Quotes

The Best Evidence Is Frequently Ignored

From Inside Higher Ed about a new book called Uneducated Guesses:

Then Wainer examined four colleges that let students submit SAT or ACT scores, and for which first-year grades were also available: Barnard and Colby Colleges, Carnegie Mellon University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. At all of these institutions, the students who submitted SAT scores had slightly better first-year grades than those who didn't.

Wainer argues that these and other data suggest that colleges that seek to enroll those who will perform best in their first year are acting against the evidence when they make the SAT optional. "Making the SAT optional seems to guarantee that it will be the lower-scoring students who perform more poorly, on average, in their first-year college courses, even though the admissions office has found other evidence on which to offer them a spot," he writes.

 

I quote this as someone who did terribly on the SAT in high school, and I don't think it's because I "didn't test well."

Making up for lost time in 2011.

(Discovered via great blog: Cost of College)

 

Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis

 
4 Comments | posted August 5th, 2011
 
 
  • Satverbaltutor

    That's interesting. Bates has been test-optional for a couple of decades now, and I know that their studies have always shown that students who don't submit standardized test scores do about the same grade-wise as those who do. Or at least that's what they claim.

    • http://www.perfectscoreproject.com Debbie Stier

      My brother went to Bates (and did very well) and claims he had worse SAT scores than I did in high school (though he has yet to verify).  So maybe there's some truth in that.

  • http://highschoolism.com/ Thao Tran

    I'd say it totally depends on the student.  Since the SAT is an achievement test and not an aptitude test.

    Interesting study though.

 

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