01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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juarezbear said:

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bear2034 said:

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BearCam said:

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bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

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What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

I don't know about the intent of the designers of the SAT, but I'm pretty sure that by the mid-late 20th century, the intent was the opposite of what you suggest: it was to uncover bright, literate kids with math aptitude, who could do university work, even though -- for whatever reason -- they had not yet achieved consistent high success in school.

And it did its job, to some extent (though far from perfectly).

Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

juarezbear said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

BearCam said:

---

bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

I've been there. not that going back that far is definitive re our lifetimes. NTL, we've beaten this one.

---

Agreed. I do appreciate the very civil discussion, though. You are a gentleman.

01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

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juarezbear said:

---

bear2034 said:

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BearCam said:

---

bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

I've been there. not that going back that far is definitive re our lifetimes. NTL, we've beaten this one.

---

Agreed. I do appreciate the very civil discussion, though. You are a gentleman.

---

A horse rose from the dead today. The College Board announced big changes to the SAT. You will take it with your computer and not paper and pencil. It will be shorter (from 3 hours to 2). You can use a calculator, either free standing or in your computer. You can take it from home or at a test site, therefore you will not be proctored. And, IT WILL BE ADAPTIVE!

What is Adaptive, you ask? The test functionality will track your responses as you answer questions and will develop a running profile on the fly of your ability to answer correctly. If you start out answering all the questions correctly, it will give you harder questions for the rest of the test. If you're having a tough time with the questions at the beginning of the test, it will give you easier questions for the rest of the test. This adaptivity continues to the end - if you start answering questions better or worse than at the start, you will be fed questions designed to bring you to the median.

The College Board says that Adaptive testing will give them the tools to measure the depth and breadth of your ability and that may be true, BUT, it also enables them to bring all test takers toward the median, making them look equal.

Seems to me that now's the time to drop the SAT, just when many are reinstating it.

Rushinbear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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Rushinbear said:

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Big C said:

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juarezbear said:

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bear2034 said:

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BearCam said:

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bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Yes indeed, the "A" in SAT used to stand for "aptitude" (basically smarts) and its purpose was to identify really smart kids who had, for whatever reason, not achieved good grades in school, but might be able to nevertheless thrive in college. And to give them an opportunity, perhaps at the expense of a kid who had managed to get a high GPA without being all that bright.

Hence the famous "analogies" questions and such.

Then, the ACTs ("A" for "achievement"), to try and figure out what the kids had actually learned, again doing an end run around GPAs.

The SAT was supposedly a test that couldn't really be prepared for, but the "prep course" people dove in and figured out ways to give students an edge. Not a huge edge, but an edge. The test has changed over the years, but is still predictive. IMO -- and I am an educator -- it should still be used as one of the data points. The more data points, the better.

---

At the risk of getting further into the statistics weeds, I'd like to see peer reviewed studies that verify that the SAT is predictive of ...what? That's the problem - as soon as you make a claim like that, you beg the question. I suspect that each college that reinstates the SAT has their own invalid, subjective, warm and fuzzy idea of what might justify their decision.

The fact is that a test like the SAT relies on uncertain definitions of the predictive criteria, namely psychological constructs such as "Aptitude." Let's see these schools reveal their definitions of them.

The ACT has a similar but different challenge. It claims to test achievement levels, but achievement measuring what? My bet is that they would answer in a way that goes back to psychological constructs. I doubt that they have run criterion-related validity studies of correct answers on objective subjects against college student performances.

Using standardized tests is a messy and unscientific endeavor, but we've gotta use something. Especially since the other things we've been using have been coming unraveled. All in the pursuit of subjective outcomes.

---

Curious if you read the UC report on standardized testing shared earlier?

---

No I didn't. I looked for it in this thread after reading your comment, but didn't see it. If in another thread, I'd be happy to trace it down from a source you might share. Is there a point (or more) in it that I should be mindful of?

---

Here's the link: https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

Curious to hear your thoughts, but from my reading and understanding of how thorough this task force was, based on their data the SAT/ACT is indicative of college success. It may not be perfect - nothing is - but it is by far the best measure at this time.

01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

juarezbear said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

BearCam said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

concernedparent said:

---

BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

cedarbear said:

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Anarchistbear said:

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It should be emphasized that at the Ivys test scores and other criteria are far less important than, as excerpted from NYT

"Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed rsums, and applied at a higher rate but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in

Data is from at least three of the dozen top colleges where the researchers had access to detailed admissions records.
The study by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America's elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html

---

Anarchistbear (great name--are you really an anarchist?), check out the graph in your NYT article. Do you see that big acceptance rate dip for those around the 70-98% of income? It's worst for those in the 90-95th percentile of income. Those kids have the lowest acceptance rate of all kids, and their acceptance rate is far lower than that of low income ones.

This is exactly what I'm talking about happening at affluent public schools. These 90-95th percentile high schoolers generally come from highly-educated families and have great grades and their test scores are much much higher than the low income kids (if you're skeptical about that, check out the CAASPP test score data for schools in Palo Alto vs. those in, say, Clovis).

But the elite schools have two agendas: raising money and showing the world that they're correcting social inequalities. So the top 1% and the bottom 20% get boosts, but the 90-95th percentile kids are in no-man's land and get held to a much higher standard. Now I'm not sure if the UCs are as guilty of kissing up to rich people as much the private schools (I think they're probably not), but talk to anyone who's paid attention to college admissions during the past 10 years, and they'll tell you that the UCs have pivoted a lot more toward social justice. Yes, CS and Engineering are tough to get into these days, but this social justice agenda is clearly also a factor.

BTW, my kid got lucky and ended up actually getting into an elite private--with mixed results from UCs/SLO. So this is not sour grapes on my part. But I do think it's kind of unfair that my kid's classmates with 1580 SATs, 36 ACTs, and 4.5 GPAs (at a high school much tougher than most) got rejected by UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCI, UCD, UCSD. Some of these classmates are bona fide geniuses. Shouldn't the University of California be educating young people in California who are this talented? I just think the pendulum may have swung a bit too far in the social justice direction at the UCs.

