Tests are written by people who talk a certain way, in a way that is easier to process for people who talk the same way. Different communities use different language, and this is reflected in how quickly different students process the problems on standardized tests. There's also the issue that standardized test scores are higher for students who have the time and encouragement to study for them - things which are scarce in poorer families where the student might have to work or help take care of younger siblings. Years of institutionalized racism (loans not given, redlining, denial of employment opportunities) have economically crippled some ethnic communities.
> for students who have the time and encouragement to study for them
It's not just time and encouragement. SAT/ACT prep is serious industry. $100+/hr tutoring sessions. Owners of good SAT prep businesses can make six or seven figures in a few months.
And good prep courses really do work. Tests, like coding interviews, are a game you can hack with enough time and effort.
The signal is totally washed out; with enough money, you can learn how to take the test well enough.
(None of the research is great, but better than nothing.)
This was with just 20 hours of practice. Many high achieving students practice for 5+ hours per week.
South Korean cram school style 2-3 hours per day is in a completely different league than a standard SAT prep course, but much of the research that shows no result counts them the same.
This is like pointing out that I can make large gains in my 100m sprint time by practicing for half an hour a day for a month and predicting that I can make the Olympic team if I put in a thousand hours practice. Novice gains are real and significant but they peter out pretty quickly.
SATs are different in 2 respects.
1. There is a large incentive to practice.
2. It isn't an IQ test, it only correlates fairly strongly with scores on IQ tests.
SATs are highly knowledge based--most of the math questions can be answered by memorizing algorithms, and the verbal section depends heavily on vocabulary.
>This is like pointing out that I can make large gains in my 100m sprint time by practicing for half an hour a day for a month and predicting that I can make the Olympic team if I put in a thousand hours practice. Novice gains are real and significant but they peter out pretty quickly.
It's unlikely you could become an Olympic sprinter, but with enough practice you could probably move into the top 1% of everyone in your age group because the vast majority aren't going to spend that much time practicing.
The SAT equivalent (for the 2018 test) would be somewhere in the 1500-1550 range.
SATs are more knowledge based than a test designed to be culture fair, like Raven’s Progressive Matrices but they’re not meant to be culture fair either, they’re for testing educated English speaking Americans. The test population are in high school but there’s nothing on the test that you wouldn’t have known by the end of middle school.
As far as algorithms and vocabulary go, most people have limited ability to follow complex algorithms because that requires a lot of working memory, which correlates with... Intelligence!
Even if correlation with IQ somehow proved score durability, a correlation of 0.76 or even .8 is low enough to allow for huge swings away from IQ in a very large percentage of the population.
A big chunk of students practicing and increasing their scores 200-300 points could easily be hiding in that 0.76 correlation.
>As far as algorithms and vocabulary go, most people have limited ability to follow complex algorithms because that requires a lot of working memory, which correlates with... Intelligence!
Most algorithms at that level are designed to be written out step by step explicitly to reduce working memory requirements.
Part of SAT prep is learning algorithms for solving word problems that reduce working memory load by memorizing patterns in the questions and writing down the components in a standardized form.
You said
>As far as algorithms and vocabulary go
And then never mentioned vocabulary.
It has nothing to do with working memory and most definitely can be improved dramatically with practice.
One more thing. The SAT was rewritten in 2016 to be far more content based, so the correlation with IQ will likely fall even further.
Years ago I took the GMAT and scored very highly, 98th percentile, and GMAT-taking is definitely a learnable skill in and of itself. Then again, maybe the test is really a proxy for “willing to do prep work upfront”. Having said that obviously it filters for those who have the opportunity to do so, but I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say the latter is not it’s deliberate intent.
So have your test writers distributed in a way that matches the general population. Don't just blindly try and force the population of VLSI design engineers or whatever to mimic the city's demographics.
2. Asian immigrants tend to learn the prestige dialect (the dialect the SAT is written in), so if their children are native English speakers, they tend to learn that dialect natively.
4. Language differences are a factor in performance but obviously not the only factor or the largest factor.
A quick glance at the first graph on this page will tell you that almost all Asian Americans are either first or second generation:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/08/key-facts-ab...
Key stats: Asian American population in 2015 is slightly more than 20 million. In 1960 it is about 1 million and only about 2.5 million in 1980.
> 2. Asian immigrants tend to learn the prestige dialect (the dialect the SAT is written in), so if their children are native English speakers, they tend to learn that dialect natively.
Is it somehow easier for Asian immigrants to learn the prestige dialect than Hispanic immigrants?
However none of that really matters because you ignored my last point.
Other factors such as family income are larger factors that native language.
>Is it somehow easier for Asian immigrants to learn the prestige dialect than Hispanic immigrants?
If it's easier is irrelevant because Asian Americans are more likely to speak the prestige dialect than Hispanics. But to answer your question, yes it is eaiser because Asians have much higher incomes, and they integrate with white communities faster--at least in part because Asian communities are smaller and more spread out.
What kind of absurd "argument" is this? If you're testing for a university in America, the expectation is that not only will the test be in English, but the vast bulk of your university courses. And Asian Americans, despite a large number coming from families of non-English speakers, still do disproportionately well. But if the local language is something you struggle with, that local university isn't for you, unless we're also going to argue that degree awarding requires lower standards.
In which case, just throw university in the dump because it's worthless.
If we're at a point where having a majority language and doing important business in that language is bordering on discrimination, this society is lost.
Or did you just decide you'd rather argue with something I didn't write?
The academic consensus is that there is.
The clearest example is that vocabulary is a large part of most standardized tests and native speakers have larger vocabularies than proficient L2 speakers.
