kitchen table math, the sequel: Charles Murray on abolishing the SAT

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Charles Murray on abolishing the SAT

Murray writes:
For most high school students who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life's landmarks. Waiting for the scores--one for Verbal, one for Math, and now one for Writing, with a posible 800 on each--is painfully suspenseful. The exact scores scores are commonly remembered forever after. So it has been for half a century. But events of recent years have challenged the SAt's position. In 2001, Richard Atkinson (2001), president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission. More and more prestigious small colleges, such as Middlebury and Bennington, are making the SAT optional. The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged students--"a wealth test," as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it--has been ubiquitous (Zwick, 2004).

I have watched the attacks on the SAT with dismay. Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.

Conant's cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today. Then, America's elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America's wealthy sent their children. The mission of the SAT was to identiy intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blowwom. Students from small towns and from poor neighborhoods in big cities were supposed to benefit--as I thought I did, and as many others think they did. But data trump gratitude. The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose. Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life. And so I find myself arguing that the SAT should be abolished. Not just deemphasized, but no longer administered. Nothing important would be lost by so doing. Much would be gained.

Murray, Charles. (2011). Abolishing the SAT. In Soares, Joseph A. (Ed.), SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions (pp. 69-81). New York: Teachers College Press.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

I see three basic choices:

(a) An "aptitude" test that kinda/sorta/mostly minimally demands content, but instead tests for raw "ability". For college, this would be IQ plus some other things *IF* one could test for them (e.g. diligence). This favors smart kids.

(b) An "achievement" test that tests for desired knowledge. Here *more* is better, so a kid that knows Calculus would probably outscore a kid who doesn't (in the math portion). This favors kids who have learned a lot.

(c) A "wholistic" approach where the entrance committee decides who they like. Historically this favors the well connected. Today, this might well result in something that is race/sex/income based ... so basically a quota system along some lines.

The SAT tried to be type (a) in the 1980s and the SAT subject tests were type (b) in the 1980s (and today, too, I think). The SAT today seems to try to be a blend of (a) and (b).

I'm fine with (a) or (b), but not really with (c). But both (a) and (b) discriminate against poor kids and kids from small towns.

Do we really want to move to (c)?

If not, what is (d)?

-Mark Roulo

Catherine Johnson said...

I say get rid of college and go with Walter Russell Mead's proposal.

The way it looks to me, colleges (and most people) have thoroughly conflated gatekeeping with teaching, and I don't see any way, in any world, that it makes sense for people to take out $200K in loans to payntenured professors to gatekeep their kids **out** of their fields of interest.

That is not money well spent.

If the professions want gatekeeping, let them pay for it.

Catherine Johnson said...

I'm dead serious about the gatekeeping.

We have friends who have sent 3 kids to the same Ivy League school, a school known for washing students out of science and pre-med tracks.

The dad is a major physician, and he's paying a fortune for gatekeeping.

These kids are all very, very bright, capable, dedicated, etc., etc.

Catherine Johnson said...

The whole concept of putting the brightest students together and **then** grading on a curve is a bad idea, as far as I'm concerned. Not good for the students, not good for us. Us meaning the society: the kids getting washed out of pre-med at this school are people I would certainly want as my physician.

I can see where gatekeeping may be a useful social function, but I definitely can't see where it's worth $50K/year in tuition, room and board, and fees to the family whose child is going to be washed out.

Where do you go to find someone who will actually commit to preparing you to make the cut?

You go to places like Advantage, and you pay $84K.

Catherine Johnson said...

$50K only buys you the Johns Hopkins and the bell curve.

Catherine Johnson said...

btw, I am not actually in favor of 'getting rid of college.'

I **am** in favor of establishing an exam system you could pass without paying for 4 years of college.

ChemProf said...

Any discussion of this kind of test ignores the legal environment, specifically Griggs vs. Duke Power Company. Unless a company can PROVE that a particular certification pertains directly the job, if the certification has disparate impact on different ethnic groups, using that certification is illegal. That's why companies stopped using IQ tests and started requiring the BA. It would be very difficult to design a college-alternative that passed this muster.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

Personally, I think alternate certification is a good idea, but it would require overcoming some legal challenges.

SteveH said...

"...and I don't see any way, in any world, that it makes sense for people to take out $200K in loans to payntenured professors to gatekeep their kids **out** of their fields of interest."