---

If you look at last years admissions, the UCs are certainly moving in that direction. The class increased their admission rates for both Latino students and first-generation college students. Laudable goals and it certainly seems indicative of their aim. However, it does leave out many California students in the same situation you faced. After having just gone through this process and discussing this among numerous families, I can attest that many well-qualified California students that historically would have attended a UC are actively looking outside the state.

HKBear97! said:

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cedarbear said:

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Anarchistbear said:

---

It should be emphasized that at the Ivys test scores and other criteria are far less important than, as excerpted from NYT

"Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed rsums, and applied at a higher rate but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in

Data is from at least three of the dozen top colleges where the researchers had access to detailed admissions records.
The study by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America's elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html

---

Anarchistbear (great name--are you really an anarchist?), check out the graph in your NYT article. Do you see that big acceptance rate dip for those around the 70-98% of income? It's worst for those in the 90-95th percentile of income. Those kids have the lowest acceptance rate of all kids, and their acceptance rate is far lower than that of low income ones.

This is exactly what I'm talking about happening at affluent public schools. These 90-95th percentile high schoolers generally come from highly-educated families and have great grades and their test scores are much much higher than the low income kids (if you're skeptical about that, check out the CAASPP test score data for schools in Palo Alto vs. those in, say, Clovis).

But the elite schools have two agendas: raising money and showing the world that they're correcting social inequalities. So the top 1% and the bottom 20% get boosts, but the 90-95th percentile kids are in no-man's land and get held to a much higher standard. Now I'm not sure if the UCs are as guilty of kissing up to rich people as much the private schools (I think they're probably not), but talk to anyone who's paid attention to college admissions during the past 10 years, and they'll tell you that the UCs have pivoted a lot more toward social justice. Yes, CS and Engineering are tough to get into these days, but this social justice agenda is clearly also a factor.

BTW, my kid got lucky and ended up actually getting into an elite private--with mixed results from UCs/SLO. So this is not sour grapes on my part. But I do think it's kind of unfair that my kid's classmates with 1580 SATs, 36 ACTs, and 4.5 GPAs (at a high school much tougher than most) got rejected by UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCI, UCD, UCSD. Some of these classmates are bona fide geniuses. Shouldn't the University of California be educating young people in California who are this talented? I just think the pendulum may have swung a bit too far in the social justice direction at the UCs.

---

If you look at last years admissions, the UCs are certainly moving in that direction. The class increased their admission rates for both Latino students and first-generation college students. Laudable goals and it certainly seems indicative of their aim. However, it does leave out many California students in the same situation you faced. After having just gone through this process and discussing this among numerous families, I can attest that many well-qualified California students that historically would have attended a UC are actively looking outside the state.

---

I mentioned this before. But my Neice who had over a 4.5 GPA and taking the science classes available at SI in SF with a 36 ACT was rejected by all UCs (did not apply to Merced or Riverside). Including Santa Cruz. Had all the standard extra curricular stuff. Ended up going to UW on an academic scholarship. Her sister, who had similar stats when they were still taking test scores started in 2020 and is graduation as a data science and journalism double major at Cal this year.

Almost no one got into Cal from any of the local privates in Oakland. I tell everyone to go to Tech - they take tons from Oakland Tech and they accept transfers in from out of their area.

It seems like a silly system to determine who should attend the school. When 60% of all applications to colleges show. 4.0 or better - guessing is the only way to determine who is the right fit.

HKBear97! said:

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cedarbear said:

---

Anarchistbear said:

---

It should be emphasized that at the Ivys test scores and other criteria are far less important than, as excerpted from NYT

"Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed rsums, and applied at a higher rate but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in

Data is from at least three of the dozen top colleges where the researchers had access to detailed admissions records.
The study by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America's elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html

---

Anarchistbear (great name--are you really an anarchist?), check out the graph in your NYT article. Do you see that big acceptance rate dip for those around the 70-98% of income? It's worst for those in the 90-95th percentile of income. Those kids have the lowest acceptance rate of all kids, and their acceptance rate is far lower than that of low income ones.

This is exactly what I'm talking about happening at affluent public schools. These 90-95th percentile high schoolers generally come from highly-educated families and have great grades and their test scores are much much higher than the low income kids (if you're skeptical about that, check out the CAASPP test score data for schools in Palo Alto vs. those in, say, Clovis).

But the elite schools have two agendas: raising money and showing the world that they're correcting social inequalities. So the top 1% and the bottom 20% get boosts, but the 90-95th percentile kids are in no-man's land and get held to a much higher standard. Now I'm not sure if the UCs are as guilty of kissing up to rich people as much the private schools (I think they're probably not), but talk to anyone who's paid attention to college admissions during the past 10 years, and they'll tell you that the UCs have pivoted a lot more toward social justice. Yes, CS and Engineering are tough to get into these days, but this social justice agenda is clearly also a factor.

BTW, my kid got lucky and ended up actually getting into an elite private--with mixed results from UCs/SLO. So this is not sour grapes on my part. But I do think it's kind of unfair that my kid's classmates with 1580 SATs, 36 ACTs, and 4.5 GPAs (at a high school much tougher than most) got rejected by UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCI, UCD, UCSD. Some of these classmates are bona fide geniuses. Shouldn't the University of California be educating young people in California who are this talented? I just think the pendulum may have swung a bit too far in the social justice direction at the UCs.

---

If you look at last years admissions, the UCs are certainly moving in that direction. The class increased their admission rates for both Latino students and first-generation college students. Laudable goals and it certainly seems indicative of their aim. However, it does leave out many California students in the same situation you faced. After having just gone through this process and discussing this among numerous families, I can attest that many well-qualified California students that historically would have attended a UC are actively looking outside the state.

---

I wonder what the flunk out/drop out rates are among the groups that UC cares about? They must track it. Do they publish it, or are they depending on the media being obsessed with entry data and overlooking the participation rates?

Cal has always been for really, really smart kids who thrive on lots and lots of hard work. Is that still the case? Can there be a place for such a school among the now-many UC's? Does Cali still have a need for people who survive that and go on to enrich the State?

HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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juarezbear said:

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bear2034 said:

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BearCam said:

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bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

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What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

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Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

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Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

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Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

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Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

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I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

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Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

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There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

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You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

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the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

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It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

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Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

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I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

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Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

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I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

Rushinbear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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cedarbear said:

---

Anarchistbear said:

---

It should be emphasized that at the Ivys test scores and other criteria are far less important than, as excerpted from NYT

"Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed rsums, and applied at a higher rate but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in

Data is from at least three of the dozen top colleges where the researchers had access to detailed admissions records.
The study by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America's elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html

---

Anarchistbear (great name--are you really an anarchist?), check out the graph in your NYT article. Do you see that big acceptance rate dip for those around the 70-98% of income? It's worst for those in the 90-95th percentile of income. Those kids have the lowest acceptance rate of all kids, and their acceptance rate is far lower than that of low income ones.

This is exactly what I'm talking about happening at affluent public schools. These 90-95th percentile high schoolers generally come from highly-educated families and have great grades and their test scores are much much higher than the low income kids (if you're skeptical about that, check out the CAASPP test score data for schools in Palo Alto vs. those in, say, Clovis).

But the elite schools have two agendas: raising money and showing the world that they're correcting social inequalities. So the top 1% and the bottom 20% get boosts, but the 90-95th percentile kids are in no-man's land and get held to a much higher standard. Now I'm not sure if the UCs are as guilty of kissing up to rich people as much the private schools (I think they're probably not), but talk to anyone who's paid attention to college admissions during the past 10 years, and they'll tell you that the UCs have pivoted a lot more toward social justice. Yes, CS and Engineering are tough to get into these days, but this social justice agenda is clearly also a factor.

BTW, my kid got lucky and ended up actually getting into an elite private--with mixed results from UCs/SLO. So this is not sour grapes on my part. But I do think it's kind of unfair that my kid's classmates with 1580 SATs, 36 ACTs, and 4.5 GPAs (at a high school much tougher than most) got rejected by UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCI, UCD, UCSD. Some of these classmates are bona fide geniuses. Shouldn't the University of California be educating young people in California who are this talented? I just think the pendulum may have swung a bit too far in the social justice direction at the UCs.

---

If you look at last years admissions, the UCs are certainly moving in that direction. The class increased their admission rates for both Latino students and first-generation college students. Laudable goals and it certainly seems indicative of their aim. However, it does leave out many California students in the same situation you faced. After having just gone through this process and discussing this among numerous families, I can attest that many well-qualified California students that historically would have attended a UC are actively looking outside the state.

---

I wonder what the flunk out/drop out rates are among the groups that UC cares about? They must track it. Do they publish it, or are they depending on the media being obsessed with entry data and overlooking the participation rates?

Cal has always been for really, really smart kids who thrive on lots and lots of hard work. Is that still the case? Can there be a place for such a school among the now-many UC's? Does Cali still have a need for people who survive that and go on to enrich the State?

---

It's a little unclear what "really, really smart" means. I grew up in Berkeley and had lots of friends who went to Cal in the 1970s as I did. They were all sharp, and had good high school (public or private) backgrounds They weren't all "driven", nor did they need to be. Given the normal 10-20-40-20-10 distribution, I'd say most were in the upper 20% cohort, or above, but not all. I knew plenty of kids who went to SF State because they lived over there and didn't have the $$ for living expenses in Berkeley. They were just as smart and hardworking and did just fine, careerwise.

EDIT - I should have prefaced this my saying I know Cal is much more competitive now than it was 50 years ago. I was questioning the assertion that it's always been this way.

HearstMining said:

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Rushinbear said:

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HKBear97! said:

---

cedarbear said:

---

Anarchistbear said:

---

It should be emphasized that at the Ivys test scores and other criteria are far less important than, as excerpted from NYT

"Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed rsums, and applied at a higher rate but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in

Data is from at least three of the dozen top colleges where the researchers had access to detailed admissions records.
The study by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America's elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html

---

Anarchistbear (great name--are you really an anarchist?), check out the graph in your NYT article. Do you see that big acceptance rate dip for those around the 70-98% of income? It's worst for those in the 90-95th percentile of income. Those kids have the lowest acceptance rate of all kids, and their acceptance rate is far lower than that of low income ones.

This is exactly what I'm talking about happening at affluent public schools. These 90-95th percentile high schoolers generally come from highly-educated families and have great grades and their test scores are much much higher than the low income kids (if you're skeptical about that, check out the CAASPP test score data for schools in Palo Alto vs. those in, say, Clovis).

But the elite schools have two agendas: raising money and showing the world that they're correcting social inequalities. So the top 1% and the bottom 20% get boosts, but the 90-95th percentile kids are in no-man's land and get held to a much higher standard. Now I'm not sure if the UCs are as guilty of kissing up to rich people as much the private schools (I think they're probably not), but talk to anyone who's paid attention to college admissions during the past 10 years, and they'll tell you that the UCs have pivoted a lot more toward social justice. Yes, CS and Engineering are tough to get into these days, but this social justice agenda is clearly also a factor.

BTW, my kid got lucky and ended up actually getting into an elite private--with mixed results from UCs/SLO. So this is not sour grapes on my part. But I do think it's kind of unfair that my kid's classmates with 1580 SATs, 36 ACTs, and 4.5 GPAs (at a high school much tougher than most) got rejected by UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCI, UCD, UCSD. Some of these classmates are bona fide geniuses. Shouldn't the University of California be educating young people in California who are this talented? I just think the pendulum may have swung a bit too far in the social justice direction at the UCs.

---

If you look at last years admissions, the UCs are certainly moving in that direction. The class increased their admission rates for both Latino students and first-generation college students. Laudable goals and it certainly seems indicative of their aim. However, it does leave out many California students in the same situation you faced. After having just gone through this process and discussing this among numerous families, I can attest that many well-qualified California students that historically would have attended a UC are actively looking outside the state.

---

I wonder what the flunk out/drop out rates are among the groups that UC cares about? They must track it. Do they publish it, or are they depending on the media being obsessed with entry data and overlooking the participation rates?

Cal has always been for really, really smart kids who thrive on lots and lots of hard work. Is that still the case? Can there be a place for such a school among the now-many UC's? Does Cali still have a need for people who survive that and go on to enrich the State?

