> Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages.

The alternatives, such as essays, are even more highly correlated with wealth: https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/essay-content-strongly-rel...

As to predicting outcomes, that’s largely due to score compression (the students at any given school are in a narrow score range). Folks across the score range aren’t being compared with each other in class performance. But look at the LSAT, where all students from different schools take the same bar exam. LSAT is highly predictive of bar exam performance. Students who score less than 150 (on a 120-180 scale) are virtually guaranteed to fail the bar.

> Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.

No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like. Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in response to that.

> No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like.

Where does that come from, other than repetition?

> look at the LSAT

I'm not talking about the LSAT (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams).

> Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in response to that.

If that's true (and I don't know that it is, especially on the scale of what has happened to blacks), what does that does that have to do with racism against black kids?

It seems everyone's great effort is not to address racism, but to deny it, against incredible evidence. Look at this entire discussion. It's incredible the effort that goes into denying racism, rather than doing something about it. Reactionary politics has swept the US and HN.

> > No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like.

> Where does that come from, other than repetition?

You started out talking about socioeconomic status, but by the end of your post you admitted getting rid of the SAT is an effort to “address racism.” People think getting rid of the SAT is about race and not class because proponents of the policies admit as much.

> I'm not talking about the LSAT

The SAT and LSAT are very similar both in content and distribution of outcomes.

> (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams).

Half the people who take the LSAT are excluded from even attending law school based largely on LSAT score. Students with lower LSAT scores are at high risk of failing their classes or failing the bar: http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2018/01/using-ls....

> If that's true (and I don't know that it is, especially on the scale of what has happened to blacks)

The SAT is highly correlated with socioeconomic status. And most poor people are white.

> what does that does that have to do with racism against black kids?

Is the SAT “racist” or is it biased against people with low socioeconomic status? Two quite different things.

As to what’s “reactionary” or not, you should try recalibrating your bubble. The majority of white, Asian, Hispanic, and Black people oppose the practice of using race as a consideration in school admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ.... They also say test scores and grades should be the main factors for admissions. The “race progressives” are a minority even among minority groups.

Math, medicine and law don't become any easier no matter how much you avoid testing. At some point they got to know the subjects.

Medical sector has one responsibility: take care of the patients.

Doctors that share a racial and cultural with their patients are able to provide better care. It's been seen in multiple studies that elder African American women are more likely to follow the advice of the doctor if the doctor shared their background. There is little controversy around the fact that diversity leads to improved health outcomes ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8675280/ / https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24787/w247... )

Similar trends can be seen in other fields. So affirmative action is not just good because it is the morally right thing to do, but also because it is the more practical solution quite often.

> Doctors that share a racial and cultural with their patients are able to provide better care

Explain why Asians and Hispanics live longer than whites despite most doctors being white?

Conversely, are you suggesting all those Indian doctors all over rural America should be replaced with white doctors?

I don't mean to suggest that (also as it turns out there's just a frightful scarcity of doctor candidates willing to work in rural America to begin with so that's a moot point to argue any which way).

I sought to note the particular and unique plight of African Americans. I came upon this picture of Ruby Bridges a month ago: https://i.imgur.com/SSRsywY.png and I got to reading what became of her, and I found this recent picture of her: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Ruby_Bri... that's that little girl who put up with a lot of shit just to attend the same school as white girls -- and she doesn't even look that old in this recent pic! The idea that we don't have to do anything to make up for denying the black man and woman the right to drink from the same fountain as the white man and woman, to attend the same school only a few decades ago is deeply unsettling, as the auspices of privilege reverberate down the generations, so do the weighted anchors of un-privilege.

In that vein, I think the argument you seem to be converging toward is not very strong because we have a special select of Asians and Hispanics, they are a special bunch to have taken the initiative to leave everything behind and immigrate elsewhere for a better life, likely they were moneyed enough to make the move, likely they had a strong social support networks as indeed Hispanic&Asian households do, better eating habits, probably more active, etc.

Also, people of similar backgrounds are more likely to understand the environmental health problems. For example, doctors from middle-class backgrounds don't understand as well the stress and trauma of poverty, and associated malnutrition. White doctors generally don't understand as well the stress and trauma of living with racism daily.

“The trauma of living with racism daily.”

Let me guess that you’re white.

