Academics Begin to Wonder if Ditching Standardized Tests was a Mistake
“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades”
Many schools have dropped standardized tests like the SAT in the name of diversity, which is ridiculous.
This is from the New York Times, so you know that progressives will pay attention to it:
The Misguided War on the SAT
After the Covid pandemic made it difficult for high school students to take the SAT and ACT, dozens of selective colleges dropped their requirement that applicants do so. Colleges described the move as temporary, but nearly all have since stuck to a test-optional policy. It reflects a backlash against standardized tests that began long before the pandemic, and many people have hailed the change as a victory for equity in higher education.
Now, though, a growing number of experts and university administrators wonder whether the switch has been a mistake. Research has increasingly shown that standardized test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success. Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years.
Without test scores, admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle. Researchers who have studied the issue say that test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive. These students do not score as high on average as students from affluent communities or white and Asian students. But a solid score for a student from a less privileged background is often a sign of enormous potential.
“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, recently wrote. Stuart Schmill — the dean of admissions at M.I.T., one of the few schools to have reinstated its test requirement — told me, “Just getting straight A’s is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not.”
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Comments
But what about muh raycissm?
Colleges get the same money in tuition for the successful students as the ones who drops out. The classrooms are always filled and who cares about those individual student units.
The difference is the debt burdening those student; certainly a bigger burden for a failed student who is unlikely to get a job with any kind of a future based on a degree that he didn’t get, than someone who at least has reasonable opportunities with a STEM degree.
It is the bad students who have been equity-passed in school all their lives who are left behind in this compassionate progressive world.
Not that real compassion every bothered a progressive.
^This!
“Not that real compassion every bothered a progressive.”
They’re stuck on empathy, compassion’s enemy.
Grade inflation and social promotion – the term used in K-12 schools for advancing student to the next grade regardless of whether they are performing at grade level – are the reasons you can’t trust a GPA or HS diploma as an indicator of success.
Teacher unions made it so students aren’t being failed. The federal government funds each seat in K-12 education. They provide more funding for keeping “students of color” in the system rather than allowing them to fail out. This is why nearly every college and university in the country now has “leveling courses.” They’re high school English and Math classes taught at universities. The students don’t get credit, but they pay university fees for the courses which are taught by adjuncts.
It’s all a sham.
Love to see Remedial Reading as a “college” course offering.
In my age cohort, over 50 years ago, practically every college required students take “Freshman Composition.” Even that isn’t a course that colleges should be burdened with teaching. People who get to college should already have mastered that.
Yes. My professor friend offered paper writing counseling in a 400 level course at Cornell.
In government high schools, teachers assume students have learned how to write in their previous grade, or that they will learn it in their next grade.
50% black males don’t finish high school.
Blame the SAT?
High school grades are useless because so many of them are dishonest. If
not simply handed out according to the intersection of the politics of the teachers and administrators with the color of the students and the influence of their parents, grades often reflect perceived effort rather than accomplishments – and that’s as perceived by gullible teachers, many of whom were among the stupidest students to barely squeak through college in an easy major.
Baltimore’s insane plight stands as an exemplar. A minuscule percentage of kids testing as adequate in any given subject, yet all steadily marching through the grades to their diplomas.
Yes, and when such children walk into the brick wall of the real world they think racism (which they’ve been taught more about than English or math) is why they can’t get the jobs they want, when in fact it’s their lack of education and actual skills that is the problem.
A outside group came in and audited Baltimore schools … An example as to the failure of Baltimore public schools … A black male about to graduate was found to have passed just 3 classes in 4 years … He has a 0.13 GPA … He was graduating at or near the top 1/2 of his class
For all of human history, families decided when to transition their child/ren away from school to employment.
Each family’s circumstances was different, and each family knew their own child/ren best.
Standardized testing was introduced in the 1800s in France for the purpose of helping the State decide which children were worth “a publicly funded education” beyond ~8th grade.
Most people do not benefit from the dumbed-down experience that American high school and college has devolved into.
Those kids in Baltimore? Many of them could have become truckers, forklift operators, soldiers, sailors, many other things — but they are not allowed to, for one or another worthy-sounding rationale.
So, they get labeled as failures, and many join gangs, and the folks who run our Education System are too arrogant or too stupid to realize that they’re the primary problem, not the kids.
Reminder: If you grew up in Baltimore a hundred years ago, you could transition out of the school system around 8th grade, get a job on the docks or elsewhere, and make enough money to get married and have a family.
Your wife , like you, would probably not have finished high school, but you two would get by on husband income, with wife raising children perhaps with her mom’s help etc.
Through mostly good intentions (?) our society has made all of this impossible.
The intentions of the teachers unions are not good.
But ——> Even prior to the existence of the very first unions for government-employed teachers
somebody somewhere somehow decided
that every human benefited by being enrolled
in a school.
In a classroom setting.
And nobody ever seems to question this assumption.
🤷♂️
The German model. That’s why they call it “kindergarten”.