---

It's a little unclear what "really, really smart" means. I grew up in Berkeley and had lots of friends who went to Cal in the 1970s as I did. They were all sharp, and had good high school (public or private) backgrounds They weren't all "driven", nor did they need to be. Given the normal 10-20-40-20-10 distribution, I'd say most were in the upper 20% cohort, or above, but not all. I knew plenty of kids who went to SF State because they lived over there and didn't have the $$ for living expenses in Berkeley. They were just as smart and hardworking and did just fine, careerwise.

---

Meaning designed for them. Not to say that just really smart kids couldn't be successful there, but the idea was not to turn out mid-level bureaucrats. Cal is not the flagship for nothing.

In the old days the really smart kids had a 3.0 and 1000 SAT's

01Bear said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

juarezbear said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

BearCam said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

concernedparent said:

---

BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

---

I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

---

I would suggest reading the report and their footnotes to the various studies they utilized.

Regarding your point, not to go down a rabbit hole, but non-native speakers of English and those students in the U.S. that speak other languages at home face the same issue.

Okay, I am about to deviate from the specific SAT topic...

The wise option for a lot of high school kids in California is to attend a community college for two years and then transfer to a UC. It is soooooo much easier to get admitted, plus the cost savings...

I think the main reason a lot of kids don't do it is that, around the time of high school graduation, it's a big deal for kids to say where they're going to college (for their parents, too) and University of Oregon or University of Colorado sounds a lot better than DVC or De Anza (two high-achieving CCs in the Bay Area).

Anarchistbear said:

---

In the old days the really smart kids had a 3.0 and 1000 SAT's

---

Wha?

Big C said:

---

Okay, I am about to deviate from the specific SAT topic...

The wise option for a lot of high school kids in California is to attend a community college for two years and then transfer to a UC. It is soooooo much easier to get admitted, plus the cost savings...

I think the main reason a lot of kids don't do it is that, around the time of high school graduation, it's a big deal for kids to say where they're going to college (for their parents, too) and University of Oregon or University of Colorado sounds a lot better than DVC or De Anza (two high-achieving CCs in the Bay Area).

---

This is so true! In the 1970s, I knew plenty of kids who attended CSUs and went on to have great careers. One of my kids' classmates, who didn't crack the books in high school but never missed a weekend of snowboarding, got into U of Arizona. His dad said he wanted his kid to have "the Pac-10 experience" so was happy to pay the out of state tuition. Well, the kid flunked out in a year. I think he tried the local JC but eventually ended up managing one of the apartment buildings that Dad owns.

I also have a friend who went to UCR (horrors!), then med school at UCLA and residency at UCSF and had a very successful career as a urologist. It doesn't have to be "Berkeley/San Diego/Davis/Irvine/Santa Barbara/UCLA or nothing".

Big C said:

---

Okay, I am about to deviate from the specific SAT topic...

The wise option for a lot of high school kids in California is to attend a community college for two years and then transfer to a UC. It is soooooo much easier to get admitted, plus the cost savings...

I think the main reason a lot of kids don't do it is that, around the time of high school graduation, it's a big deal for kids to say where they're going to college (for their parents, too) and University of Oregon or University of Colorado sounds a lot better than DVC or De Anza (two high-achieving CCs in the Bay Area).

---

Going to DVC and transferring to Cal was the best choice I ever made.

HKBear97! said:

---

01Bear said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

juarezbear said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

BearCam said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

concernedparent said:

---

BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

---

I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

---

Regarding your point, not to go down a rabbit hole, but non-native speakers of English and those students in the U.S. that speak other languages at home face the same issue.

---

Agreed. But just because racial bias toward one group is not accounted for doesn't mean that an unaccounted racial bias toward another group is not racial bias. It just means those who performed the study either don't recognize their own biases or ignored them.

HKBear97! said:

---

01Bear said:

---

HKBear97! said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

juarezbear said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

BearCam said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

concernedparent said:

---

BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

---

I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

---

I would suggest reading the report and their footnotes to the various studies they utilized.

Regarding your point, not to go down a rabbit hole, but non-native speakers of English and those students in the U.S. that speak other languages at home face the same issue.

---

Also, I just did a quick search for the term "racial bias," on the report; it includes nothing about how the studies of racial bias were conducted, let alone the metrics. Is there something you had in mind from the report that I missed?

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

---

juarezbear said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

BearCam said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

concernedparent said:

---

BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

I've been there. not that going back that far is definitive re our lifetimes. NTL, we've beaten this one.

---

Agreed. I do appreciate the very civil discussion, though. You are a gentleman.

---

A horse rose from the dead today. The College Board announced big changes to the SAT. You will take it with your computer and not paper and pencil. It will be shorter (from 3 hours to 2). You can use a calculator, either free standing or in your computer. You can take it from home or at a test site, therefore you will not be proctored. And, IT WILL BE ADAPTIVE!

What is Adaptive, you ask? The test functionality will track your responses as you answer questions and will develop a running profile on the fly of your ability to answer correctly. If you start out answering all the questions correctly, it will give you harder questions for the rest of the test. If you're having a tough time with the questions at the beginning of the test, it will give you easier questions for the rest of the test. This adaptivity continues to the end - if you start answering questions better or worse than at the start, you will be fed questions designed to bring you to the median.

The College Board says that Adaptive testing will give them the tools to measure the depth and breadth of your ability and that may be true, BUT, it also enables them to bring all test takers toward the median, making them look equal.

Seems to me that now's the time to drop the SAT, just when many are reinstating it.

---

I hate those types of exams. I preferred being able to take exams on paper since (1) it allowed me to make notes (e.g., cross out wrong answers, write formulae) on the test, (2) it allowed me to review my answers and make corrections, and (3) it use later questions (in the same section) to help jog my memory as to how best to answer an earlier question.

01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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juarezbear said:

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bear2034 said:

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BearCam said:

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bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

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What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

---

I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

---

I would suggest reading the report and their footnotes to the various studies they utilized.

Regarding your point, not to go down a rabbit hole, but non-native speakers of English and those students in the U.S. that speak other languages at home face the same issue.

---

Also, I just did a quick search for the term "racial bias," on the report; it includes nothing about how the studies of racial bias were conducted, let alone the metrics. Is there something you had in mind from the report that I missed?

