Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion An interesting take on the college prep arms race

Because upper-middle-class families produce most of the smartest kids, there is no way to reform the system (short of disregarding intellectual ability altogether) to prevent their children from coming out on top. We can only make sure that high-ability students from disadvantaged backgrounds realize that the nation’s best colleges yearn for their applications and that their chance of breaking out of their disadvantaged situations has never been better—in short, that the system is not rigged. Now, the widespread belief is that the system is rigged, and the SAT is a major reason for that belief. The most immediate effect of getting rid of the SAT is to remove an extremely large and bright red herring.

The 17-year-old who is at the 40th percentile on the SAT has no other score that lets him say to himself, “Yes, but I’m at the 99th percentile in working with my hands,” or “Yes, but I’m at the 99th percentile for courage in the face of adversity.

Now consider high-ability students in mediocre schools who do not play the classroom game. They are bored with their classes and sometimes get Bs and the occasional C, but they have active minds and are looking for ways to occupy themselves. They spend all their time on the debate team or writing for the high school newspaper, or in the drama department. By the end of high school, they have a long list of accomplishments studding their applications. One way or the other, by the end of high school, students in this category are very likely to have done things that will catch the attention of an admissions officer. And again, their achievement test scores are high. These students are at least as intellectually curious as those who play the game. Their Bs do not mean they didn’t absorb the substance of the coursework, and they too have typically encountered and retained large amounts of information outside school.

That leaves the worst case: high-ability students who are alienated by school and perhaps by life. They don’t study, don’t go out for the debate team, don’t read on their own, don’t even watch the Discovery Channel. It is possible for them nonetheless to achieve a high score on an individually administered IQ test, despite being hostile and uninterested. Arthur Jensen relates the time he was testing a sullen subject in a juvenile detention facility and came to the vocabulary item “apocryphal.” The boy answered, “How the hell should I know? I think the whole Bible is [bunk].” In an individually administered IQ test, the examiner could score his answer as correct, but that same alienated boy is unlikely to get a high score on the SAT because no one, no matter how smart, gets a high score on the SAT without concentrating and trying hard over the course of three stressful hours. So keeping the SAT will not help most students in this category. They won’t try hard, and their SAT scores will be mediocre despite their ability.

That leaves an extremely odd set of high-ability students who will be harmed by dropping the SAT—so alienated that they do nothing to express their ability in school, so completely walled off from independent learning that they do poorly on the achievement tests, and yet able to buckle down on the SAT and get a good score. I am not sure that getting a good score under such circumstances is even possible on the SAT Math—too many of the questions presuppose hard work in algebra class—but perhaps it could be done on the SAT Verbal.

In any case, we are now talking about a very few students, and even for them it is not clear whether dropping the SAT introduces an injustice. Should such a student be given a slot that could have been filled by a less-talented student who is eager to give a competitive college his best effort? Being forced to go to an unselective college instead could well be the better outcome for all concerned.

...because no one, no matter how smart, gets a high score on the SAT without concentrating and trying hard over the course of three stressful hours.

He also doesn't mention the significant changes to the SAT that begin with the spring 2016 test - there may be no need to do away with the SAT as it may do away with itself, its old self, and morph entirely into an achievement test.