I remember that the college statistics course did a good job of that where I used to teach. Students picked departments based on the highest math required. But that seems like a different issue. I couldn't teach and grade at the same level of the classes I had in college. You can't flunk half the class. Obviously, this means that a degree from that college will mean less. Companies know this and take it into account.

At my first corporate job, I was part of a recruitment team that went to RPI and only talked with engineering students who had a GPA of 3.75 or higher. Their philosophy was to go for the best prospects and pay them a good starting salary. Even though they weren't competitive over the years, enough employees got married, settled down, and didn't want to move. It was an interesting stategy.


Not all Harvard students can handle their physics department. It's true that the quality of a course can reflect the abilities of the students, but that isn't always the case. However, there is a payoff for those who can do the work. You won't change colleges to make them all equal, so it's up to the student to decide whether it would be better to go to a less competitive school. You might get the degree you want and not be eliminated from your field of interest, and after 10 years, the difference might not matter at all.

SteveH said...

So, what IS the problem?

You are not going to make colleges equal. You are not going to convince people that the ranking of the college doesn't matter. (It does, but maybe not that much.) You are not going to change the demand.

Being smart about the system might lead you to a path that doesn't depend on the college rankings. But the SAT permeates all levels in terms of acceptance and dollars. Even if you don't care to play the rankings game, you don't want to ignore the dollars.

If colleges eliminate the SAT and go to a more subjective system, then that will be analyzed and gamed just as hard. Instead of working on shortcut triangle cases, my son will have to put more efforts into what, putting time in at a soup kitchen? Putting more bullets on his resume?

There will always be a need for a student to decide whether he/she can handle a college where the average ability of the student population is higher. The college will take your money and let you try. Perhaps you can get a quality education without the high achiever bell curve somewhere else, especially for your undergraduate degree. My brother-in-law looked at top graduate schools to see what undergraduate schools their students came from. He found some surprising results.

There will always be a college acceptance game. I would rather have it based on real learning rather than aptitude or subjective criteria. Even if there was the ability to replace the SAT with SAT II or AP scores, that would be a step in the right direction. As I mentioned on the other thread, an emphasis on the AP would at least have a chance to translate back into the schools rather than into the pockets of the SAT test preparers. That would help those who don't have the assets or connections.

ChemProf said...

"My brother-in-law looked at top graduate schools to see what undergraduate schools their students came from."

Yep. Liberal arts colleges always do better when you look at grad school acceptance. I don't name my college, but trust me, if I did, I would just send people googling "where?". Nonetheless, I've sent students to PhD programs at Stanford, Yale, UCSF, UC Berkeley, etc. I've also had many students work after graduation in their field (and am really proud to say that last year all of our chem majors found jobs).

That seems to be more true for STEM than for humanities disciplines, where there are entire companies who only recruit from Ivies. But if you are looking at STEM, tiny places can make a lot of sense.

Katharine Beals said...

Here's a link to what looks like the full article:

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/july-august-magazine-contents/abolish-the-sat/article_print

Murray's argument seems to go like this:
(1) The SAT and the Achievement tests are highly correlated with one another, and equally predictive of college grades.
(2) The SAT is tainted because people perceive that it can be gamed, and because people get very hung up on their SAT scores
(3) The Achievement tests aren't tainted in these ways and are unlikely to become tainted (because Achievement test coaching is more about cramming than about gaming, and because people don't get as hung up on (and as demoralize by) achievement scores as they do with intelligence scores.
(4) If everyone focuses on the Achievement test rather that the SAT, then coaches will focus more on content, and there will be more pressure to improve the content of college prep classes in high school.

SteveH said...

That's pretty much the same conclusion I come to. An emphasis on the SAT II tests and/or the AP tests will have a better chance of forcing real improvements in high schools. This doesn't get rid of gaming or the enormous emphasis on preparation, but it's a more productive focus. Many colleges expect SAT II scores anyway.

Crimson Wife said...

I've always thought that med schools should set a minimum GPA in the prerequisite courses and a minimum MCAT score high enough to ensure those admitted are qualified and once that bar has been met, admit based on interpersonal skills/"bedside manner" as judged in the interview, letters of recommendation, and relevant work/community service experience.

