We are currently living in a time when many people feel the need to dispute that rigorous education can have any meaningful impact on a child's abilities.
Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should.
Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should.
Sure, but it seems to me that we should do so in a controlled and rigorous fashion. A few questions:
- Are we sure that the tests are exactly the same difficulty each year? If not, what is the falloff?
- Who decides the difficulty?
- How do we think about tradeoffs between grasping concepts correctly versus doing test prep?
- Do the increased test scores from 2003 to 2020 actually translate into meaningfully better further education or quality of life on average?
If you are making confident statements about "test scores dropped and this is bad for children", you should know the answers to all these questions.
I feel like most parents handwave this sort of stuff away when it comes to children's test scores and always assume that it's perfect – but would start asking this kind of stuff very quickly, for example, if they were asked to, say, do a similar test as adults to determine what their bonus for last year should be.
That doesn't sound right to me. My perception is that the value of a rigorous education is actually nearly universally valued, but how/whether children should have access to that education equitably is quite disputed.
The liberal refrain is "High-scorers just had rich parents to hire them a tutor!", as if the tutor's instruction didn't actually uplift the children and make them stronger.
https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
Absent test scores all you have is GPA which can be gamed and is impossible to compare against other applicants and extracurriculars which will be dominated by wealthy kids with engaged parents. so that smart kid from a poor family in West Virginia has no way to show they can compete with the kid from Greenwich on the Lacrosse, Sailing and Model UN teams.
I think the anti-SAT argument is indeed misguided though. As it stands, the SAT is actually the best way for a poor kid from a bad school district to stand out - you can't take the grades at face value, and academic extracurriculars are substantially more expensive.
My own institution did not require standardized tests for a couple of years, mostly because of Covid, and it's been a bit of a mess. Test scores turn out to be good for placement in math classes.
The arguments are next week!
His point is that they got in and feel like a failure when they could have gone to a different school and done just fine and not felt that way. And that, as such, affirmative action was actually having a negative effect on minorities.
Anyhow, it's a tough problem and I don't know the right answer and don't envy anyone having to set admission policies.