SAT remains a ‘near useless’ measure of college merit
The College Board, which administers the SAT to 2 million high schoolers every year, announced this month that it was piloting a program to measure “adversity” in its test takers.
The “Environmental Context Dashboard” assigns a student a score from zero to 100, with 100 being the most disadvantaged. The idea is to give college admissions officers another metric to judge applicants beyond a test score.
The latest effort at reform comes long after the College Board’s belated concessions that its test does not, in fact, measure “aptitude” (the original “A” in SAT).
Many changes have been made to the SAT over time, including efforts to make it more culturally appropriate, but the built-in assumption of the test has remained unchallenged. That assumption is talent and knowledge are naturally distributed along a bell curve — and, in turn, test results should reflect that type of distribution.
The SAT would have us believe that half our children must fail and only a few of them are truly excellent.
It’s not just that there’s something profoundly wrong and un-American about that Darwinian, zero-sum view of success. It also turns out that it doesn’t have a basis in science.
There is no “average” brain. Indeed, distributions in populations — in terms of weight, height, anything — hardly ever resemble a bell curve.
But the SAT stays the same because the College Board’s customer is the university, not students or parents. The SAT uses questions aimed to differentiate candidates rather than assess their capability to perform in a college setting. Its goal is not to prove mastery of essential skills like writing and verbal and mathematical reasoning, but to pit test takers against one another in the quest to fill coveted spots in colleges.
Given the larger-than-life role the SAT plays in our culture, you would be forgiven for thinking the test would be a predictor of college performance. It’s not. Research is clear that high school grades are far better predictors of academic success.
The real purpose of the test is to give universities cover to make the admissions choices it wants to fulfill its mission, picking those individuals they want to pick. The same thing will likely be true of an “adversity score,” where someone’s social or economic standing among their cohort will be used as judgment to determine their worthiness of entry to college.
The good news is we have better ways of measuring achievement and potential, and they are not based on bell curve modeling. The College Board itself even administers some of these tests, with performance tests such as the Advanced Placement (AP) test that do not score results by comparing the test takers to each other but rather by based on
how much they know.
The same is true with professional certification tests.
Take someone who wants to be a doctor. To practice medicine, a med student needs to achieve a certain board score in order to be licensed. The performance, not a predetermined bell curve, decides whether that person passes or fails.
Most of us simply want to be measured on pure performance, not by comparing us with how smart the person next to us is.
On its surface, the Environmental Context Dashboard might seem to enhance the opportunity for those from a disadvantaged background to receive an education — a worthwhile and long overdue change to a higher education system corrupted by a false scarcity, legacy admissions and, as the public has witnessed in recent months, rampant cheating and bribery.
It will reinforce a view of human potential that fits the rigid contours of a bell curve and the wrongheaded idea that only some are entitled to succeed.
In all fairness to the 119-year-old College Board, the SAT is merely a symbol of a much larger problem plaguing the American meritocracy: the reality that technology and human preferences in 2019 are outstripping and rendering obsolete institutions built for an Industrial Age that valued standardization and one-size-fits-all models reducing all of us to an average that very few of us actually fit.
But if we don’t cast aside the SAT and call it what it is — a near useless metric for measuring knowledge and admissions worthiness — it will be hard to move the rest of our social systems that are supposed to bear some relationship to merit.
Maybe it is a good idea to add 1,000 more seats to their freshman classes. Or maybe it’s fairer to have a lottery system that doesn’t pretend to rank kids based on arbitrary measures.
Whatever the case might be, it seems perfectly reasonable that institutions that rely on billions of dollars in tax breaks and public funding justify their process to the taxpayers who subsidize them.
The SAT will go away tomorrow if together we recognize it shouldn’t have a role in determining whether our children get golden tickets to the schools of their dreams. Students have it within their power to stage a mass walkout and refuse to take the test.
But engaged parents also have the power and responsibility to start having this conversation at every dinner table. SAT scores and college admissions are not matters of life and death. Neither of those things have a correlation with a life’s success and failure.
What’s certain is that our kids are far more talented than we’re being told. The SAT is designed to make our kids to be just like their classmates, except better. By fiat and reliance on bell curves that we remain convinced of a pernicious lie: that talent is scarce.
The reality is talented individuals are all around us. And chances are they didn’t score anywhere near a 1600 on their SAT.
Todd Rose, co-founder and president of Populace, is the best-selling author of the “The End of Average” and coauthor of “Dark Horse.” He is also a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he directs the Mind, Brain, and Education program and leads the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality. Follow him on Twitter: @ltoddrose