Why Elites Dislike Standardized Testing

This was an interesting article from Quillette. We know that everyone hates standardized tests. And with good reason. The reality is that there is a good reason for them. They do tell us things about students and eduction.

Universities have gotten away from only using SATs and ACTs in accepting students preferring a more "holistic" approach. Of course, we know that this move to "holistic" judgements is based on creating quotas for students, making sure that the campus is more "diverse." Too many Asian students  and students from wealthy families were excelling on these tests, thereby creating a monochromatic campus.

As Thomas Sowell points out, many students who have been accepted on this holistic basis, and who have poor test scores end up flunking out. Had they gone to a less prestigious, less challenging school, they may have excelled. But students aren't the point. It's all about virtue signaling.

When some children of big Hollywood stars needed a bit of extra help, some of their parents applied it in the form of hefty bribes. They got caught and exposed. Oops!

Opponents of tests like to argue that tests primarily measure socioeconomic status and parental resources, but it’s not true that rich parents unfairly distort the college admissions process by outspending other people on test prep. There’s not a clear causal relationship between income and test scores, and there’s no evidence that expensive test prep gets better results than cheap or free alternatives.

According to data released by The College Board, the median SAT test taker in 2013 scored a 496 on the SAT’s critical reading section and a 514 on the math. The median student whose family earns less than $20,000 will score a 435 on the critical reading section and a 462 on math, considerably below average. Students from families earing $60,000-80,000 perform similarly to the overall distribution, and median scores continue to rise about 10 points for every marginal $20,000 of family income. The median student from a family earning more than $200,000 per year scores a 565 on critical reading and a 586 on math. The richest students perform a little more than half a standard deviation above average, while the poorest perform a bit more than half a standard deviation below.

But while it’s true that higher-income students get better scores on average and lower-income students do worse, it doesn’t necessarily follow that money raises test scores. This is a mere correlation, and, as anyone who did well on the SAT knows, correlation doesn’t imply causation.

SAT scores correlate strongly enough with IQ that the SAT is interchangeable with IQ as a test of general cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is highly heritable; the single strongest predictor of a child’s IQ is the IQ of the child’s parents. There is also a correlation between income and IQ. That means smarter than average parents are likely to have smarter than average kids and higher than average incomes.

The educational attainment of an SAT taker’s parents is about as strongly correlated with higher scores as high income is; the median student whose parents hold graduate degrees scores a 560 on critical reading and a 576 on math, only slightly lower than the richest students in the dataset by income, and a full standard deviation higher than students whose parents hold only high school diplomas.

There’s also little support for the contention that inequalities in access to test prep is the mechanism by which richer students secure their advantage.

It is true that prep can help; working practice tests can help students get comfortable with the tested concepts and get familiar with the test format and the way the test writers reason. Practicing can also improve the speed at which testers can work the problems, and help them become more confident and comfortable taking the test.

There is much more. Daniel Friedman shreds some of the more popular anti-test, white privilege arguments and argues for a meritocracy in higher education.

Besides, if rich people are trying to buy their unqualified children's way into prestigious schools, admittance cannot primarily be based on privilege. In fact, doing away with testing would certainly open the door to privileged students being able to buy or cajole their way in.