It's a good thing we have tests like these and pay large sums of money to the people who maintain it. Otherwise interviewing might be totally screwed up and completely fail at its intended purpose in this country.
It's not a random number the College Board pulls out of their backside. At the end of the day, having an independent company running standardized tests across the nation in dozens of subjects (there's SAT and then there's SAT II) is really a good thing (TM).
Interviews are good, but they're not great. You can't have a good interview without good metrics at hand to qualify what you're seeing. There are geniuses that fail at social interaction and will buckle under the pressure of an interview at CalTech, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc. or Google, Microsoft, Facebook, & co. but you'd still want; just as there are interviewees that will ace any verbal interview with flying colors (yes, including technical questions) that you wouldn't.
At the end of the day: the SAT score, as it was intended to be used, is a datapoint. It's not the be-all end-all: it's an additional piece of information that should be used responsibly to arrive at a good conclusion whether or not to accept/hire an individual.
A good score on the SAT + a good score at an interview means that this person not only knows their stuff and can think on their feet, it also means they're hard-working and will do what it takes to do great (believe me, it takes MONTHS (or even years) of dedication to actually ace the PSAT or SAT). A good score on the SAT and poor interviewing means this person is a hard-worker but not particularly great at thinking on his or her feet. A good interview w/ poor SAT scores indicates someone that couldn't be bothered to study for even a month for an important event in their high school career - can you trust him/her to research thoroughly before taking on a big project?
The problem is not with the SAT. The problem is with the interviewers at colleges and workplaces around the country that treat it as the Holy Grail. Don't blame the College Board for this one.
Anyway, what would you have the SAT replaced with? Don't tell me you'd have colleges accept students based solely on the grades they achieved - in the United States we have some the highest educational disparity across the nation, and even across neighboring cities and suburbs. An A+ at one school may not even be a C at another. Teachers who's pay depends on the evaluation of their kids' academic performance are not necessarily the people you want giving them a number you'd bet the farm on. Just look at the recent Chicago teachers' strike: at the end of the day, pay and compensations aside, it rested on the fact that teachers don't want standardized tests to be used as metrics to determine the quality of their teaching, and they wanted to set the evaluations themselves.
The statistical balance of the scores on the PSAT/ACT/SAT/SATII is very well-studied and well-designed, just like with the USMLE medical board examinations and all other engineered standardized tests. There are easy questions, there are medium questions, there are hard questions, and there are flawed questions which can't be answered - before and after every examination, the questions are classified and then re-classified to avoid anomalous or unfair results.
Coming up with these questions, organizing the examinations, coming up with the statistical review methods, grading the exams, and getting the results to the universities is not cheap - I paid for all these exams when I was in highschool myself (and my family was lower middle class at best) and while I then considered them to be pretty damn expensive (and that's why I did my best to get the mark I needed the first time around and worked hard to make sure money was not being thrown away), in retrospect the pricing is very fair (although I hear USMLEs are outrageously expensive, but then again, so is everything associated with the medical industry).
I'm disinclined to believe this statement. Would you mind taking the time to prove this for me? Also, what is considered an "ace" score?
In my experience the PSAT and SAT were tests that measured how well you can take tests and I do not consider my personal test scores to be the result of years of hard work and dedication.
I contend that those that put tremendous importance on high school assignments (ex: the overachievers) come out needing textbook style answers because a huge portion of the time, high school assignments and tests are of the "This is what it says in the textbook. The textbook is always right. Go find the sentence and repeat it here." type.
Furthermore, I doubt you can judge someone's ability to find solutions to non-textbook style problems via their performance in high school due to the fact that those sorts of problems are rarely brought up in a high school context.
Case in point: Multiple choice tests and essay questions based on your ability to cross reference the textbook.
Anecdotal evidence: I coasted through high school and have no trouble arriving at potential solutions (and gauging chances of success) when I meet problems with no discernible textbook-style solution.
I've met many highly-talented individuals who did really great on PSAT/ACT/etc, but none of whom could have achieved a 200+ on the PSAT without studying (for) the test extensively beforehand. In fact, I'd bet there isn't a single NMSQT scholar who didn't kill themselves in preparation for the PSAT.
I was an NMSQT semi-finalist, but not a finalist, so I'm fairly certain I don't qualify as an NMSQT Scholar however, by your definition, I probably aced it. The extent of my studying (for any standardized test) was taking an SAT book from the common library in the house and placing it on the shelf in my room.
I've never put much stock in it, but if what you're saying is true, it has ramifications for my worldview in general. I guess what I'm trying to say is thanks for giving me some perspective, I have some thinking to do.
ie: did you go to class? do homework? spend more time on projects that were non-school related? etc.
There's a very good reason for good teachers to push back against evaluations based on standardized testing, and that's the fact that they can be assigned bad students to force them out of their jobs. When two equally qualified teachers at the same school teach the same subjects, and one of them plays the administration's political games and the other does not, you may mysteriously find that the second teacher's class sizes are larger, and that they got all the known troublemakers.
Using standardized testing of students for teacher evaluation, without accounting for variation in students (both random and orchestrated) will not bring better teachers into public schools.
Of course, what it's truly good for is to measure how affluent the student's family is.
>"The purpose of the SAT is to predict how well a high school student would perform as a freshman at a college or university in the United States of America (USA)."
>"...Another implication of the purpose of the SAT is that taking preparation courses that focus on the exact, narrow content of the SAT, no more and no less, is not "morally wrong". If a person does better on the SAT as a result of specific training or coaching, then, in essence, the SAT has indicated that the person has a quality (such as initiative, motivation, or money) that correlates with good performance in a college or university in the United States of America (USA)."
In my opinion, the completion of a college degree in combination with one's GPA add up to a pretty good, but not perfect, indicator of one's work ethic. Standardized tests on the other hand, could identify intelligence, but probably not in their current forms.
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Interestingly, there's no "hard work" in taking a test you do not prepare for, e.g., an IQ test.