Split SAT scores as a measure of your potential and college worthiness

[Rhea]

A salutatorian in one school may not crack top 10% in another.

I find that highly doubtful but if you have an example I'm willing to look at it.

Quite possible with an inner city school. A decent student can end up at the top of the pack while they would be simply average in a good school.

He said find an example. He did not say use prejudgement to suppose one in a situation you think would make your point if it were true.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Why inner city with a graduating class in high numbers, probably VERY competitive? Why not focus on a HS with a graduating class of 4?

 

[southernhybrid]

The SAT does not include any questions about medical science. Why should I care how good my surgeon was at memorizing random trivia about Math and English when they were 17? A solid fourth of American doctors are foreign born and never had to take SAT at all. I care more about their professional qualifications as an adult than how good they were at gaming their way through standardized exams as a child.

Random trivia? It's been a long time since I took the SAT but I do not recall it being random trivia. The English part of it is a test of vocabulary and comprehension--something a doctor needs plenty of both. There's no fancy math on the SAT and in some cases doctors need to be able to handle math well. Most drugs have quite a bit of leeway to them and are close to one-size-fits-all in adults, but not all. Some are start on the low dose, raise to the desired effect. However, some are more finicky--doses must be calculated for the patient. (This is much more common in pediatrics.) A doc who can't do that shouldn't be a doc. Even when the computer does the calculations for you the doc needs to have enough of a sense of it to recognize a bad answer.

Seriously? A doctor needs some fancy math to figure out which dosage to start a patient on, when ordering a new Rx.? It's really not that hard, as most drugs come in a small number of doses and with few exceptions, most doctors start patients on the lowest dose when ordering a new drug, to see how they will tolerate it. If they tolerate it well, but need a higher dosage because, for example it's not lowering their BP enough, they will gradually increase the dosage. It's not rocket science and it doesn't require fancy math. It's basic math, the kind a good student learns in elementary school. Doctors, at least most doctors make lots of mistakes. My own primary doctor has ordered the wrong dosage of one of my medications twice in the past two years. The first time she ordered me twice what I needed the other time, she ordered half what I needed. And, we have this modern invention called a calculator that makes it very easy to do basic math, if the highly educated doctor can't do basic math without help. I see no correlation between an SAT score and a doctor's ability to do basic math or use a calculator. If the SAT scores are so valuable, why are so many schools doing away with them as a qualification for admission? It's not just me.

 

[Politesse]

Random trivia? It's been a long time since I took the SAT but I do not recall it being random trivia

But it's a good measure of your current worth and intelligence, right? What you knew at 16 or 17 when you took the test is the most objective measure of how good you are at your current profession?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The SAT does not include any questions about medical science. Why should I care how good my surgeon was at memorizing random trivia about Math and English when they were 17? A solid fourth of American doctors are foreign born and never had to take SAT at all. I care more about their professional qualifications as an adult than how good they were at gaming their way through standardized exams as a child.

Random trivia? It's been a long time since I took the SAT but I do not recall it being random trivia. The English part of it is a test of vocabulary and comprehension--something a doctor needs plenty of both. There's no fancy math on the SAT and in some cases doctors need to be able to handle math well. Most drugs have quite a bit of leeway to them and are close to one-size-fits-all in adults, but not all. Some are start on the low dose, raise to the desired effect. However, some are more finicky--doses must be calculated for the patient. (This is much more common in pediatrics.) A doc who can't do that shouldn't be a doc. Even when the computer does the calculations for you the doc needs to have enough of a sense of it to recognize a bad answer.

Seriously? A doctor needs some fancy math to figure out which dosage to start a patient on, when ordering a new Rx.? It's really not that hard, as most drugs come in a small number of doses and with few exceptions, most doctors start patients on the lowest dose when ordering a new drug, to see how they will tolerate it. If they tolerate it well, but need a higher dosage because, for example it's not lowering their BP enough, they will gradually increase the dosage. It's not rocket science and it doesn't require fancy math. It's basic math, the kind a good student learns in elementary school. Doctors, at least most doctors make lots of mistakes. My own primary doctor has ordered the wrong dosage of one of my medications twice in the past two years. The first time she ordered me twice what I needed the other time, she ordered half what I needed. And, we have this modern invention called a calculator that makes it very easy to do basic math, if the highly educated doctor can't do basic math without help. I see no correlation between an SAT score and a doctor's ability to do basic math or use a calculator. If the SAT scores are so valuable, why are so many schools doing away with them as a qualification for admission? It's not just me.

