracurriculars can vary vastly across schools, and the SAT provides a pretty good indicator of one’s academic ability in comparison to others.
The supreme irony in my case is that I go to a school in Texas for completely free thanks to merit scholarships funded in part by Texas taxpayers, while the schools in my state (California) are charging $30k per year despite being funded by my parents’ taxes. Basically, going out of state was more affordable in my situation.
No one is claiming it's "impossible", and I don't want to minimize your experience -- 20 years ago, I also scored 99th percentile on the SAT with only $15 spent on practice books -- but it's absolutely not the norm.
The reality is that a SAT scores correlate with wealth. Both directly, in that while you and I may not need tutoring to improve our scores, there are also millions of kids out there who do benefit from expensive tutoring, and millions of kids who would benefit, but don't because they can't afford it. But also indirectly: I'd be willing to bet you don't come from a low-SES background: i.e., living in poverty, unable to afford basic needs, parents or guardians infrequently present, with unsteady income, etc. (For the record, I don't have this background.) If I'm wrong about your background, you are truly an exception, not merely in the 1% of SAT scorers.
Using the SAT in college admissions means that admissions is biasing -- at the margins -- towards, of those students who would benefit from expensive tutoring, the subset who can afford it.
Everything good correlates with wealth. Wealth is quite literally the ability to make things happen.
The relevant question is, do SAT scores correlate with wealth more or less than whatever holistic criteria the UCs will be switching to? And if they correlate more, is it because the holistic criteria are actually fairer or because the UCs are Goodharting on highly visible measures such as wealth?
Well, no, because the SAT correlates with wealth while plausibly having claim on being an objective measure.
When little Johnny gets an internship as his daddy's company, that obviously correlates with wealth, and admissions committees can discount it. When little Susie is on a groundbreaking paper from mommy's lab, that obviously correlates with wealth (not necessarily financial), and admissions committees can discount it.
Other activities can be more easily/obviously/readily discounted for wealth, while the SAT's correlation with wealth is harder to account for.
In the end, there isn't any point in admitting a student to a university where they don't understand the curriculum. So the important question that I expect universities to ask themselves is: are we getting enough information about how well a student is going to be prepared for our curriculum based on their SAT score?
If rich people who know less have higher SAT scores than poor people who know more, then the systemic bias is in the SAT itself. If not, then the SAT isn't the problem, the actual school system is. And, unless they want to take on educating younger children, Universities can't to do too much to fight that type of bias.
I firmly believe that exams are in principle the only fair way to do admissions in educational institutions. They could be national exams or admissions exams created by that institution itself, but either way, as long as the exams are kept un-biased (which I'm not claiming is an easy problem to solve) and scoring is anonymous, you get the closest thing we have to a fair process.
The only alternative could be an easy exam covering just the bare-minimum knowledge, and a lottery system for everyone who passes the exam.
Of course, private universities are free to be as biased as they want. I don't think it's ethically or morally correct, but it shouldn't be illegal.
This considers only academic knowledge, and specifically only that knowledge that can be assessed in a standardized way.
Such knowledge makes up a very small fraction of success -- though you could make the argument that students' ability to acquire and demonstrate it probably correlates with success much more than the knowledge itself.
Second, why would you want to go to college with a bunch of other kids who just meet some bar on some measure of academic capability? At least in the US, college is most kids' first experience living away from home for an extended period of time. Wouldn't you want to be with driven individuals, interesting conversationalists, performers, intellectual peers across other disciplines, etc.?
Why limit admissions to "book smarts"? Why is that the most fair?
That’s true, I don’t. I come from a middle-class background (at least, what counts for middle class in CA)
> Using the SAT in college admissions means that admissions is biasing -- at the margins
I agree with you here. However, removing the SAT requirement does little to improve the status quo. I’ve personally seen parents do things like move their kids to different schools so that a bad semester grade wouldn’t stick on their transcript, and of course, rich parents funding/helping establish startups and nonprofits that their kids claim they founded/ran for college application purposes. The truth is, having a good GPA or resume is more likely to get you in, and some of the more impressive/rare “accomplishments” that students like to tout in their activity summaries and essays are simply unavailable to lower income students, making it harder for them to appear competitive to an admissions committee.
Yes, but admissions officers know this, so I don't think the inability of students whose parents don't found startups for them to play with is really that much of a hit.
In reality, if all else is equal, a student from a low-SES background has a much better shot at admission -- because doing all those upper-middle-class college-signaling things is much harder when you're not upper-middle-class, and thus much more impressive because it indicates a level of ability above and beyond the equivalent upper-middle-class student.
I posted about this elsewhere in the thread, but admissions committees are not actually trying to optimize over the set of various typical middle-class college-aspirational things -- they are trying to optimize for success & fit both in college and post-college, so they'll students in the incoming class will become good friends, have fond feelings, and bring both financial and prestige rewards to the university.
They don't care -- and shouldn't care -- who can perform the motions the best.
I came from a lower middle class background, not white if that matters, did next to zero studying, paid nothing to prepare and got a 96th percentile score. The extent of the preparation I did was practice tests held at my high school.
However, I didn't come from the background you described: living in poverty, unable to afford basic needs, parents or guardians infrequently present, with unsteady income.
I had a roof over my head, never worried about where my next meal was coming from. The only thing I'd might have in common with people of that background is that my parents didn't graduate elementary school, parents were paid less than min wage under the table, and that I grew up on welfare.
That's my background. From where I stand I'm skeptical that tutoring really skews the results to the extent that wealth is primary thing measured by the SATs. I had no tutoring and only relied on the education I received from public schools. That said, the quality of public schools still correlated with wealth. But school quality being linked to wealth is a much bigger problem than standardized testing. And it doesn't change, ultimately, how much education the test taking has absorbed from school. Removing the SATs as a requirement may or may not make things better. But doing it and claiming that you're making things better for those that are less fortunate seems like a stretch when the root cause is that they're receiving a poorer education in the first place given that if you fixed that, this problem of standardized testing would benefit the rich to a much lesser extent.
> But school quality being linked to wealth is a much bigger problem than standardized testing.
Agreed. The UCs can't solve this problem on their own, though. The UCs have different admissions criteria for undergrads than private selective colleges, in my understanding -- they can't treat the SAT as an optional indicator, it's part of a score.
Grades? Ability to complete college successfully?
Selective colleges are looking for students who (a) meet a baseline for academic success there, and then (b) succeeded with respect to their opportunities, in ways that suggest future success is likely.
Success looks different in different environments, and that includes different levels of wealth, access to institutions, community, etc. Much of the stress of this competitiveness comes from large wealthy metro areas and their suburbs, where the access to opportunity is generally huge.
How do you demonstrate exceptional ability to succeed in an environment where you can't sneeze without hitting success?
