Reply to Banneker versus School Without Walls

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
It's EXTREMELY disingenuous not to acknowledge that high school and college admissions tests are systematically used all over the world. This is the case because such tests are useful for identifying the academic preparedness of prospective students. 
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If you learn a bit more about the origins and stated purpose of the SAT (hint -- it's right there in the name, the Scholastic APTITUDE Test) you'll understand the difference between the SAT and other tests used all over the world for college admissions.  The SAT was explicitly developed, and has been repeatedly adapted over the years, to NOT be a content-specific or skill-specific test like AS levels or A levels in the UK.

The SAT was originally developed to be a test of genetic aptitude rather than specific skills.  Looked at charitably, you could argue that this is all in an effort to prevent people from being able to prep for the test so that true genetic aptitude rather than preparation could be tested (again, explicitly UNLIKE the tests used in the rest of the world), but there are a lot of problems with this, most importantly that content-specific, prep-able tests have lower bias toward high-SES and white students.  This is reflected in the fact that eliminating questions that the College Board designates as easier from SAT test scores results in a lower SES and racial gap, and the prevailing understanding of this result is that harder questions reflect things that both high SES and low SES students need to study for, whereas easy, "general knowledge" questions tend to favor high SES students.

The fact that the College Board knows all this but continues to push their genetic aptitude test is really problematic.

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