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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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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I'm not white and didn't grow up UMC but I say bunk. If you're a HS student of whatever race or background who can't score at least in 500s on both sections of the SAT after a couple of tries, you don't belong in a BA program.  You need more prep, perhaps at a community college. You can argue about the whys and wherefores until the end of time without changing this inconvenient truth.

There aren't really general knowledge questions on the SAT. There are simple reading comp questions, only a little bit harder than those on MS state standardized tests mandated by ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act under Obama), questions stemming from knowledge of arithmetic and basic algebra geometry, and questions related to interpreting highly accessible charts and graphs. No trick questions designed to trip up poor minority students.

If you haven't acquired the requisite college prep skills in HS to get a decent SAT score, you need to that before commencing BA studies.  Policy makers need to ensure that far more low-income minorities have the education to score well enough on good-quality standardized tests to demonstrate that they're ready to move on to BA studies on good form.  I wasn't a cherry-picked minority at a private school or NYC magnet.  But I had access to GT programs in ES/MS in my working-class community, and good AP classes in HS.  The SAT was no great mountain to climb for me and my low-SES minority friends.[/quote]

All of these claims are flatly refuted by mountains of evidence.

PP, this is why we don't make policy based on anecdotes, but as long as we're sharing anecdotes -- in my elementary school G&T classes were for whites only, and their role in continuing segregation was an open secret.  In fact, in my elementary school, special ed classes were where "unruly" black boys were placed to keep them away from the white kids.

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