That doesn't disagree with anything said?

Disagreement isn't the only purpose for commenting here on HN, despite how threads often appear.

True, but that doesn't tell me the point of that comment.

> LSAT is highly predictive of bar exam performance. Students who score less than 150 (on a 120-180 scale) are virtually guaranteed to fail the bar.

Source? Or do you mean "taking LSAT at the same time as taking the bar for fun"? Because LSAT is typically done before you enter law school, while you take the bar after you get out.

I don’t have the source, but when I checked this out it captures LSAT performance and Bar Exam outcome at their normal milestones.

SAT is one of the strongest correlations of academic success and future income. Where did you hear that it isn't?

I worked in edtech analytics for a while where SAT among other factors were correlated with student success. SAT scores correlate with graduation rates, college GPA, job placement. Most elite universities also tend to receive applicants with higher SAT scores (A no brainer)

I read research that it wasn't, and I believe many colleges claimed that it wasn't. Since neither of us is citing anything, I will keep an eye out.

> Most elite universities also tend to receive applicants with higher SAT scores

Many don't use SAT scores anymore.

I think you read propaganda.

As the other comment points out, the obsession with the flaws of the SAT completely ignores the fact that every single other method of evaluation is even worse, both at identifying promising students and at equity.

If you take it away, colleges will happily admit loads of "well-rounded" students with tons of expensive extracurriculars. They will be racially as balanced as possible, but their family incomes will all be very high. The kid from a poor broken home who somehow managed to score 1400 on the SAT will lose their best shot at standing out.

Exactly. It is still the least evil, one of the reasons Chinese are still keeping their infamous GaoKao. Removing it will create a huge political hitback.

AFAIK, the SAT is biased against poorer students, including in its structure, in its content (maybe they've fixed that), and because wealthy test-takers can afford test prep courses.

What makes you say that the SAT is the best option for poor applicants?

> AFAIK, the SAT is biased against poorer students, including in its structure, in its content (maybe they've fixed that), and because wealthy test-takers can afford test prep courses.

The idea that the SAT is inherently biased against poorer students is controversial. AFAIK, the evidence for this requires advanced statistical analysis and expert interpretation and isn't widely accepted as definitive. Even among those experts who accept this evidence, there doesn't seem to be any clear sense of what is causing this bias or what can be done about it. It simply isn't the case that the SAT has some glaring bias that can easily be rectified, like questions assuming knowledge of water polo and horseback riding. Student skills in things like reading and math do not exist in a vacuum, but depend on prior exposure and knowledge, which robustly correlates with family/neighborhood/school environment and thus socioeconomic status. Efforts to create tests that are completely independent of those things have not produced useful results.

Quality studies show that the benefit of test prep is modest to moderate, on the order of 30-100 points, and almost all of the benefit is achieved within 8 hours of preparation. Even that benefit is not widely accepted as simply retaking the test can increase scores by 60 points. [1] There is no evidence that expensive private tutoring leads to better outcomes than self-study with free alternatives such as Khan Academy. [2]

> What makes you say that the SAT is the best option for poor applicants?

It's helpful to look at it more as the "least bad" than the "best" -- we need to stop focusing exclusively on the issues with the SAT and think about the actual alternatives. For example, essays, extracurriculars, and prestigious brand-name private school affiliations are all valued by prestigious colleges, and can be bought legally and very easily by rich families. It is much harder to buy a high SAT score. To buy a high SAT score, a family could pay someone to impersonate their child, but this is very risky as the recent Varsity Blues scandal showed.

Suppose we put ourselves in the shoes of a bright-but-poor high school student. We need a way to make ourselves stand out. We can sign up with Khan Academy or download some SAT prep materials at the public library and prepare for a few hours... or we can try to get into an expensive private school, get a private college essay consultant, join a rich-kid sport, take a trip to Africa, and other things that rich kids do to burnish their applications. Which of these seems more practical to you?

If you look at the criticism of the SAT from universities, I think you'll find that they are mostly interested in attacking the SAT in isolation, not comparing with the alternatives. Comparing with the alternatives would require shedding light on their opaque and subjective admissions processes and the way in which those processes favor the rich. On the contrary, research suggests that leveraging standardized tests, and increasing participation in them, tends to open doors for poor students relative to status quo [4][5].

