The misguided war on the SAT | Hacker News Reader

The misguided war on the SAT

nytimes.com

16 pointsmannykannot21 comments

One of the comments on the NYT site captures two important points:

"Equity in education has nothing to do with the Ivys"

The first point is familiar to most people outside an elite bubble: a large proportion of colleges are not meaningfully selective, i.e. applicants are not competing with each other for places. Accepting one person doesn't mean rejecting another.

The second point still seems to be lost on most people: for most applicants, the main point of going to Harvard or MIT instead of some less famous college isn't due to the quality of education, or even due to the quality of your peers. It's the signalling value of a degree from Harvard or from MIT.

Elite colleges are selling signalling devices, not education. Signalling devices only have value if they're scarce, so admissions must be zero-sum.

Imagine you care about skin-color diversity at the leadership levels of society, above any other concern. The easiest way to achieve that is by changing who gets into elite universities. You could try to improve the K-12 system in the hope that racial gaps disappear, but you have no guarantee it would work, and it's hard work that would take a long time.

It's much easier to just change the admissions process to get the mix you want.

Elite schools are effectively zero sum as you say and that's where Affirmative Action becomes a problem. Colleges can say they're not penalizing White or Asian students just giving Black and Latino students a boost. Which immediately leads to a situation where students with the same test scores are approved or denied on the basis of race, where the black student gets accepted and the Asian student gets turned down

There are many folks who have little sympathy for this argument, because they believe one or more of these:

- each student is not an individual, but a representative of an ethnic group

- the use of test scores discriminates against ethnic groups who, in aggregate, do poorly due to reasons that are unrelated to merit or potential (socioeconomic factors, legacy of discrimination in the past etc.)

- Asian students who are rejected from Harvard 'will do fine' wherever they land

- SAT/ACT scores aren't predictive of academic success

- college admissions processes shouldn't be trying to maximize expected college GPA

The most balanced work I've read about these issues is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4354321

I disagree with the author on many points, and the paper (at least the earlier versions) had a couple of arguments that I thought were weak and one-sided. But overall it's an excellent read. Even better than the Harvard vs. SFFA ruling.

> I disagree with the author on many points, and the paper (at least the earlier versions) had a couple of arguments that I thought were weak and one-sided. But overall it's an excellent read. Even better than the Harvard vs. SFFA ruling.

I found the arguments on page 44 particularly weak and undermine much of the paper. It destroys a previously more objective definition of "invidious" and "benign" motives [1] made earlier in the paper.

Because the author doesn't want to justify preferring whites to Asian students, even though her own earlier analysis on page 12 does view that as a benign motive (reduce race gaps), she constructs this cop-out based on a completely arbitrary definition of "disadvantage". A more confident author would have accepted the implication and moved on OR established objective criteria for disadvantage.

[1] The word choice can be disputed, but at least it was objective.

> Colleges can say they're not penalizing White or Asian students just giving Black and Latino students a boost.

They cannot do this (legally) in the wake of the SFFA decision by SCOTUS.

Yes, they can.

The SCOTUS decision was explicit:

1. At the level of an individual applicant, you can't take race/ethnicity into account when making a decision

2. Other ways to affect racial mix are still permitted.

For example, nothing in the ruling prohibits colleges from:

- having lower standards for people from certain neighborhoods (zip codes)

- having lower standards for people from certain high schools

- eliminating tests on which certain ethnic groups do worse than others

They can do things that have the effect you describe, using broad and not 100% precise methods. But they can no longer explicitly "giv[e] Black and Latino students a boost."

Yup. My understanding is that Harvard could still give someone a boost for having attended a particular high school (which happens to be 95% non-white-non-Asian).

That is an open question, especially if their reason for doing so is based on racial considerations. This question (is a policy that is racially neutral on its face allowable, if it was motivated by racial animas?) is being litigated in the TJ case, where school board members are alleged to have tweaked their HS admissions program with the goal of reducing Asian student enrollment.

Right. For now it's an open question. I hope it gets cleared up soon.

I think the TJ case is a bit complicated, because:

- an action motivated by racial balancing may be trying to correct for other issues, and not necessarily by 'racial animus'

- a lot of the comments (from board members) suggesting racial animus were a precursor to the original proposed policy

AIUI the most recent ruling suggested you couldn't assume the latest policy was informed by such animus just because the first one proposed was. To draw such a conclusion would mean the board could never make a new policy without it being tarnished.

Such a messy situation.

It took more than a supreme court ruling to end Segregation in southern schools. It took some boots on the ground.

Yes, I imagine that colleges will continue with their historical practices until lawsuits force them to stop. Getting rid of the SAT actually helps them in this regard, by making it harder to tell that they are still treating applicants of different races differently.

One 'tell' will be if students who don't submit scores are disproportionately likely to get in if they are of a certain race (as evidenced by their personal statement, club membership, etc., since this can no longer be explicitly asked on the application).

My broken record comment is people with non ivy league schools should always take any opportunity to wreck that sort of signaling. You have two qualified candidates, one from an ivy and other other not? Veto the ivy. You might say that's unfair. But that is what people from ivy's do and feel totally justified when they do it.

> Likewise, a faculty committee at the University of California system — led by Dr. Henry Sánchez, a pathologist, and Eddie Comeaux, a professor of education — concluded in 2020 that test scores were better than high school grades at predicting student success in the system’s nine colleges, where more than 230,000 undergraduates are enrolled. The relative advantage of test scores has grown over time, the committee found.

Interesting, given the UC system is not merely test-optional, but refuses to consider test scores at all. I wonder if that will change, if even their faculty committees are recognizing the superior predictive value of tests over GPA.

My guess is that they might create their own test, but that it would not have a purely academic score. It would have the “adversity score” of the SAT built in, and impossible to separate out.

Of course, making a second test for students to take would disproportionately affect kids with fewer resources in terms of test prep, which would be counterproductive to the UC’s stated goals regarding equity.

>“adversity score”

I don't understand what this means. You would penalize students for, what, growing up in a stable two-parent household?

IIRC the SAT added this several years ago. It gave students more points based on zip code, and perhaps some other factors. They got some blowback at first, but modified it and I believe it still exists. But it's separate from your "regular" SAT score, which is what everyone talks about. My theory is that the UC system might create a test where the adversity score is baked in, and you have no way to disaggregate it.

How do you imagine they could do that? SAT are multiple choices tests, with answers are objectively wright or wrong. The scores are simply summed up. Where is the place to put in adversity score or any “adjustment” scores?

Easy: they just don't break out the different parts of your score. You just get one score, which is a composite of your math, verbal, and adversity tallies.

They can of course accomplish the same effect (since the UC itself would be the only institution using these scores) by aggregating the academic scores with the adversity scores and never letting reviewers know what the individual components were.

If it results in in a better predictor of outcomes than the unadjusted SAT, it would be hard to justify the latter but not the former. I have no idea whether this is actually the case.

UC made their decision after this report came out.

It was a purely political decision as the article goes into. They are unlikely to create their own test.

They apparently considered creating their own test, but realized they couldn't do it fast enough to replace the SAT/ACT. [1] But from their new status quo (no test), they could take all the time they need to create a new test. I'm not sure CA voters will countenance the new admissions policy, which forces many top students to apply to expensive out-of-state schools because the UC system is so difficult to get into via traditional means (grades and test scores).

1: https://www.highereddive.com/news/uc-system-ends-undergradua...

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