---

They note they reviewed "existing literature" although I would need to look more deeply to see what that includes. However, the report specifically noted a study by Santelices and Wilson - see footnote regarding that study on page 83. The report further delves into demographic characteristics starting on pg 137 of the PDF. There may be more if you read further.

Like I said earlier, it's a fascinating report that is extremely comprehensive.

I don't know how you can actually say that you're getting a worse or better quality of end student outcomes without doing something like a panel study over 10 years and comparing them to another school that does require tests.

HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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juarezbear said:

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bear2034 said:

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BearCam said:

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bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

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What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

---

I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

---

I would suggest reading the report and their footnotes to the various studies they utilized.

Regarding your point, not to go down a rabbit hole, but non-native speakers of English and those students in the U.S. that speak other languages at home face the same issue.

---

Also, I just did a quick search for the term "racial bias," on the report; it includes nothing about how the studies of racial bias were conducted, let alone the metrics. Is there something you had in mind from the report that I missed?

---

They note they reviewed "existing literature" although I would need to look more deeply to see what that includes. However, the report specifically noted a study by Santelices and Wilson - see footnote regarding that study on page 83. The report further delves into demographic characteristics starting on pg 137 of the PDF. There may be more if you read further.

Like I said earlier, it's a fascinating report that is extremely comprehensive.

---

It looks like I didn't miss anything, then. The methodology to determine racial bias in the studies was never actually mentioned. Like I said, if the studies don't even acknowledge the difference in dialects across the US, then they're not worth the paper they're printed on.

To be clear, I worked hard to learn standard academic English (and I'm not African-American, nor do I speak AAVE). However, I recognize what I consider my default "standard" English is the result of adapting to white racial English preferences in the US. In my daily life, I encounter far more people whose English includes vocabulary from assorted languages. Yet, the SAT doesn't test for an understanding of these words.

While the SAT may reference "the ghetto," I highly doubt it would do the same with "el barrio." Even when referencing "the ghetto," it's more likely the definition the SAT uses would be in line with something like "the parts of town where the Jewish community was forced to live in parts of Europe" than the more modern definition that's more like "the poor side of town" (let alone with the connotations of a black and brown populace). Yet, minority test takers would likely be more familiar with the latter definition of "ghetto." If a particular SAT question included the term "the ghetto" (even if just as part of a reading passage and not as one seeking a definition of the word), it can cause confusion to minority test takers more familiar with the modern definition. This would be just one example of racial bias.

Another example of racial bias (that I remember well from my days of studying for the SAT) is use of the word "brownstone." White middle-class and upper-class kids who grew up in Boston, New York, or other more affluent parts of the Northeast would know it meant a house. Black and brown kids (even those the less affluent parts of the Northeast) would be unfamiliar with the term. Heck, I only learned the word because I was studying for the SAT (on my own with a study guide that mentioned the term as one non-white kids needed to learn).

Racial bias is not necessarily racial animus or racist intent. Racial bias can be an unconscious bias (e.g., assuming "brownstone" is a common term outside of affluent white Northeastern communities). It can also be found in the choice of reading passages, including the selection of passages that only perpetuate "model minorities" instead of those that show the fuller image of the complexities of minorities (e.g., passages about African Americans who are only authors, musicians, and scientists). If a test isn't designed to recognize these biases, then the results will obviously show "no racial bias."

Yet, the methodology for studies the linked report purports to rely on to prove no racial bias is not included. Absent a full accounting of the methodology of any study on the racial biases of the SATs, I would be cautious trusting any study that found little evidence of racial bias.

Rushinbear said:

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Anarchistbear said:

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In the old days the really smart kids had a 3.0 and 1000 SAT's

---

Wha?

---

Into the 1970's if you were in the upper 1/8 of your high school you were ensured admission. On 1975 for example there were 5000 applicants and 3900 admit. In 1960 the mean combined SAT was 1113, in 1986 , 1181.

The rise in standards is driven by numbers, competition and inflation.

https://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/karabel_report.pdf

01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

---

Rushinbear said:

---

01Bear said:

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juarezbear said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

BearCam said:

---

bear2034 said:

---

concernedparent said:

---

BearCam said:

---

What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

---

Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

---

I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

---

I would suggest reading the report and their footnotes to the various studies they utilized.

Regarding your point, not to go down a rabbit hole, but non-native speakers of English and those students in the U.S. that speak other languages at home face the same issue.

---

Also, I just did a quick search for the term "racial bias," on the report; it includes nothing about how the studies of racial bias were conducted, let alone the metrics. Is there something you had in mind from the report that I missed?

---

They note they reviewed "existing literature" although I would need to look more deeply to see what that includes. However, the report specifically noted a study by Santelices and Wilson - see footnote regarding that study on page 83. The report further delves into demographic characteristics starting on pg 137 of the PDF. There may be more if you read further.

Like I said earlier, it's a fascinating report that is extremely comprehensive.

---

It looks like I didn't miss anything, then. The methodology to determine racial bias in the studies was never actually mentioned. Like I said, if the studies don't even acknowledge the difference in dialects across the US, then they're not worth the paper they're printed on.

To be clear, I worked hard to learn standard academic English (and I'm not African-American, nor do I speak AAVE). However, I recognize what I consider my default "standard" English is the result of adapting to white racial English preferences in the US. In my daily life, I encounter far more people whose English includes vocabulary from assorted languages. Yet, the SAT doesn't test for an understanding of these words.

While the SAT may reference "the ghetto," I highly doubt it would do the same with "el barrio." Even when referencing "the ghetto," it's more likely the definition the SAT uses would be in line with something like "the parts of town where the Jewish community was forced to live in parts of Europe" than the more modern definition that's more like "the poor side of town" (let alone with the connotations of a black and brown populace). Yet, minority test takers would likely be more familiar with the latter definition of "ghetto." If a particular SAT question included the term "the ghetto" (even if just as part of a reading passage and not as one seeking a definition of the word), it can cause confusion to minority test takers more familiar with the modern definition. This would be just one example of racial bias.