It's interesting that they are so favorable to a change which will make their processes even more subjective and opaque, especially given their history of using subjective and opaque processes to exclude undesirable minorities (yesterday Jews [3], today Asians). Although they have proven themselves untrustworthy, they are not interested in increasing transparency and objectivity of admissions processes. I think we should be hesitant to accept their reports and recommendations as being in completely good faith, given their strong interest in (and consistently observed behavior of) recruiting as wealthy a class as possible each year.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/explore/special-sections/sat-pr...

[3] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dobbin/files/2007_asq_kara...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/upshot/why-talented-black...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/upshot/how-universal-coll...

This is the same argument supporting capitalism (which I agree with). Capitalism is the worst system, but it's still better than all else.

I think taking away the SAT as criteria will actually enhance racial bias through subjective measures - than the flip

There's plenty of research you can read, as well what colleges have published. What do you think of it?

SAT math scores combined with GPA are 5 times more predictive than gpa alone at Berkeley. They also found the test was more predictive for low income students

SAT correlates well with college performance and moreover must be used to obtain the best college performance predictors we have (or something highly correlated with SAT).

Some elite law schools did a study where they admitted underprivileged students with bad LSAT scores and guess what, those students did great and got great jobs.

Do you have the link to the study?

For the SAT the difference between winning and losing in college admission is if you can prepare for it. It's not a test you take cold. That is the biggest issue with it so it advantages those with more resources.

The same task force you're quoting also recommended the SAT be revamped to reduce the inherent bias among the questions.

“black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students.“ nonetheless the SAT math lets them find students who’s GPAs aren’t super high for personal reasons and also distinguish between students with the same GPA

Rather than saying "the SAT is discriminatory," maybe ask which questions on the SAT's are discriminatory, and why? And how could you fix them? This will be more revealing of what the problem might be.

I believe a lot of problems that the SAT's used to have were fixed over the years? It's somewhat of a moving target.

And if you can't make any standardized test that's fair, why is that?

A prominent researcher noted that the following question was tested by the ETS but never made it onto the SAT:

The actor's bearing on stage seemed ______; her movements were natural and her technique _____

A. unremitting...blasé B. fluid...tentative C. unstudied...contrived D. eclectic...uniform E. grandiose...controlled

Apparently 8% more black students answered this question correctly than white students, and it was never moved from a potential question into the real test. The allegation is that the racial outcome of the question is the cause of its never making it onto the SAT.

I think it never made it because the question is bad. None of the answers makes much sense (the correct answer is apparently C).

1: http://www.jayrosner.com/publication-onwhitepreferences.html

That made no sense so I followed your link and found that C is uncontrived not contrived, which then makes perfect sense.

Every option has either 2 words that make no sense, or one word that makes no sense with "her movements were natural" and one that does. Only option C has two words which make sense with both. This question is just basic English comprehension and should be on every exam.

Sorry, I had seen this elsewhere and it was incorrectly transcribed. You are correct that the linked page shows "uncontrived" for C. That makes the question less bad though still a bit stilted.

To be clear, the thesis of the article you quoted from is the following:

Every single question carefully preselected to appear on the test favors whites over blacks.

As a non-American, this thesis simply doesn't pass the smell test unless you guys are living in literal KKK land, which - from be outside - doesn't seem to be the case.

Why not read the research? A 'smell test', especially by someone with no experience or expertise, doesn't indicate much.

Any claim of racism - even raised by an expert who has done detailed research, in a society with overwhelming evidence of it historically and now, and in higher education admissions in particular - is always dismissed.

It seems SAT merely reflects current academic skills. If they developed to that point due to privilege, the test isn't responsible for highlighting it. If college goal is to give limited space to most skilled students then it's an effective method to do that.. isn't it?

> It seems SAT merely reflects current academic skills.

What is that based on, and how do you define academic skills? It may reflect how much time and money you can spend on test prep courses (time is also a problem for poor students who tend to have jobs, take care of siblings for parents with multiple jobs and no day care, etc.). It may reflect test-taking skills in general, which aren't skills of value.

That's a possibility, that there is a difference between test taking skills and true academic skills, in that case maybe have students take one class and admission would based on percentile... ie. 1000 student in top percentile will be accepted full time other passing students will get a credit but not admission.