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Comment by code4tee | Hacker News Reader

The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT. For top schools all viable candidates had very good scores so it wasn’t much use.

It was just one of those things everyone did because everyone did it. With more opting out that momentum goes away and increasingly now people are asking “so why did we use this test again?”

Likely won’t be long until the SAT just disappears entirely and replaced with nothing, or subject tests or some other exams more practically linked to placement in certain programs.

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> The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT.

I don't know about the SAT specifically, but in my country we also have standardized admission tests and, from my appreciation, it's good at measuring 2 things:

1. General Intelligence.

2. How well you prepared for the test.

Sure, (2) may be an undesirable artifact but I think that intelligence is a good way --if not the best-- to select people for college.

2 isn't an undesirable artifact. You want highly motivated hard working people applying to your university course. People have this idea of some genius slacker but you know what's better than a genius slacker? A genius who works hard. And frankly, most people aren't geniuses anyway.

You don't even need to raise the bar that much. A normal intelligence person who works hard is much better than a genius slacker. My experience is that a lot of people at the top of their high school classes get/stay their based on 1) general intelligence, 2) memorization skills, 3) socioeconomic advantages, 4) compliance. Of those factors, only #3 has a particular bearing on future success. At university, those who tend to be most successful as students tend to be those who are intrinsically motivated to work hard and study, and also those with socioeconomic advantages. After university, those with socioeconomic advantages tend to succeed regardless of their educational background, so there are fundamental reasons to investigate the systemic unfairness and discrimination in our society. Without trying to sound snarky, this is as linked to movements like BLM as it is to Harvard's discrimination against Asian applicants.

People think smart kids with lower-middle-class parents are losing out on college places to kids whose rich parents can afford $$$$ tuition at the crème-de-la-crème school for the rich and thick.

And that's both inefficient as we're not sending our best students to our best schools; and bad for social mobility as it makes it harder for those born poor-but-smart to improve their lot in life.

In my experience, hard work can make up for quite a lot.

I'm not sure which of the above is a better predictor of success in college or after.

It begs the question of if colleges should be selecting for general Intelligence over hard works.

On the other hand, removal of the SAT will probably put an even greater emphasis on school grades, which certainly correlates better with effort than general intelligence.

> It begs the question of if colleges should be selecting for general Intelligence over hard works.

Colleges should be building a model to determine who will derive the highest value from their education. Good inputs to this model include test scores measuring general scholastic abilities, actual performance during high school, notable achievements outside school, and the general background in which they made these accomplishments.

AKA, a lot like they're doing now. I don't think the testing portion of it should be eliminated.

Studies seem to show that SAT prep helps 20-30 points on average. AFAICT it does help to do SAT prep but it is a relatively minor factor.

for example: https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cos....

That's the average, which tells us nothing about the distribution. If you're looking at the top n% of scores, the distribution is important.

Furthermore, those studies weren't looking at kids who were prepping for 2 hours a day like many kids with perfect and near perfect scores are doing.

Also here's a study from 2017 that shows an average gain of 115 points with only 20 hours of practice (plus 16,000 students who gained more than 200 points).

https://www.collegeboard.org/releases/2017/average-score-gai...

Another issue is that scores have gone up dramatically over the last 20 years, so given that and the fact that Asian American kids are so overwhelmingly dominant, I think preparation being a major factor is the most likely explanation.

> The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT.

I've heard that claim a lot, but never accompanied by evidence.

Nobody I knew prepped for the SAT, and many got into top schools. Unless you count paying attention in math class, and reading adult level books "prepping".

I wasn't sure where to look for hard evidence for the claim, and I would love to see data showing the average SAT scores over time on a per-school basis. But this at least shows how admission rates have been consistently decreasing over (recent) time: https://www.ivywise.com/ivywise-knowledgebase/admission-stat...

I think it's reasonable to assume that the increased competitiveness in admissions leads to increasingly competitive attempts to game the admissions process.

Whether or not the original claim is true, I think it's certainly true that an increasing amount of cost and effort has gone into SAT prep. Certainly, that was my experience (if we're comparing anecdotes). Everyone I knew in the top percentile of my HS prepped for the SAT, and that was in the early 2000s. Based on one of your other comments, it seems that your personal experience was in the 70s -- how reflective do you think that is of the admissions process today?

> how reflective do you think that is of the admissions process today?

The college students I know today didn't prep for it, either, and one was accepted by Stanford and Caltech.

I've seen some claims that the SATs have been "dumbed down" or "re-normed" since the 70s. Certainly, the number of students who apply to elite colleges has increased substantially, which means there will be more with perfect scores.

That was a while ago though as you've stated elsewhere. The percentage of kids who score perfect or near perfect scores has gone up dramatically over the last 20 years.

https://www.compassprep.com/great-to-good-the-diluted-value-...

My scores where good enough to get in almost anywhere in the 2000s, but they're barley above the 50th percentile at our flagship state university now.

It's unlikely that the average intelligence of high schoolers has increased that much. It's much more likely that people have figured out how to prepare for the SAT.

There's a whole industry that also got built around test prep, and it's pretty lucrative. the tutor that my friends and I had was really expensive, and she consistently had kids that were scoring near perfect on the SAT and ACT.

Be careful about inferring that any gaming taught by the tutor made the difference. If the tutor was simply teaching the math needed, that would be fine.

The math needed to ace the SAT is taught in high school. If you slide by on that, you'll probably need a math tutor to make up for it. Or you can choose to learn the math presented in high school.

>The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT. For top schools all viable candidates had very good scores so it wasn’t much use.

There are many people who have high GPA's but are not intelligent enough to do well on the SATs. Removing this bar will allow those people through.

Not necessarily a bad thing but a thing nonetheless.

The point is that the SATs don't measure intelligence. "not intelligent enough to do well on the SATs" is harsh. And if anything I think it would go the other way--it's common to get a subpar grade on the SAT even if you are smart and a high achiever.

And regarding removing the bar allowing more people through, that's not true either--it's not like colleges all of a sudden have more seats available. They'll still only admit the same number of students, and they will still select for the best students.

>And regarding removing the bar allowing more people through, that's not true either--it's not like colleges all of a sudden have more seats available. They'll still only admit the same number of students, and they will still select for the best students.

But white people tend not do as well on the SATs, but they do fine with GPAs.

Now they can let more white people into the school and they don't have to explain the SAT discrepancies because they aren't measuring for that.

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