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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

The average 13-year-old white student scores better on the SATs than the average 17-year-old black student.[1] This places minority students at a huge and completely arbitrary disadvantage, since the SAT doesn't correlate with academic performance at all beyond a slight correlation with GPA the first semester of freshman year in college.[2]

And yet somehow I doubt the College Board is going to drop the SAT anytime soon. Dropping AP classes "for racial diversity reasons" is like making Rosa Parks the TV spokeswoman in the front to mask the secret eugenics program going on in the back.

[1] It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform [2] C.f. the academic research into the validity of the SAT on the College Board website. (There have been plenty of popular press articles written on this too.)

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"The average 13-year-old white student scores better on the SATs than the average 17-year-old black student."

Thanks for the citation, but since I can't look up the book right now, perhaps you can answer a question. Is that really measuring the "average?" Or the average score of 13-year-old white students who are taking the test? That's a very biased sample; for instance, I took the test when I was 12 only because I seemed likely to qualify for the Center for Talented Youth.

Check out page 10: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0815736398/ref=sib_dp_pt#rea...

Unfortunately I don't have my copy on me so I can't look up the footnote in the back. IIRC it was the SAT, but I'm not entirely positive.

If you want to see something really telling about standardized testing though, check out this Greg Palast article on how the NCLB discriminates against minorities:

http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/nation/13968-no-child-left-...

That does not answer the question are they using a random selection of 13 year olds vs a random selection of 17 year olds or a self selecting group of 13 year olds that take the text vs a random selection of 17 year olds who take the test.

If the methodology was that severely flawed they obviously wouldn't use the study in the book. This isn't Oprah's book club, it's a report co-authored by multiple Ph.D.s that was commissioned by the Brookings Institution.

Aren't you judging the kind of thing that makes credentials meaningful by citing the credentials themselves? As high finglefarb of the church of deontoenails, I am fully able to condemn this as heretical. And as someone experienced with condemning people as heretics, I am obviously qualified to be the high finglefarb.

Good question: "That is an interesting finding, I'd be interesting in seeing the methodology behind the study."

Insulting question: I wonder if the authors made a certain specific error, when making said error implies the person is either ignorant, stupid, or intellectually dishonest.

I'm not not going to defend the statistic since I haven't seen the methodology. That said, I do think it's insulting to the authors to ask if they've made a very basic and specific error without first reading the methodology.

In any event, I'm sure you could email any of the authors and ask where the statistic came from if you are interested.

Is it really true that SAT scores don't correlate with academic performance?

Political correctness has a way of distorting reality for many people :)

Actually, it's more likely that political correctness creates a chasm between what people say and what they really think.

Well finger length correlates with better SAT scores. I propose that finger length measurement replace SAT testing.

http://www.livescience.com/health/070522_finger_sats.html

Although I myself did well on the SAT's, I too am hesitant to support the use of correlations like these in determining what students, or anyone deserves.

With regard to SATs and academic performance, the first google result:

"Findings indicated a very low correlation between SAT math scores and overall college math grades of six graduating classes at one university"

http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...

Finger length correlates with testosterone production, which correlates with different ratios of mathematical to verbal skills. So it would tell you whether to go to MIT or Yale, but not whether to go to Wash U or Forest Park Community College.

You may enjoy this anecdote, in which someone even more self-righteous about such things makes a fool of herself:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/05/finger-length-and-sat-sco...

"Various studies conducted over the lifetime of the SAT show a statistically significant increase in correlation of high school grades and freshman grades when the SAT is factored in." from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT

"How well does the SAT I predict first-year college grades? The College Board and ETS conduct periodic studies of the SAT I. This usually involves examining the relationship between test scores and first-year college grades, generally expressed as the correlation coefficient (or r value). The College Board's Handbook for the SAT Program 2000-2001 claims the SAT-V and SAT-M have a correlation of .47 and .48, respectively, with freshman GPA (FGPA). This number is deceptive, however. To determine how much of the difference in first-year grades between students the SAT I really predicts, the correlation coefficient must be multiplied by itself. The result, called r squared, describes the difference (or variation) among college freshman grades. Thus, the predictive ability (or r squared) of the SAT I is just .22, meaning the test explains only 22% of the variation in freshman grades. With a correlation of .54, high school grades alone do a better job, explaining almost 30% of the variance in first-year college performance."

http://www.fairtest.org/facts/satvalidity.html

They don't control for the college you go to?

