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.
Yes, some private high schools feed to quality summer research programs, but A) those schools give out more aid than you'd think and B) a number of public magnet schools have similar success in placing students with labs. I am sure that this does still correlate with wealth to some degree, but I don't think it does so in a way that the admissions committee can easily "see".
Beyond that, I think the vast majority of admissions committees (including all of the ivies) have little interest in discounting anything. I watched a lot of students that to be honest were just average get into very good schools, purely on good (inflated) grades from a name brand high school. The kids from my summer research cohort also got into very good schools for the most part, but those students were actually some combination of insanely smart and insanely dedicated.
It's a very hard problem for sure, I don't feel confident enough to say strongly that a particular set of metrics is obviously good or obviously bad. But I don't think removing standardized testing on the whole is likely to help with discounting for wealth (and I also don't think they really want to).
FWIW I think SAT/ACT are bad indicators for the "elite" schools because they just saturate and stop having much value in splitting the applicant pool. Especially the math section, it becomes a matter moreso of making a careless mistake or two.
> I think SAT/ACT are bad indicators for the "elite" schools because they just saturate
this is a feature. Elite schools don't want to be able to tell the 0.5% from the 5%, because then they wouldn't be able to select for rich and solidly but not amazingly competent kids. They'll take the 0.01% olympiad medalists to fill their genius quota, then fill the rest of their cohort with solid, hardworking, well-connected kids who'll boost the prestige (and donations) of their institution more than the scrappy smart kid who aced every standardized exam with no support to speak of but probably won't (want to) learn the lingo and do the hustle to make it into McKinsey's.
"Average" on what criteria?
I think I was unclear about research experience and similar -- it's not that having these experiences is a marker of wealth, it's that if the experience was only enabled by wealth, then it's more visible. If you're in mommy's lab -- what wealth without talent can get you -- it's clearer than if you got a tutor for the SAT. But perhaps I'm wrong on this.
You also raise a good point -- I don't think schools want to discount for wealth. I think they want to have interesting and capable people. Wealth makes many, if not most, people more interesting and capable. Why discount for that?
They want to avoid uninteresting, incapable students who appear interesting and capable because of wealth -- but there's no issue with admitting interesting, capable students who could take advantage of their own (parents') wealth to become more interesting and more capable!
Elite schools have long used the SAT/ACT as a "shouldn't score below XYZ" indicator for middle class students, and as a way to propel underrepresented students.
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?
As such, in a university setting, I expect to be surrounded by people who are curious, who value learning, who are building up the skills and knowledge to excel in their chosen fields. In my own country, universities are usually specialized, and further divided into highly specialized 'faculties', which has upsides but also downsides. Still, even in the American college system, I would expect all of my peers to be interested in excelling in their chosen fields of study, whether that is music or sports or medicine or computer science. I would not expect to be surrounded by people who are just ok at academic knowledge but are really driven social workers, or by people who have basic knowledge in a lot of fields, but no advanced knowledge at all.
Do you truly believe you can measure this with a single standardized exam?
I’m not even sure you can measure academic knowledge with a standardized exam, let alone all the other attributes we agree we’d like to see in peers at university.
One thing is for certain: the SAT is not that exam.
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?