There's no fancy math on the SAT, either.

And while the vast majority of drugs a patient encounters are one-size-fits-all that does not cover all of them. The drugs that are pickier are generally not used by patients directly.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Random trivia? It's been a long time since I took the SAT but I do not recall it being random trivia

But it's a good measure of your current worth and intelligence, right? What you knew at 16 or 17 when you took the test is the most objective measure of how good you are at your current profession?

The point is that the SAT is testing skills they will need. They have a lot more skills to acquire but it's not at all irrelevant.

 

[Politesse]

They have a lot more skills to acquire but it's not at all irrelevant.

There is an ocean of distance between "topically relevant" and "an objective measure".

 

[southernhybrid]

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/educat...rdized-testing-may-miss-mark-college-students

Former Dean of Admissions for Bates College William Hiss led the study which tracked the grades and graduation rates of students who submitted their test results against those who did not over several years.

Hiss’ data showed that there was a negligible difference in college performance between the two groups. Only .05 percent of a GPA point set “submitters” and “non-submitters” apart, and the difference in their graduation rates was just .6 percent.

There are about 850 test-optional colleges in the U.S., and the trend is growing slowly.

What should college admissions officers look for instead? Hiss says GPA matters the most.

“The evidence of the study clearly shows that high school GPA matters. Four-year, long-term evidence of self-discipline, intellectual curiosity and hard work; that’s what matters the most. After that, I would say evidence that someone has interests that they have brought to a higher level, from a soccer goalie to a debater to a servant in a community to a linguist. We need to see evidence that the student can bring something to a high level of skill,” Hiss said.

 

[Rhea]

Split from Feinstein thread

 

[Elixir]

the SAT is testing skills they will need

Wow. Good thing I never took the SAT!
It would have been awful to discover that I lacked skills I would need. Anyway, I was busy being a human while many of my contemporaries were finding out that they lacked (or in some cases, had an excess of) the skills they would need.
To whose benefit are these epiphanies of meeting or failing to meet the “needed” levels of those skills? The test taker? That seemed to be the emphasis when I dropped out. The prospective employers? In retrospect, that seems more probable. But thinking about the “smart kids” I went to school with, most of them were narrowly suited to particular fields - electrical engineering or astrophysics or whatever. Most were socially inept and possessed of a degree of focus that astonished me then and still does today. I’m sure they all scored in the top few percentile on whatever test they took … prospective employers would not have looked up their scores, I am sure.

 

[bilby]

To whose benefit are these epiphanies of meeting or failing to meet the “needed” levels of those skills? The test taker? That seemed to be the emphasis when I dropped out. The prospective employers? In retrospect, that seems more probable.

The sole beneficiaries are the people in HR and admissions departments, who are absolutely swamped by applicants.

If you have a thousand applications for a single position (or for two dozen positions), then you have a huge amount of work to do, to try to determine which is the applicant (or applicants) most likely to succeed. It's essentially an impossible task; We all know of people who get a job (or a place on a college course) by lying on their resume, or by being highly skilled at writing a response to selection criteria, but who are utterly hopeless once in place, and who were almost certainly less suitable than one (or even many) of the unsuccessful applicants.

It's an impossible task; You cannot determine which of a thousand people are likely to be the best. So you need a shortcut.

You could just chuck ninety nine out of every hundred resumes in the bin, based on a purely random selection, and then interview the ten survivors. But your boss would be all "what was the reasoning behind this choice?", and you'd have no good answer for that.

But you can achieve much the same result by setting an entirely arbitrary minimum SAT score for applicants to be considered, and only interview the ten applicants who make that cut - and your boss will be satisfied that your selection process has some solid basis. Even though it really doesn't. And even though the chances are very high that you didn't even interview the best of the applicants.

