The Truth About the SAT and ACT
wsj.com
wsj.com
They're just exams.
I agree that in general an individual does have the ability to do well/poorly in life, but that doesn't mean that the tests serve no purpose.
1. These tests don't aim to assess habitual, interpersonal, and other relevant characteristics that are directly impactful to the success of college students.
2. They're just tests. They aren't studies, they aren't grades, they aren't interviews...they have substantial limitations.
Your first point is a bit of a non sequitur. No admission committee has ever looked at a kid's SATs and said "wow, look at that work ethic!" Gauging whether someone is going to have the maturity to focus at school is a separate issue from test scores and very difficult to determine from a several page pamphlet describing an 18 year old.
Oh, come on. Neither I, nor anyone else in this thread, has said anything to this effect.
> College and grad schools involve taking cramming for and studying for a lot of tests.
Unlike exams in college, the ACT and SAT are not knowledge tests, and they are not designed to be. It'd be tough to view these entrance exams as a way to judge a student's ability to take tests in college. Even the GRE and LSAT have a heavier preparatory burden and a more specialized set of expectations for test-takers (eg, diagramming in the Analytical Reasoning section of the LSAT).
Arguably, admissions committees heavily overvalue exam scores, to the detriment of assessing the other factors that may have a greater impact on college success. It's easy to look at a universal metric, especially one that features in USNWR.
A couple of years ago before I came to US as an undergrad, there were these test prep schools (e.g.New Oriental Education) in China that specialize in teaching students tricks about taking SAT test without actually studying the subject/course materials. Given that CollegeBoard has been doing poor job keeping the question bank updated, the prep schools would hire people to take the SAT exams in Hong Kong or other Asian countries and memorize the questions, in order to observe patterns and collect questions from the Collegeboard question bank.
I spent a summer at New Oriental prep school in Beijing and learned absolutely nothing in terms of actual subject materials, but all these tricks about how to "guess" answers without understanding the questions/statements for the reading section, which is the weakest point for a lot of Chinese students. For writing, we were taught to memorize famous people's life stories such as Jack Welch, Bill Gates, the founders of Starbucks, etc, to fill up bulk of our essays (wouldn't the graders grow suspicious if a lot of people are citing Jack Welch's life story in their essays??). Math is whatever. Most high schoolers in China wouldn't have much problem with SAT math.
I quit the prep school half way and did self-learning instead, and I am glad I did that. My score wasn't fantastic, 2040 compared to all the 2300s and 2400s out of that prep school, but not until I came to college did I find people with perfect SAT scores but could barely communicate with people in English, read, not to mention understanding lectures, etc.
Maybe my high had the worst guidance counselors but I was explicitly told to only apply to 2-year community colleges because college would be too expensive for someone whose parental income was ~12/yr. There was no mention of FAFSA being a thing (I didn’t even apply because I didn’t know until my 2nd year in college). There was no mention that universities will offer financial aid to poor people.
Additionally $70 to take the test is a lot for a poor person.
The fact that these were not explored as considerations, or disregarded means that they already removed a lot of poor people from their investigation.
(As a side note, thanks to whoever is running this. I'm surprised it hasn't been DMCA'd to hell.)