I was pre-med for my first two years at Stanford and one of the reasons I dropped out was because I disliked most of the other pre-meds. With a handful of notable exceptions, the students who were successful in the pre-med track were ruthlessly competitive to the point where backstabbing and cheating on exams were rampant.

My DH had to take a chemistry class as a prerequisite for one of his engineering courses and most of the other students in the class were pre-meds. He said that he couldn't believe how different the pre-meds were from the engineering students. The engineering students in the class formed study groups to help everyone in the group succeed. By contrast, the pre-meds refused to collaborate because they didn't want to do anything that might benefit someone else.

Overemphasizing grades and test scores just ensures that the wrong people wind up attending med school...

ChemProf said...

The wacky thing about med school is that they pretty much do what you said, Crimson Wife. Beyond a 3.5 GPA in the premed courses, there is no advantage for admissions to having a higher GPA. There is a similar cutoff for the MCAT (although I don't know the numbers off the top of my head). However, you can't convince premeds of this (and I'm not disagreeing with your assessment -- at Berkeley when I was a grad student they rejiggered the premed series to get the students away from the chemists as soon as they could possible manage it).

Catherine Johnson said...

chemprof wrote: Any discussion of this kind of test ignores the legal environment, specifically Griggs vs. Duke Power Company.

good point

The one thing I'll say there is that for the past couple of years I've spent a lot of time hanging out with lawyers, which has given me a different perspective on the law.

To some degree (and maybe I have this wrong, so this is a very provisional statement) .... anyway, where the law is concerned schools need to hire lawyers who tell them how to do what they want to do rather than telling them they can't do what they want to do.

A very good lawyer figures out a way to make things work.

I don't mean to oversimplify, and of course I have oversimplified, BUT my lawyer friends tell me that schools and ordinary mortals shouldn't be in the business of 'self-censoring' on grounds that something they'd like to do is 'going to' be against the law...which is something I've seen many, many times in public school districts.

Basically, my lawyer friends tell me that non-lawyers shouldn't be in the business of pre-emptively deciding 'against' their own case---

Catherine Johnson said...

oh Katharine - thanks for that!

I didn't read Murray's article; I'm pressed for time and got a little annoyed when I reached the passage where he authoritatively cited 'research' as proving that coaching doesn't work.

There are no studies of high-end, one-on-one tutoring as far as I know.

If that's his argument, I agree with it (at least I agree with it until somebody here points out the drawbacks I haven't thought of...)

I definitely agree with the coaching issue. If we're going to have thousands and thousands of dollars spent on coaching, I would like to see that money spent on content knowledge instead of "educated guessing" and the like.

Catherine Johnson said...

SteveH wrote: An emphasis on the SAT II tests and/or the AP tests will have a better chance of forcing real improvements in high schools. This doesn't get rid of gaming or the enormous emphasis on preparation, but it's a more productive focus. Many colleges expect SAT II scores anyway.

We are exhibit A for this.

C. has to have SAT (or ACT) and he has to have SAT II tests. He has a bunch of AP tests, too.

We spent a year, off and on -- but a full year emotionally -- prepping for SAT.

A couple of weeks ago, C. took his 3rd (or 2nd? I'm so uninvolved I don't even know which one it is) SAT II test: American History.

The extent of test prep for SAT II American History (history being the subject he's most likely to major in)?

Ed made him stay home from school the day before the test, and C. spent an hour or two going through the test prep book.

He got something in the 700s -- low 700s, I think -- and was disappointed.

I said, "Well, you should have studied more than one day," and he agreed.

And that was that.

Catherine Johnson said...

one of the reasons I dropped out was because I disliked most of the other pre-meds

oh, man

I don't like to hear that

Catherine Johnson said...

they rejiggered the premed series to get the students away from the chemists as soon as they could possible manage it

sorry - I didn't quite follow - why did they do that?

ChemProf said...

Because the premeds made life difficult for everyone else. In organic, you couldn't leave your reaction unwatched, because someone would dump something in to lower your yield and purity (which is how the labs were graded). It was exactly the attitude that Crimson Wife describes -- improve your place in the curve by lowering other people.

So, they created a sequence of one semester of Gen Chem, a year of a new Gen Chem/Organic hybrid, and a semester of biochem. They got the med schools to accept it, the molecular biology folks were happy, and the premeds only spend one semester with the engineering and chemistry majors (who take a year of general chemistry and a year of a higher level organic course).