Another example of racial bias (that I remember well from my days of studying for the SAT) is use of the word "brownstone." White middle-class and upper-class kids who grew up in Boston, New York, or other more affluent parts of the Northeast would know it meant a house. Black and brown kids (even those the less affluent parts of the Northeast) would be unfamiliar with the term. Heck, I only learned the word because I was studying for the SAT (on my own with a study guide that mentioned the term as one non-white kids needed to learn).

Racial bias is not necessarily racial animus or racist intent. Racial bias can be an unconscious bias (e.g., assuming "brownstone" is a common term outside of affluent white Northeastern communities). It can also be found in the choice of reading passages, including the selection of passages that only perpetuate "model minorities" instead of those that show the fuller image of the complexities of minorities (e.g., passages about African Americans who are only authors, musicians, and scientists). If a test isn't designed to recognize these biases, then the results will obviously show "no racial bias."

Yet, the methodology for studies the linked report purports to rely on to prove no racial bias is not included. Absent a full accounting of the methodology of any study on the racial biases of the SATs, I would be cautious trusting any study that found little evidence of racial bias.

---

Before coming to that conclusion, I would suggest you actually review the studies they referenced which would include their respective methodologies. Moreover, their methodology analyzing actual test results and demographics is included in the report.

While I appreciate your viewpoint, I think you may be influenced by an outdated view of standardized testing. When the UC system announced they were going down this path, I dug into this report and others when it was issued in early 2020. The findings here and in other studies were enlightening and addressed several of the misperceptions about standardized testing.

HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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juarezbear said:

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bear2034 said:

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BearCam said:

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bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

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What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

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Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

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Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

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I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

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the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

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Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

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I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

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Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

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I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

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I would suggest reading the report and their footnotes to the various studies they utilized.

Regarding your point, not to go down a rabbit hole, but non-native speakers of English and those students in the U.S. that speak other languages at home face the same issue.

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Also, I just did a quick search for the term "racial bias," on the report; it includes nothing about how the studies of racial bias were conducted, let alone the metrics. Is there something you had in mind from the report that I missed?

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They note they reviewed "existing literature" although I would need to look more deeply to see what that includes. However, the report specifically noted a study by Santelices and Wilson - see footnote regarding that study on page 83. The report further delves into demographic characteristics starting on pg 137 of the PDF. There may be more if you read further.

Like I said earlier, it's a fascinating report that is extremely comprehensive.

---

It looks like I didn't miss anything, then. The methodology to determine racial bias in the studies was never actually mentioned. Like I said, if the studies don't even acknowledge the difference in dialects across the US, then they're not worth the paper they're printed on.

To be clear, I worked hard to learn standard academic English (and I'm not African-American, nor do I speak AAVE). However, I recognize what I consider my default "standard" English is the result of adapting to white racial English preferences in the US. In my daily life, I encounter far more people whose English includes vocabulary from assorted languages. Yet, the SAT doesn't test for an understanding of these words.

While the SAT may reference "the ghetto," I highly doubt it would do the same with "el barrio." Even when referencing "the ghetto," it's more likely the definition the SAT uses would be in line with something like "the parts of town where the Jewish community was forced to live in parts of Europe" than the more modern definition that's more like "the poor side of town" (let alone with the connotations of a black and brown populace). Yet, minority test takers would likely be more familiar with the latter definition of "ghetto." If a particular SAT question included the term "the ghetto" (even if just as part of a reading passage and not as one seeking a definition of the word), it can cause confusion to minority test takers more familiar with the modern definition. This would be just one example of racial bias.

Another example of racial bias (that I remember well from my days of studying for the SAT) is use of the word "brownstone." White middle-class and upper-class kids who grew up in Boston, New York, or other more affluent parts of the Northeast would know it meant a house. Black and brown kids (even those the less affluent parts of the Northeast) would be unfamiliar with the term. Heck, I only learned the word because I was studying for the SAT (on my own with a study guide that mentioned the term as one non-white kids needed to learn).

Racial bias is not necessarily racial animus or racist intent. Racial bias can be an unconscious bias (e.g., assuming "brownstone" is a common term outside of affluent white Northeastern communities). It can also be found in the choice of reading passages, including the selection of passages that only perpetuate "model minorities" instead of those that show the fuller image of the complexities of minorities (e.g., passages about African Americans who are only authors, musicians, and scientists). If a test isn't designed to recognize these biases, then the results will obviously show "no racial bias."

Yet, the methodology for studies the linked report purports to rely on to prove no racial bias is not included. Absent a full accounting of the methodology of any study on the racial biases of the SATs, I would be cautious trusting any study that found little evidence of racial bias.

---

Before coming to that conclusion, I would suggest you actually review the studies they referenced which would include their respective methodologies. Moreover, their methodology analyzing actual test results and demographics is included in the report.

While I appreciate your viewpoint, I think you may be influenced by an outdated view of standardized testing. When the UC system announced they were going down this path, I dug into this report and others when it was issued in early 2020. The findings here and in other studies were enlightening and addressed several of the misperceptions about standardized testing.

---

I don't have access to the studies relied upon by the report authors. Would you happen to be able to summarize their methodology?

HearstMining said:

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Rushinbear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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cedarbear said:

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Anarchistbear said:

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It should be emphasized that at the Ivys test scores and other criteria are far less important than, as excerpted from NYT

"Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed rsums, and applied at a higher rate but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in

Data is from at least three of the dozen top colleges where the researchers had access to detailed admissions records.
The study by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America's elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html

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Anarchistbear (great name--are you really an anarchist?), check out the graph in your NYT article. Do you see that big acceptance rate dip for those around the 70-98% of income? It's worst for those in the 90-95th percentile of income. Those kids have the lowest acceptance rate of all kids, and their acceptance rate is far lower than that of low income ones.

This is exactly what I'm talking about happening at affluent public schools. These 90-95th percentile high schoolers generally come from highly-educated families and have great grades and their test scores are much much higher than the low income kids (if you're skeptical about that, check out the CAASPP test score data for schools in Palo Alto vs. those in, say, Clovis).

But the elite schools have two agendas: raising money and showing the world that they're correcting social inequalities. So the top 1% and the bottom 20% get boosts, but the 90-95th percentile kids are in no-man's land and get held to a much higher standard. Now I'm not sure if the UCs are as guilty of kissing up to rich people as much the private schools (I think they're probably not), but talk to anyone who's paid attention to college admissions during the past 10 years, and they'll tell you that the UCs have pivoted a lot more toward social justice. Yes, CS and Engineering are tough to get into these days, but this social justice agenda is clearly also a factor.

