I received a lot of support for my recent post on the folly of the University of California’s decision to drop the SAT, as well as a lot of pushback. I’ve done several podcasts in the past week on this question and will share them in this week’s Saturday evening roundup post. I recommend this resource for an exhaustive exploration of the SES-SAT question specifically. I want to take a little time and go through a few dynamics of this conversation that I think are important. I will say that I find this a particularly frustrating debate in large measure because many liberals loudly and confidently repeat “facts” that are in reality empirically indefensible half-truths or out-and-out errors and will not relent when this is brought to their attention. That’s no way to arrive at more equitable and fair college admissions.
Research has found again and again that considering GPA+SAT results in the most accurate predictions of college success.
This paper aggregates three of the most commonly-cited studies performed to answer the question of how best to quantitatively predict college performance. Again and again, we have found that SAT scores explain variance in college GPA and graduation rates not explained by GPA. In other words, they provide useful predictive information that can be utilized to reduce the number of students who are accepted into college who then fail out, a major negative event in a young person’s life due to opportunity cost and taking on student loan debt. The predictive effectiveness of the SAT is inconvenient for liberals who hate the test, but it is about as empirically well-justified as a claim about education can be, so they try to dissemble their way around it. The simple fact of the matter is that, for making the determinations that college admissions departments are meant to make, the SAT is a useful tool. Getting rid of it just makes us dumber.