I'm skeptical of this author's positions, but it is an issue to consider.
The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair
MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society.
By
Kathryn Paige Harden
[About the author:
Kathryn Paige Harden is a clinical-psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of
The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.]
...
Critics of standardized tests have had plenty of reasons to celebrate lately. More than
three-quarters of colleges are not requiring the SAT or the ACT for admission this fall,
an all-time high, and more than 400 Ph.D. programs have
dropped the GRE, up from a mere handful a few years ago. MIT’s announcement on Monday that it is reinstating a testing requirement for fall 2023 admissions was a major departure from these recent trends. Just as striking, amid the widespread perception of standardized testing as an engine of inequality, was MIT’s rationale: “Not having SATs/ACT scores to consider,” MIT’s dean of admissions, Stu Schmill,
wrote, “tends to
raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.” Dropping the SAT, it turns out, actually hurts low-income students, rather than helping them.
MIT’s conclusion is counterintuitive because students from richer families,
on average, score higher on the SAT and other standardized tests than students from poorer ones. The correlation between family background and SAT performance is from
about .25 to .40—that is, meaningful but far from perfect. Still, it’s strong enough that some researchers dismiss standardized tests as nothing more than a proxy for asking, “
Are you rich?” (The ACT measures roughly the same skills as the more widely used SAT, and the arguments for and against both tests are similar.)
But the income-related disparities we see in SAT scores are not evidence of an unfair
test. They are evidence of an unfair
society. The test measures differences in academic preparedness, including the ability to write a clear sentence, to understand a complex passage, and to solve a mathematical problem. The SAT doesn’t
create inequalities in these academic skills. It
reveals them. Throwing the measurement away doesn’t remedy underlying injustices in children’s academic opportunities, any more than throwing a thermometer away changes the weather.
...
The higher scores of richer students are not due, as is commonly assumed, to richer students’ ability to “game” the SAT with expensive test prep. Despite the marketing claims of test-prep companies,
gains from test prep are modest at best. Instead, richer students’ higher scores reflect a problem that is much more durable and pervasive: These students are the beneficiaries of lifelong inequalities in opportunities to learn. As
developmental scientists have long documented, poverty and racism can harm children’s learning in countless ways, even to the point of affecting their
brain development. In the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab at the University of Texas, my colleagues and I
have found that children as young as 2 years old from low-income families differ from their better-off counterparts in their performance on standardized tests.
No one should be surprised that, at age 18, students who have enjoyed a lifetime of material, social, and cultural advantages perform better on tests of academic skills that those advantages facilitate. And these skills actually matter more for students’ performance in college than how wealthy their families are. In
large-scale studies of
college admissions, higher socioeconomic status is not associated with better grades after controlling for SAT scores, but SAT scores remain predictive of better grades after controlling for family background.
...
Similarly, when the state of Michigan required every high-school student to take the ACT or the SAT, it saw an increase
in the number of low-income students attending four-year colleges. These studies suggest that the best policy might actually be to facilitate more high-school students taking the SAT, not abandon it entirely. Standardized testing, inequitable as it might be, is more equitable than any other criterion.
...
MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society.
www.theatlantic.com