Well, realistically I'm not sure if it would make a difference since GPA is such a tenuous concept to begin with. To quote Dressel, "A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material." This quote is actually from 1956; today it would be inaccurate since most classes factor some combination of attendance, homework, and participation into the grade. (To get GPA you just average all of those together using an arbitrary weighting scheme.) That's why (IIRC) GPA only accounts for about 3% of expected future earnings.

If you really wanted to figure out the value of the SAT you would have to use a much more robust measure of cognitive development than freshman GPA. However, it doesn't look like anyone is going to undertake such a massive project anytime soon. Incidentally, Alfie Kohn has some really good stuff to say about grades in both Punished By Rewards and also in What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?

Also, I should have mentioned above that there are some meta-studies that find that degree of validity depends on the person's race, and that if you take the person's race into account the test can be useful. I have multiple objections to this though, both practical and theoretical.

I took a look at your source, their numbers actually seem to imply the SAT is very good.

They mention that a 100 point increase on the SAT corresponds to a 0.1 boost on college GPA. Assume a linear relation: this means that a 1500 SAT student might expect a 3.0 GPA, while a 1000 SAT student might expect a 2.5 GPA. That's actually a great predictor.

Then they mention other studies of SAT scores within a fixed college. This is deceptive. A typical college has students from a narrow SAT range (say 1200-1400). By the above numbers, one expects that SAT predicts only 0.1 GPA above/below the mean (within the college). However, it also predicts that if the school were to ignore SAT and admit a cohort with SAT's of 800, then those students would underperform by half a letter grade.

Unfortunately the College Board changed the information architecture scheme on their website a couple of years ago so the URLs from my class notes no longer resolve.

There is one study that shows there is a correlation between SAT score and college GPA, but only for students whose HS GPA is above a 4.0. In general though the test doesn't really have any validity.

Here is a link to the studies the College Board is promoting:

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/...

EDIT: http://www.fairtest.org/facts/satvalidity.html

The real question is, how does "academic performance" correlate with actual proficiency? In AP Computer Science, probably not much. I'm taking the test soon (trying to skip the course and go on to fun stuff). At least half the review book is about the Java standard class library. Much of the remainder is Java syntax and semantics and the brain-damaged system that Java programmers call "good object-oriented design". Oh, and another thing: chapter 5 of the review book has a section called "The Software Development Life Cycle". The first subsection of that is titled "The Waterfall Model". After explaining the waterfall model, it proceeds to completely neglect the existence of any other software development model.

One of the most noticeable differences between A and AB is that in AB, you go into algorithms and big O notation in much more depth, and you do some work with implementations of binary trees and such. When they cut out AB, they are leaving what is essentially an AP Introduction to Java.

It's sad that this passes off as computer science. I'm taking the test so I can hopefully skip the course and move on to fun stuff that has APCS as a prerequisite. Fun stuff like AI. AI, the class where Python and Ruby are the default languages, and you get to use other things if you want, like Lisp.

(I found this out when I still didn't know much about Lisp, saw someone using it, and laughed at the stupid, old language with all the parentheses. The guy tried to explain that Lisp is a good language, but I wasn't convinced. Later I independently stumbled on some of PG's essays, and I was convinced.)

" since the SAT doesn't correlate with academic performance at all beyond a slight correlation with GPA "

Did you know that weight doesn't correlate very well with linebacker performance in the NFL? It could be that a 350-pounder is just as effective as a 150-pounder, and there's some pro-fat discrimination -- or it could be that you're talking about correlation within a school, which chooses people on the basis of multiple criteria including SATs, such that their students are about equal academically.

Consider: a school could look at two people, one of whom gets a perfect math SAT and a 500 verbal, and another of whom gets 600 on each and writes a killer admissions essay. The former student gets a 3.5 focusing on math and CS. The latter gets a 3.5 taking English and Philosophy. This is the kind of evidence schools find; that people play to their strengths, so as long as they're of similar average talent, they'll have similar success, even if an individual measure of that talent doesn't correlate with their relative success among people who by the average of many measures, are very similar.

This has been a well-known problem with the studies you cite for over a decade.

re [1] - the actual statement from the book is: -- By age 17, the average test scores for minority students are no higher than the average scores for white 13-year-olds.

Note that the book is written about, and the comment refers to, <em>schools in large cities</em>.

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