How did this expand from “SAT vocab section is biased” to “the entire standardized testing system is biased”??
How can a math test be biased? Please keep it concrete, related to these actual tests, and not reach for hypotheticals
How can a math test be biased? Please keep it concrete, related to these actual tests, and not reach for hypotheticals
You can consider SAT performance reflects:
A) SAT test prep
B) Other things that only more wealthy/affluent parents can easily provide.
C) Other stuff.
It's possible that A (test prep) has little effect on its own, but that A+B has a massive impact.
The linked article talks only about the impact of test prep. I can't access the cited sources, so don't know whether they've attempted to control for any correlation between those students who received test prep, and those students who received other special advantages that may also have increased their SAT scores.
There are good arguments on both sides.
But, as other commenters have pointed out, the conflict only exists because:
1. We rely on university degrees as a credential to filter people for jobs and other desirable opportunities.
2. To maintain the value (and price) of the credential, the best universities must restrict supply.
3. Outcomes from the USA's public grade/high school systems vary widely, and no one has figured out how to give everyone a good (if not equal) shot.
So perhaps there's no perfect solution possible from tweaking one thing (university undergraduate admissions). The whole system needs work, from K onwards. But such an overhaul would need people to agree on what they're trying to optimize for.
2. The school's credential is valuable because it's a proxy for smart, well educated people. If Harvard stopped looking at grades and sat scores and instead just picked 400 people at random the degree would be worthless.
This would not be the case if either:
A. There are high standards for graduation, OR
B. Attending Harvard for 4 years makes you more capable.
If you're suggesting that 400 applicants picked at random would all graduate, then maybe the standards need to be raised. If the degree signals only that you were good enough to get in, then the 4 year gap between matriculation and graduation seems like waste.
B. I doubt that the Harvard educational material makes you significantly more capable than any equivalent one. Same text books, doubt teachers are that much more capable than a good state school.
Stats are less gameable than alternatives like grades, lacrosse trophies, and interviews/subjective chemistry evaluations.
> For the most part, wealthy families who can afford private tutoring for their kids at $150 or more an hour, generally don't send their kids to the Jiechu School for help on the SHSAT. It serves families of modest means, especially recent immigrants, many of them from Fujian province, who constitute the lowest socio-economic layer of the Chinese-American population.
> For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That
I had never heard of Jiechu until just now, but you could achieve this 50% cost reduction simply by having class sizes closer to those of China's high schools (~48 per class) than those in the US (~24 per class).
This is before you consider other potential cost savings, e.g.
- contract teachers can be cheaper than unionized employees
- no costly central bureaucracy
If you're a smart and poor kid you're more likely to be undereducated and unprepared for college level academics.