Two familiar tropes about the SAT have haunted the Web over the past couple of weeks, and they may be more directly related than they seem.
The first is the annual hand-wringing over stagnant scores — a woe-is-us effort spearheaded by the College Board itself, which publishes and sells the SAT. According to the Board’s press release, only 42.6 percent of SAT-takers meet its definition of college and career readiness, and this presents a “readiness challenge” that has persisted for years.
As I noted in response to the Board’s similar “call to action” last year, missing from the discussion is what percentage of students should be college-ready. How can the SAT results be disappointing without some a priori understanding of what constitutes success? Rather than fretting over an arbitrary score threshold each year, a more productive activity would be to analyze the degree to which our school system is tailoring instruction to individual student needs.
The second trope is citing the positive correlation between scores and parental income as evidence that the SAT is biased against the poor, and that it foments inequality. The Wall Street Journal has a recent example, following the Washington Post’s lead from last spring.
That argument is, to put it bluntly, political correctness on steroids. The SAT predicts college performance roughly equally well for all income groups. In fact, to the extent there is any difference, the test tends to overpredict the college performance of low-income students — i.e., it is slightly biased in their favor. Furthermore, as long as (a) smarter people tend to have higher incomes, and (b) smarter people tend to have smarter children, then the positive score-income correlation will inevitably exist. That’s not an elite conspiracy, just common sense.
Could the second trope explain the first? Perhaps the College Board has adopted a college-for-all mentality in response to the complaints about rich kids doing better on the SAT than poor kids. It seems plausible. After all, here is what I would consider to be an honest sales pitch for the SAT:
The SAT is a fairly efficient and cost-effective way to predict college performance. It can’t measure everything–not even close–and how it should be used as part of the full application process is up to individual colleges. However, it does add some predictive power beyond what the traditional indicators (such as high school GPA) can offer.
Notice that the honest sales pitch says nothing about college-for-all or raising test scores. That’s probably not PC enough for the College Board to use these days. It seems to imply comfort with the fact that — gasp! — ability varies.
If the College Board stuck with the honest sales pitch, colleges might stop using the SAT in order to avoid such uncomfortable implications. So the Board has focused on lamenting how much of a “challenge” it is that not everyone does well on its test. Conveniently, this preserves the use of the SAT, only now it’s a barometer of our society’s shameful failure to make everyone above average.