If you discriminated against perfectly good applicants on the basis of skin colour, or gender, or whether they lived in a particular suburb, or any of dozens of other factors that are highly unlikely to be relevant, then you'd risk being sued, or at the very least, being accused of bias.

But discrimination between two applicants on the basis that one scored 1542, while the other scored 1543, on a standardised test they took twenty years ago, is not going to get you into trouble; And it renders your job vastly easier. Nobody else benefits.

 

[thebeave]

This story has been making the rounds in my area. If this guy gets rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to with his SAT score (1590 out of 1600) and a 4.42 weighted GPA it makes you wonder what the ones who got in had going for them. Maybe we shouldn't bother with SATs or grades, and just admit those who had jobs as a crossing guard for little kids, smiled a lot, picked up a lot of litter on the highway and wrote a good essay.

Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges reveals how he got Google job

In short, Zhong was rejected this spring by MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, Cal Poly SLO, Cornell, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Caltech, University of Wisconsin and University of Washington. He was only admitted to the University of Texas and Maryland.

My alma mater is in that list, and I got in with a B+ average and fairly unremarkable ACT scores (didn't take SAT) though I started college 23 years ago. I guess things have changed a lot since then!

 

[Elixir]

your boss would be all "what was the reasoning behind this choice?", and you'd have no good answer for that.

Never been in that situation but I’d likely extoll the virtues of my selection, based on claims made, yet to be borne out.

 

[Elixir]

your boss would be all "what was the reasoning behind this choice?", and you'd have no good answer for that.

Never been in that situation but I’d likely extoll the virtues of my selection based on claims made, rather than compare them to the other 999 candidates.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This story has been making the rounds in my area. If this guy gets rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to with his SAT score (1590 out of 1600) and a 4.42 weighted GPA it makes you wonder what the ones who got in had going for them. Maybe we shouldn't bother with SATs or grades, and just admit those who had jobs as a crossing guard for little kids, smiled a lot, picked up a lot of litter on the highway and wrote a good essay.

Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges reveals how he got Google job

In short, Zhong was rejected this spring by MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, Cal Poly SLO, Cornell, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Caltech, University of Wisconsin and University of Washington. He was only admitted to the University of Texas and Maryland.

My alma mater is in that list, and I got in with a B+ average and fairly unremarkable ACT scores (didn't take SAT) though I started college 23 years ago. I guess things have changed a lot since then!

"Zhong". I knew it before I saw the name. There was no question he was Asian in order to get rejected like that.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

...
My alma mater is in that list, and I got in with a B+ average and fairly unremarkable ACT scores (didn't take SAT) though I started college 23 years ago. I guess things have changed a lot since then!

"Zhong". I knew it before I saw the name. There was no question he was Asian in order to get rejected like that.

I applied to only one of those schools and I was accepted into the one school I applied in that list. In my view and what I remember about how I perceived things at the time, I thought things were very competitive and that I had to participate in many (MORE THAN 10) extra-curricular activities with good successes as well as get phenomenal recommendations from teachers, have plenty of other measures of academic testing success than just the SAT such as testing in specific areas like 5's on multiple AP exams and high numbers on chemistry/math/physics/etc Achievement tests, write a great essay, and meet with an alum that would check me out for some reason.

I do recall that there was another student who was almost at my level of testing and his grades were good. But he did not participate in as many activities as I did. He also was a very immature jackass and teachers disliked him because of his in-class entitled behaviors. He likely would not get so great recommendations nor be able to show very much on the activity front in a highly competitive domain of college applications. And I recall he did not get accepted into the same elite school that I did. I believe he did get into some other good college, don't recall exactly.

The point being that acceptance into elite schools is about way more criteria than the 2 listed and if we do not observe the remaining criteria we draw conclusions on incomplete information. If a school is to defend themselves over accusations such as this, they cannot publicly do so due to privacy laws such as ERPA. So while the story could be legit, we cannot say for sure, and people will tend to leap to conclusions based on ideology or stay skeptical.

I would ask, though, that anyone saying it's a sure thing--a definite case of bias or whatever--to demonstrate it further by listing out all the criteria that a college might use and showing how this particular person met and exceeded all the other criteria besides GPA and SAT.