BTW, my kid got lucky and ended up actually getting into an elite private--with mixed results from UCs/SLO. So this is not sour grapes on my part. But I do think it's kind of unfair that my kid's classmates with 1580 SATs, 36 ACTs, and 4.5 GPAs (at a high school much tougher than most) got rejected by UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCI, UCD, UCSD. Some of these classmates are bona fide geniuses. Shouldn't the University of California be educating young people in California who are this talented? I just think the pendulum may have swung a bit too far in the social justice direction at the UCs.

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If you look at last years admissions, the UCs are certainly moving in that direction. The class increased their admission rates for both Latino students and first-generation college students. Laudable goals and it certainly seems indicative of their aim. However, it does leave out many California students in the same situation you faced. After having just gone through this process and discussing this among numerous families, I can attest that many well-qualified California students that historically would have attended a UC are actively looking outside the state.

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I wonder what the flunk out/drop out rates are among the groups that UC cares about? They must track it. Do they publish it, or are they depending on the media being obsessed with entry data and overlooking the participation rates?

Cal has always been for really, really smart kids who thrive on lots and lots of hard work. Is that still the case? Can there be a place for such a school among the now-many UC's? Does Cali still have a need for people who survive that and go on to enrich the State?

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It's a little unclear what "really, really smart" means. I grew up in Berkeley and had lots of friends who went to Cal in the 1970s as I did. They were all sharp, and had good high school (public or private) backgrounds They weren't all "driven", nor did they need to be. Given the normal 10-20-40-20-10 distribution, I'd say most were in the upper 20% cohort, or above, but not all. I knew plenty of kids who went to SF State because they lived over there and didn't have the $$ for living expenses in Berkeley. They were just as smart and hardworking and did just fine, careerwise.

EDIT - I should have prefaced this my saying I know Cal is much more competitive now than it was 50 years ago. I was questioning the assertion that it's always been this way.

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Back then half the kids who started at Cal eventually were kicked out for not making the grade. Now 93% get through. Different now as well when 50 years ago there were plenty of middle class jobs available for people who did not go to college as well.

01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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HKBear97! said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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Rushinbear said:

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01Bear said:

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juarezbear said:

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bear2034 said:

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BearCam said:

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bear2034 said:

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concernedparent said:

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BearCam said:

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What you wrote is precisely the opposite of what Dartmouth found. To quote the NYT:

"Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing."

---

Test scores are also a fantastic predictor of family resources.

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Families are a fantastic predictor of success.

---

Family resources are also a fantastic predictor of admission essay quality, number and quality of extra curricular activities, school district quality, # of AP tests taken, and # of high school sports played.

---

Families are also fantastic for kids trying to stay out of poverty.

---

I believe the origin of the SAT was to get a measure of kids who didn't attend prep school or one of the well known public schools in NY, Boston, or Chicago. If a kid was from Texas, the Dakotas, a small city in the south - basically any high school that admissions heads at top schools weren't familiar with. Then, as now, it's very difficult to measure a 4.0 from Piedmont HIgh against a 4.0 from a high school in the Imperial Valley or rural NorCal. Aside from not having access to as many AP courses, the kids could have similar transcripts so without a standardized test or a course they both took from the same instructor, it's very difficult to gauge who's more talented strictly in academics. Grade inflation has made comparisons even murkier. It's clear the SAT favors wealthier kids, but it would be interesting if the SAT were used only to distinguish between a Piedmont kid and a Gunn High or Beverly Hills HIgh kid and not between Piedmont and Mission High.

---

Wasn't the origin of using standardized testing in the college admissions process intended to keep the Ivy League schools lily white? This was in an era where Eugenics was a valid theory and the belief that WASPs were naturally more intelligent than "Jews," the "negros," and the "Orientals" such that standardized testing would prevent the admissions of the undesirable latter three categories.

I'm not saying that standardized tests are the same now, let alone that Eugenics is a valid current belief, just pointing out that the historic genesis of the standardized tests was rooted in racism.

That said, there is absolutely bias in standardized tests. Not only in the words used (e.g., while the term "brownstone" is common in the Northeast, few in the West Coast would recognize it as a description for a house, yet "brownstone" was a common word in SATs), but also in the passages chosen for "reading comprehension." Few, if any, of these passages ever centered on minorities or minority cultures, but very often centered on the white majority and white culture. While an argument could be made that white culture is the default in the US, that alone argues in favor of the position that standardized testing is racially biased.

I'm actually not against standardized testing. I think standardized tests serve a valid purpose. However, numerous objective problems have been identified with how standardized tests have been implemented; these problems need to be fixed. A good start would be by including test writers from a multitude of races and cultures. Also, making test prep free for all students is a must.

---

There is a kernel of truth here, but most is spec. The SAT was first conducted on a somewhat widespread basis in the late 50's when I was in hs (public). I took it in 58 and 59. I was in a grad class of 600. 8 went to Harvard, 2 skipping their freshman year. 12 went to Yale, many skipping. Most of those got 1,600's. I got close and started at Brown...and flunked out after 1 year. About 1/3 of my hs was Jewish, including most of those 20, and just about every one got in a great school. So, from my experience and that of my entry class at Brown and my friends throughout the Ivies, the SAT didn't discriminate against Jews. Asians? At that time, there weren't any to speak of. BUT, you had to figure that it discriminated against Blacks, but I'm thinking as much because they got terrible educations and because edu was discouraged, anyway. Studying was "acting white" even then as it is now.

Eugenics? BS. That was and is PP talk.

---

You're about 30 years too late. The SATs originated in the 1920s. That's also when the Eugenics was still going strong in the US. Also, during this inter-war period, there was a lot of concern over the erosion of WASP values in the US paired with the belief that whites were genetically superior to all other races.

---

the elite schools didn't need the SAT back then. And, Eugenics never got anywhere, despite Sanger's blather.

