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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge is paying for test prep.  Affluent families who pay big money for someone to help their kids with test prep give their kids a huge advantage in this test required world.   Until someone figures out how to normalize for that, the whole system is still going to be messed up - test optional, test required, or whatever else!  Maybe scores should be reduced by 0.1 point for every dollar you pay for test prep (pay $1000 your score gets reduced 100 points) and require a legally binding agreement that if you lie about your costs you forfeit your acceptance [/quote]

Why can’t they add questions to their application process such as: did you use an SAT/ACT tutor?  Some of these problems are not so difficult to solve. [/quote]

Why? If asked:
-to know if family can afford test prep/tutoring (presuming tutoring/test prep) leads to better scores.
-you think they will honestly answer anyways?[/quote]

The interesting thing is that scores predict success pretty much the same across all racial and income groups.  If you can get the score (no matter how) it corresponds to success in college.  The prep argument is also much less relevant than it used to be; almost everyone has the ability to prep, and free prep (khan academy) is quite good.  Who actually preps is also somewhat surprising; Asians prep the most (not surprising), followed by blacks, then Hispanics and lastly whites.   This holds for all types of prep.  Eliminating all prep wouldn’t “eliminate” gaps, and might make them worse.[/quote]

Can you share where you found this data? [/quote]
dp.. here's an article about how SAT and GPA correlate, and how it predicts college success.  Note; the link to the charts may have lost the x/y access labels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/briefing/the-misguided-war-on-the-sat.html

[quote]Likewise, a faculty committee at the University of California system — led by Dr. Henry Sánchez, a pathologist, and Eddie Comeaux, a professor of education — concluded in 2020 that test scores were better than high school grades at predicting student success in the system’s nine colleges, where more than 230,000 undergraduates are enrolled. The relative advantage of test scores has grown over time, the committee found.

Test scores have vastly more predictive power than is commonly understood in the popular debate,” said John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown and one of the authors of the Ivy Plus admissions study.[/quote]

And regarding test prep:

[quote]Consider that other measures of learning — like the NAEP, a test that elementary and middle school students take nationwide — show similarly large racial and economic gaps. The federal government describes the NAEP as “the nation’s report card,” while education researchers consider it a rigorous measure of K-12 learning. And [b]even though students do not take NAEP test prep classes, its demographic gaps look remarkably similar to those of the ACT and SAT.[/b][/quote]

[img]https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2024-01-04-mag-sat-scores/9a519982-994c-4242-88e6-05c7d9157d05/_assets/outcomes-future-600.png[/img]

And regarding grade inflation:

[quote] The relationship between test scores and college grades, by contrast, was strong. Students who did not submit a test score tended to struggle as much as those who had lower scores:[/quote]

[img]https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2024-01-04-mag-sat-scores/9a519982-994c-4242-88e6-05c7d9157d05/_assets/outcomes-college-600.png[/img]

WRT race:

[quote][b]Within every racial group, students with higher scores do better in college. The same is true among poor students and among richer students[/b]:[/quote]

[img]https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2024-01-04-mag-sat-scores/9a519982-994c-4242-88e6-05c7d9157d05/_assets/outcomes-college-hs-600.png[img]

In those charts, look at the data for those missing test scores. That is very telling.

[quote][MIT] But [b]after officials there studied the previous 15 years of admissions records, they found that students who had been accepted despite lower test scores were more likely to struggle or drop out.
[/b]
Without test scores, Schmill explained, admissions officers were left with two unappealing options. They would have to guess which students were likely to do well at M.I.T. — and almost certainly guess wrong sometimes, rejecting qualified applicants while admitting weaker ones. Or M.I.T. would need to reject more students from less advantaged high schools and admit more from the private schools and advantaged public schools that have a strong record of producing well-qualified students.

[b]“Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,” Schmill told me. “Having test scores was helpful.[/b]”[/quote][/quote]

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