 

[Bomb#20]

To whose benefit are these epiphanies of meeting or failing to meet the “needed” levels of those skills? The test taker? That seemed to be the emphasis when I dropped out. The prospective employers? In retrospect, that seems more probable.

The sole beneficiaries are the people in HR and admissions departments, who are absolutely swamped by applicants.
... And it renders your job vastly easier. Nobody else benefits.

Your boss benefits -- she's the one who'll get sued if the outfit can't explain how nondiscriminatory it is, not some HR functionary. And society benefits -- there needs to be some mechanism to keep the volume of lawsuits from rejected applicants down to a dull roar.

 

[Bomb#20]

...
My alma mater is in that list, and I got in with a B+ average and fairly unremarkable ACT scores (didn't take SAT) though I started college 23 years ago. I guess things have changed a lot since then!

"Zhong". I knew it before I saw the name. There was no question he was Asian in order to get rejected like that.

... things were very competitive and that I had to participate in many (MORE THAN 10) extra-curricular activities with good successes as well as get phenomenal recommendations from teachers, have plenty of other measures of academic testing success than just the SAT such as ...
I do recall that there was another student who was almost at my level of testing and his grades were good. But he did not participate in as many activities as I did. He also was a very immature jackass and teachers disliked him because of his in-class entitled behaviors. ...
The point being that acceptance into elite schools is about way more criteria than the 2 listed and if we do not observe the remaining criteria we draw conclusions on incomplete information. If a school is to defend themselves over accusations such as this, they cannot publicly do so due to privacy laws such as ERPA. ...
I would ask, though, that anyone saying it's a sure thing--a definite case of bias or whatever--to demonstrate it further by listing out all the criteria that a college might use ...

That's an impossible challenge, well-engineered to make claims of nondiscrimination unfalsifiable. And of course there's rarely any way to prove whether discrimination happened in an individual case; but then there doesn't need to be proof since it's a civil matter so preponderance of the evidence is what counts. But "makes you wonder what the ones who got in had going for them.", thebeave said, and "non-Asianness" occurred to me on the spot, likewise before I saw the name. Failing to prove an individual case misses the point, and whether SAT scores measure college worthiness misses the point, and demonstrated ability to make a long list of other criteria misses the point. There is a measured statistical pattern, and it needs to be accounted for, and none of those point-missing rejoinders account for it.

So let us take it as read for the sake of argument that Mr. Zhong is an immature jackass, and that SAT scores make "a negligible difference in college performance", and that GPA and extracurriculars and maturity and likability and unentitledness and essay writing and smiling are far better criteria, and that the schools dropping SAT and ACT are doing so for those reasons and not because they're trying to cover up racial quotas. Let us grant all that and we still have a measured statistical pattern that needs to be accounted for. So to all the folks making excuses for Harvard et al., what accounts for the pattern Toni exhibited in post #1?

What merit, what measure of college worthiness, what positive personal characteristic or skill or background, do Asians have less of than the rest of us?​

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

...
My alma mater is in that list, and I got in with a B+ average and fairly unremarkable ACT scores (didn't take SAT) though I started college 23 years ago. I guess things have changed a lot since then!

"Zhong". I knew it before I saw the name. There was no question he was Asian in order to get rejected like that.

... things were very competitive and that I had to participate in many (MORE THAN 10) extra-curricular activities with good successes as well as get phenomenal recommendations from teachers, have plenty of other measures of academic testing success than just the SAT such as ...
I do recall that there was another student who was almost at my level of testing and his grades were good. But he did not participate in as many activities as I did. He also was a very immature jackass and teachers disliked him because of his in-class entitled behaviors. ...
The point being that acceptance into elite schools is about way more criteria than the 2 listed and if we do not observe the remaining criteria we draw conclusions on incomplete information. If a school is to defend themselves over accusations such as this, they cannot publicly do so due to privacy laws such as ERPA. ...
I would ask, though, that anyone saying it's a sure thing--a definite case of bias or whatever--to demonstrate it further by listing out all the criteria that a college might use ...

