> It's very likely that SAT requirements level the playing field considerably if not completely. It's probably quite a lot of work (and cost of education) for those high-SES folks to get such high SAT scores, so by removing those SAT requirements they can be admitted more easily/cheaply.

Those are the only claims I made, and no, I don't have citations for them. Mostly just intuition that the requirements existed to ensure merit rather than nepotism carried the day, so undoing those requirements is likely to have the inverse effect.

> Anecdotal but where I grew up it was never much work for students to get high SAT scores, most people I knew scored relatively high even before preparing.

"Getting into prestigious schools" high? If you're doing that effortlessly then you should bottle your local water and sell it, because there's something in it. :)

>"Getting into prestigious schools" high? If you're doing that effortlessly then you should bottle your local water and sell it, because there's something in it. :)

Yeah, I think it's pretty standard for certain Bay Area public high schools. If I remember correctly the school average was around 1470/1600 (though after prep). For reference Google says the average at Harvard is 1510. Probably has to do more with the parents than the water though.

Doesn't that corroborate the hypothesis that wealth begets higher SAT scores? Access to the quality education available in the Bay Area requires wealth (in general, you have to be pretty wealthy to live in the Bay Area--of course there are some exceptions which prove the rule)?

I'd say it's consistent with that hypothesis, but not that it corroborates it. An alternative hypothesis is that the Bay Area draws in smart folks (who are then wealthy, because Bay Area salaries are outrageous), and smart folks have smart kids. In other words, while wealth is correlated with higher SAT scores it doesn't "beget" them.

To tease that apart you'd need a counterfactual universe where those same Bay Area people weren't wealthy but still had kids. So, uh, good luck finding that...

One datapoint that at least gestures in "correlates" but doesn't "beget" is that half of the students at Stuyvesant High School, the most prestigious math/science school in New York with an admission based on a test akin to the SAT, are economically disadvantaged[0]. If wealth truly "begot" high scores on these tests, you'd probably not see that.

(It also demonstrates that Stuyvesant does a great job making the test accessible: there's free study materials, test times on weekdays and weekends, free shuttles to test site, etc. I wish that was the takeaway here with the SAT discussion: help low income folks prep for and take the test, don't eliminate the test altogether.)

[0] https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2018&instid=80000...

I guess the way I saw it was that the wealth itself begets high SAT scores (through the channel of paying for a good education, which would be invested in regardless of SAT requirements). Removing SAT requirements doesn’t help most wealthy students because they were likely going to do well on the SAT anyway, if anything it hurts them as it’s one advantage they have over others that wouldn’t be considered.

As anyone who worked through high school can attest, not having thr time or money for clubs, volunteering and activism looks poorly in admissions.