---

It looks like I may have been too late by about 20 years. Harvard first used standardized testing (a precursor to the SATs) in 1908 for college admissions. Again, it was believed, at this time, that WASPs would do well and the "inferior races" would struggle on the test. The latter proved not to be true as Jews and Catholics wound up doing well. In fact Jews did so well that Harvard went to a holistic admissions model in order to preclude the admission of so many Jews.

Also, the SATs were designed, in part, to prove the superiority of the white race over that of other races. It was only after years of teat results proved otherwise that the inventor of the SATs realized he was wrong about the role of race in intelligence.

Eugenics never wound up going as far as its proponents had believed it would/should. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a policy goal of many in prominent positions. Heck, even J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. implicitly endorsed it with his infamous "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. (Incidentally, Buck v. Bell is still good law.)

---

Objective evidence? ...numbers? distinctions? design of SAT objective?

---

I can pull up the quotes (but I'm feeling lazy), but do a quick google search and you can find the references to the SAT's original intent by its creator. Heck, it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the SAT.

---

Regardless of the tests' origins, current data shows it is not racially biased. See pg 83 of the UC Regents task force report on standardized testing. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

"So, in three of four cases (math for both racial/ethnic comparisons and verbal for Latino/white comparisons) no evidence of racial bias emerges. In the fourth case, black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students"

---

I'd be curious what the parameters of the study were re racial bias. U less the SAT has changed considerably since I took it 30 years ago, I suspect it does not incorporate non-white dialects of English, including AAVE. AAVE is a recognized dialect, which is spoken among African Americans as a "primary language" at a much higher rate than among whites. It also utilizes somewhat different grammar and vocabulary than the standard English used in most high schools. If the tests don't account for such an obvious racial bias, of what value are they?

---

I would suggest reading the report and their footnotes to the various studies they utilized.

Regarding your point, not to go down a rabbit hole, but non-native speakers of English and those students in the U.S. that speak other languages at home face the same issue.

---

Also, I just did a quick search for the term "racial bias," on the report; it includes nothing about how the studies of racial bias were conducted, let alone the metrics. Is there something you had in mind from the report that I missed?

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They note they reviewed "existing literature" although I would need to look more deeply to see what that includes. However, the report specifically noted a study by Santelices and Wilson - see footnote regarding that study on page 83. The report further delves into demographic characteristics starting on pg 137 of the PDF. There may be more if you read further.

Like I said earlier, it's a fascinating report that is extremely comprehensive.

---

It looks like I didn't miss anything, then. The methodology to determine racial bias in the studies was never actually mentioned. Like I said, if the studies don't even acknowledge the difference in dialects across the US, then they're not worth the paper they're printed on.

To be clear, I worked hard to learn standard academic English (and I'm not African-American, nor do I speak AAVE). However, I recognize what I consider my default "standard" English is the result of adapting to white racial English preferences in the US. In my daily life, I encounter far more people whose English includes vocabulary from assorted languages. Yet, the SAT doesn't test for an understanding of these words.

While the SAT may reference "the ghetto," I highly doubt it would do the same with "el barrio." Even when referencing "the ghetto," it's more likely the definition the SAT uses would be in line with something like "the parts of town where the Jewish community was forced to live in parts of Europe" than the more modern definition that's more like "the poor side of town" (let alone with the connotations of a black and brown populace). Yet, minority test takers would likely be more familiar with the latter definition of "ghetto." If a particular SAT question included the term "the ghetto" (even if just as part of a reading passage and not as one seeking a definition of the word), it can cause confusion to minority test takers more familiar with the modern definition. This would be just one example of racial bias.

Another example of racial bias (that I remember well from my days of studying for the SAT) is use of the word "brownstone." White middle-class and upper-class kids who grew up in Boston, New York, or other more affluent parts of the Northeast would know it meant a house. Black and brown kids (even those the less affluent parts of the Northeast) would be unfamiliar with the term. Heck, I only learned the word because I was studying for the SAT (on my own with a study guide that mentioned the term as one non-white kids needed to learn).

Racial bias is not necessarily racial animus or racist intent. Racial bias can be an unconscious bias (e.g., assuming "brownstone" is a common term outside of affluent white Northeastern communities). It can also be found in the choice of reading passages, including the selection of passages that only perpetuate "model minorities" instead of those that show the fuller image of the complexities of minorities (e.g., passages about African Americans who are only authors, musicians, and scientists). If a test isn't designed to recognize these biases, then the results will obviously show "no racial bias."

Yet, the methodology for studies the linked report purports to rely on to prove no racial bias is not included. Absent a full accounting of the methodology of any study on the racial biases of the SATs, I would be cautious trusting any study that found little evidence of racial bias.

---

Would a black or brown affluent person from the Northeast know what a brownstone is? I suspect so, which belies the point that this is racial bias. If anything, it is regional or socio-economic bias. I am white and grew up in an upper middle class household in CA and in high school would have had no idea what that was.

I agree these type of biases should be eliminated to the extent possible. But it not possible to account for all "dialects" (as you refer to them). As you point out, the test is designed based upon "standard academic English". That is what is being tested. And, per the UC study, in some questions the english questions were biased in favor of whites, and in some cases biased against.

It seems to me that the goal should be to: (i) eliminate terms like brownstone that are regional or abstract; and (ii) teach standard English to all students, even if they come from places/communities where that is not dominant. Foreign students take the test and have to learn standard english. I'm not sure why we'd have a different expectation for US students.

I also want to point out that your prior posts point to the original intent of standardized tests - to favor WASPS, etc with eugenics thrown in. I don't know all that much about the history but I'll take your word for it since it seems plausible. At the same time, you also acknowledge that the actual impact of the tests was the opposite. And that is the most important thing - do the tests help identify the stronger students who otherwise don't have wealth or other advantages. I think they do and the UC study suggests they do.

The private schools in our area, which attract primarily wealthy students, provide a great example of why test scores matter. The private school students operate in a world of grade inflation and parent interference (i.e., parent lobbying for grades, etc.). Generally not the case in the public schools where the competition is often cut throat. When students from both schools apply to UC with 4.5 GPAS, the test scores should be the great equalizer. At the same time, if a student from a lower socioeconomic school has lower grades (or fewer AP classes, etc.) due to additional life challenges, test scores are a way to show the hidden diamond i the rough. But UC doesn't want that information.