That's an impossible challenge, well-engineered to make claims of nondiscrimination unfalsifiable. And of course there's rarely any way to prove whether discrimination happened in an individual case; but then there doesn't need to be proof since it's a civil matter so preponderance of the evidence is what counts. But "makes you wonder what the ones who got in had going for them.", thebeave said, and "non-Asianness" occurred to me on the spot, likewise before I saw the name. Failing to prove an individual case misses the point, and whether SAT scores measure college worthiness misses the point, and demonstrated ability to make a long list of other criteria misses the point. There is a measured statistical pattern, and it needs to be accounted for, and none of those point-missing rejoinders account for it.

BUT I haven't missed any point as I am aware of the statistics. I am just open-minded that there could be other statistics that counter those statistics within the criteria that are not shown. For example, it is known that Asians participate less in extra-curricular activities on average than do White people. It's also known that there are more White legacy admissions. And another factor is sports. Personally, I don't like sports or the focus on them. I think it's stupid. However, colleges pay a lot of attention to sports as an extra-curricular activity and Asians according to statistics participate far less in sports. Perhaps it would be a better world if there was less focus there on prioritizing sports by colleges but for whatever reason when they focus on sports they also get more money and some of that benefits more people, allegedly. Same with focusing on legacies or at least that is what you told me years ago...

I will add that I think looking at national statistics misses the point in examining an individual. We want to know what are the criteria the college used and what are the measurements for the individual in each criterion. It could be a case of bias--I am open-minded--but if someone is saying it's a definite thing, then they have to show it. It is after all very insulting to me to claim I only got in because of my SAT scores and GPA and not all the other extreme hard work I did and to only use those 2 measures to compare against other people.

I seeking to answer this question, I checked out the video at the link that was given:
video

There is an expert there who said he looked at this case and said that Zhong came across as too "uni-dimensional." That does sound to me like he took a lot for granted that he'd be accepted based on scores and a strict focus on computer science stuff only.

Here also is another student from Zhong's high school who posted about it on LinkedIn:

Stanley Zhong, a fellow alum from my high school, was rejected by 16 out of 18 colleges he applied to.

His GPA was 4.42, and his SAT score was 1590.

This is more common than you think.

Stanley's credentials didn't guarantee him a spot in these elite institutions. The highly competitive nature of college admissions, especially in STEM fields, make it harder for certain students to secure admission.

According to one expert interviewed for the story, the admissions process can be particularly tough for Asian students seeking admission into computer science programs.

As person of Chinese descent who studied CS at Stanford University, this concerns me.

Thankfully, there are many paths to success beyond top-tier universities. In Stanley's case, he chose to accept a FT offer to work at Google at a Software Engineer.

This situation is also a reminder that test scores and GPA aren't enough for some of our most selective schools. Students are expected to excel in extracurriculars, invest time in charities, win awards in sports, etc. All while maintaining near-perfect stats.

All this said, if I were on the team to decide his admission, I'd be all for him being admitted to the college I got into. Even though he may have been uni-dimensional, he did participate in at least 2 activities and that participation was elite calibre enough for elite schools. For example, he was on the #1 US high school team for MIT Battlecode 2023.

For whatever reason, he got some bad advice about how to get into an elite school. He could have mitigated risk by just participating in two more activities, like a charity-type activity and something else to show well roundedness or community spirit. Questions still remain about scores on other tests such as AP and achievement tests and especially teacher recommendations. One bad recommendation could have destroyed his chances.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

What merit, what measure of college worthiness, what positive personal characteristic or skill or background, do Asians have less of than the rest of us?​

To be open, I do not reject an idea of bias out of hand. That said, even if so, I still think there is an answer as can be seen from previous post. Asian culture has a big focus on academics and sometimes this can be a detriment to other areas such as extra-curricular activities, esp sports, as well as the kind of well-roundedness colleges sometimes seek. Anecdotally, I've known parents who would ground their kids if not getting straight A's and this would impact social stuff to include school activities. That's meant to show the focus at work. Sometimes the colleges are also asking teachers in recommendations about the social or community side to the student. It may be hard for a teacher to speak to this question for a high achiever who has singular focus and just expects to be rewarded. None of that means all Asians or even most Asians...but there is some kind of statistical difference.