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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As much as we talk about the difficulty of college admissions, American high school students are not learning enough content to compete in a global market. The SAT is not rigorous and barely tests at a pre-calculus level. Our students are dropping out of STEM programs like flies, and students aren’t graduating with the skills needed to compete in the entry level market. What reforms should we make?[/quote]

This quote makes it seem as if the difficulty of college admissions is in contradiction to the SAT being less rigorous, etc. In fact, they're connected:

Grade inflation in classroom GPAs, SATs, even AP exams means there are more kids with very top qualifications. Sure, what used to be a C is now a B. That's just a labeling difference.

But when what used to be a B is now an A, and all the As are still getting As, it means there are twice as many people with those top grades. You're getting similar clustering at the top of the SAT scale.

For context, I graduated HS in the mid-1980s with a 1400 SAT and ended up at Middlebury. My SAT score was more than 100 points above the Middlebury average, but it was also 200 points below the maximum. So there was plenty of room to tell the difference between me and, say, the person who ended up at MIT. (I also had a B average in honors class, so there's another way to tell the difference!)

Now it's much harder to tell me from the MIT applicant. And since grades don't do much to distinguish the two, you need to do it through ECs, various olympiads, etc., which suck the life out of kids and of course favor families that know about and can afford to do this stuff.

Solution: Just make the tests harder. Add 10 more super-hard questions to the SAT and give a plus to kids who can answer them. And so on with classroom grades, etc. It would make a lot of people's lives a lot less stressful.[/quote]

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