It's almost insulting to think that dialect matters that much considering how much exposure everyone gets to the mainstream dialect.
In China they've got a standard dialect and there doesn't appear to be any advantage for those that are from the area north of Beijing where the dialect originates.
>It's almost insulting to think that dialect matters that much considering how much exposure everyone gets to the mainstream dialect.
Whether it's insulting is irrelevant to whether it's true.
>In China they've got a standard dialect and there doesn't appear to be any advantage for those that are from the area north of Beijing where the dialect originates.
I'd be interested to know what your basing this assertion on. Gaokao scores in Beijing are distorted by families who try to move there from other areas to take the test and migration in general.
Combined with with relative lack of reliable data, I'm not sure how you could confidently make this claim.
From the beginning I've not denied that dialect can have an effect, only that I believe it to overwhelmed by a sea of countless other factors that cause someone to succeed or fail at getting into college, and I haven't seen any data that shows that it is the prevailing factor and one that truly matters.
The subtext to my comments is that this a debatable point, and I interjected because others were throwing veiled insults and calls of racism at anyone who tries to discuss this, which is an unfair way to shut conversation down.
Yes it can be and is at an individual level.
If you removed 50 points from every Black student's SAT score just because they were Black, there would still be countless other factors that caused them to succeed for fail at getting into college. Their being Black wouldn't be the largest factor (family income still would be).
But across the entire population, you would see a significant drop in the number of Black students in college.
As to a link: Here's a link and a quote from the abstract of a relevant metastudy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26090843
"The results showed a negative and moderate relationship between dialect use and overall literacy performance (M effect size = -0.33) and for dialect and reading (M effect size = -0.32). For spelling and writing, the relationship was negative and small (M effect size = -0.22). Moderator analyses revealed that socioeconomic status and grade level were not significant predictors for relations among dialect use and literacy skills."
All standardized testing should be conducted in the universal language of interpretive dance.
And again, people from families of non-native speakers do well. Generally better than people who only have family who speak the native language and dialect.
That people think it's discrimination is quite clearly silly. :)
>Not being able or willing to put in the effort to learn
This has nothing to do with putting in effort. Across a population, people who grew up speaking a dialect will perform better on a test than people who learned to speak that dialect later.
This isn't a controversial statement.
If your goal is to ensure that speakers of other dialects have equal access to top tier higher education, you will need to account for that somehow.
If you dont care about equal access to speakers of other dialects, then you don't have to do anything.
Are there any proven advantages to standardized testing?
People recommended doing your GRE but it wasn't required.
My recollection of the GMAT's difficulty was that any high school grad with an A average could easily score higher than the 80 percentile on the test. While I was happy my result gave me the ability to choose which business school I wanted to go to (my marks, while not bad, were also nothing to brag about), I also think the GMAT was a useless selection criterion.
Your thoughtless dismissal of those less intelligent is enraging. Do you think all the people who work harder than you to get worse results are less motivated?
There are tens of thousands of people who would love to get into top graduate programmes, who love the subject they study but who just aren’t as smart as other people and you’re shitting on them as unmotivated?
Conscientiousness and intelligence are negatively correlated.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30661143/Con...
I am joining a CS PhD program in an US university this fall. The GRE, especially the math part, is high school mathematics. If you are not good at math, you can ace it by studying hard for a month.
That is why a low GRE quant score reflects that you haven't really bothered.
From the part I heard, a big reason given was that you can significantly improve your SAT/ACT scores by taking test prep courses, which reduces the reliability of the test. They believe that can get a better idea of an applicant's academic potential from their grades.
Objective standards can really help people without the connections to succeed otherwise.
I've lived in schools where an A/4.00's average score was 90-100 and I lived in another school where it ranged from 95-100. 3.00 would be from 80-89 at the one school and 90-94 at the other.
From raw GPA data, students who had a 90% average would look great if they graduated from the first school, but just OK if they graduated from the latter school. And I've had friends that went to schools that had max possible GPAs of 5.0.
It's a mess.
I believe "could be perceived" is incorrect; there is a large amount of evidence that it is discriminatory, and that therefore the most deserving students aren't getting opportunities and that the university is shortchanging itself on the quality of its student body.
> one stated goal to make the student body mirror the general population
Who stated that? Also, it's not a bad guide given that talent is distributed relatively equally.
> Is it even the role of higher education to remedy the cards that have already been dealt, and even if so what evidence is there that it actually does what people say it does?
What do you think, and more importantly to fellow users, on what is it based? Shall we stand still until nobody raises another question?
> It seems like ...
Sentences that begin with those words can end in almost any way the author wishes, and in almost all cases we will have learned nothing.
Yes. SAT/ACT scores are terrible signals because of Goodhart's law. Professional tutoring in wealthy suburbs starts at $100/hr. Many ambitious students opt for four-figure private prep courses.
SAT/ACT scores may have been good signals 20 years ago. But today, those scores discriminate against poor students and students aren't inculcated into the "elite institution rat race" from a young age.
That discrimination matters to U Chicago because they are interested in admitting brilliant, creative thinkers. Not perfectly groomed drones. If you don't require test scores, then there's a lot less back-and-forth about admitting that one kid who did publishable research as a high schooler but also happened to do only so-so on the associated SAT subject test.
Qualitative evaluations have many problems, but overly quantitative evaluations also have their failure modes. Especially when the candidate knows the quantitative function they're supposed to be optimizing.
But that is a flawed premise. Is it even the role of higher education to remedy the cards that have already been dealt, and even if so what evidence is there that it actually does what people say it does?