Yep. I love her latest tack of pontificating about the virtues of the SAT… having never taken the SAT or, it would seem, ever been in a position where she would have cause to seriously ponder the impact or efficacy of the SAT.
I took the SAT (twice) and did pretty well on it. I’ve also taken the GRE (general), GRE (Music), and the GMAT, and did pretty well on all of them.
And the correlation between those tests and anything practical in my life has largely been zero (except for the GRE subject tests, which actually test knowledge as well as skill).
Okay, so you think if a student is getting long term tutoring to improve their grades, that would also improve their SAT score commensurately, but unlike with grades there is no SAT score from before tutoring to compare with? Is that correct? And what do you base this opinion on?
(Although I note that @Babale said he did lots of standardised tests like the PSAT at school, so for some kids there would be earlier results to compare to. @Babale, how did your results on those earlier tests compare to your SAT score?)
Certainly this is true. But for most people there will also be a point of diminishing returns where great effort is required for a small improvement. I’ve worked at improving things I’m good at, and things I’m bad at (playing the guitar, for example), and it took me a hell of lot of time and effort to improve at the latter. No doubt I could have improved further, but at some point it’s better to direct your energy where it will have more impact.
You don’t need to care about schoolwork to get an A, you just need to do it. So maybe that is partly what tutoring addresses. But a student who is getting As is an A student regardless of whether they are internally or externally motivated, no?
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not claiming that the SAT is the best way to select students for college, predicts performance better than any other measure, or anything similar. I’m arguing against the frankly ludicrous claim that it doesn’t measure anything at all. (Made by a bunch of generally smart and professionally successful people who totally coincidentally all have high SAT scores.)
Race realists love taking about SAT scores. Love it.
It’s a good thing nobody is making that claim.
My daughter is by far a better student than me… She will be more successful in school than I ever will. But give us both an ACT/SAT today, even though many of the subjects might be something I haven’t studied academically since before she was born, and I will run rings around her, because I am a test-taking savant. Doesn’t matter what it is, any standardized-type test I will pass with flying colors, whether a college entrance test or an FAA-administered licensure test.
My daughter, though, is a hard-working, driven student, but lacks the skill to do well on those sorts of tests, for whatever reason. So yes, they do measure something; they measure the ability to take those types of tests.
…goes on to make exactly that claim:
No one said the SAT is a perfect measure of anything. We’re talking about correlations, not some universal rule with no individual variations. That doesn’t mean it’s not measuring anything useful in general. Studies have shown SAT scores do correlate with college grades, they do correlate with life outcomes. If all I get in response is assertions without evidence, and anecdotes, and people trying to imply something unpleasant about me for bringing up the subject… well, that’s exactly what I was talking about in the first place.
I mean, SAT scores, high school grades, parental education, and parental wealth all correlate with college grades and with life outcomes. They also all correlate highly with each other. I’m not sure what point you are even trying to make.
It certainly could, because as other posters have pointed out, there’s a great deal of overlap between getting good grades and getting good SAT scores.
There is no SAT score from before “years of” tutoring to compare with, is my point. Because most students start taking the SAT in spring of their junior (third) year, and have to submit their best SAT scores with their college applications in fall of their senior (fourth) year.
Yes, some students do take the PSAT as early as the fall of their sophomore (second) year, but the content-mastery gap between the start of sophomore year and the end of junior year is significant enough that it’s not really “practicing the SAT” yet.
I’m not sure which part of that you’re objecting to as a controversial opinion.
True, but at least IME, students generally exhibit a pretty strong correlation between caring and doing. Oddly enough, the students who don’t care about schoolwork tend to be much less likely to do it.
That it’s NOT true the SAT only measures ability to take the test, or the socioeconomic status of your parents, or doesn’t measure anything inherent.
This came up because I said I was more impressed by the ‘IDW’ writers (if they even are?) who actually give evidence for their claims, compared to people making claims like the above who generally don’t.
Out of curiosity, who are the IDW people you’re reading?
Refresher on IDW acronym?
Internet Dark Web?
Intellectual Dark Web.
People who think that because they take a contrarian stance to reality, it makes them edgier.
The problem is that their followers think so too.
I have a Substack. Does that make me a darkweb intellectual? If so, kewl. I mean, Qewl.
I mean, it measures all of those. For instance, a major component of doing well on the verbal SAT score is knowing a lot of the vocabulary words on the test. And having a large vocabulary is no-doubt correlated with verbal intelligence. But it’s more strongly correlated with how many hours you’ve spent reading, which is likely to be more for kids who live in houses full of books and who don’t need to spend a lot of hours working after school. And the actual words tested tend to be the words that upper-class kids would have come in contact with – the poster child for that was “regatta”. There are plenty of words that are more common in other demographic groups, but those words weren’t the ones on the SAT.
Similarly, a component of the verbal SAT test is comfort with the grammar of “upper class English”. And again, no doubt people with higher inherent verbal intelligence are more facile at knowing which edge cases do and don’t follow the rules. But people in different demographic groups grew up speaking slightly different dialects, with different rules. It’s a hell of a lot easier to master the rules you learned in the cradle than the ones you only see in school and in books assigned by schools.
And then there really is an element of raw “test-taking ability”. Some people are just comfortable in the standardized testing environment, and can navigate it quickly and with certainty. And other’s can’t. I happen to be extremely good at standardized tests. And yeah, it’s probably helped me in life. I leveraged that skill by picking a field where I earned my credentials by taking a series of really hard standardized tests. (that’s how US actuaries are credentialed.) But I’m not convinced that “test taking ability” is very predictive of anything other than the ability to score well on standardized tests.
fwiw, in the past, the SAT people claimed that they were really and truly testing underlying intelligence. As their claims became less and less tenable over the years, they have changed their tune, and they now claim they are testing ability to do well in school (specifically, college) and as a results, they’ve moved their questions to be more like what kids see in school. But are those questions more like what kids in wealthy suburban schools see than what kids in poor inner-city and rural schools see? Hell yes.
Not the most famous of them apparently, she’s never heard of him 
I am quoting this post in full because @puzzlegal conveyed very eloquently EXACTLY what I was trying to get across earlier.
@DemonTree, all snark aside, if you’re genuinely trying to understand the SATs, reading this post and internalizing it is the closest you’re going to get without growing up in the US and experiencing it first-hand.
Thank you. I scored very well on the verbal SAT. 
Another 
for puzzlegal. I’m another good standardized test taker. SAT prep was a very new thing when I took my test, so, I just showed up the day my test was scheduled with no practice at all. I ended up in the 99th percentile in the verbal section and 84th percentile in the math section. I probably needed to take some math practice tests!
But it really was completely meaningless for my university experience.
They measure more than that.
Does an A in 9th grade English mean the same across the country? It absolutely doesn’t. Every year we graduate people who get stumped with simple arithmetic internet questions such as what is 1(3-0). C’mon man! If we had some form of national standards for performance and curriculum I’d agree that we wouldn’t need standardized tests but to claim they have no value other than the ability to see what you would get on that one test that one time isn’t a fair claim.