Colleges turning their backs on the SAT and ACT scores

There is a new school in Mass., Olin College founded in 2002 that has doesn't use SAT scores in their admissions process, www.olin.edu . Surprisingly, its an engineering school, not a liberal arts college...I was there last month and it's very impressive.

Admissions are based on high school grades, interviews with the admissions staff, and a weekend at the school where applicants will take part in a design project and other team exercises with current Olin students, .....and the current students have a say in who gets admitted, their opinion is 1/3 of the admission process.

The best part......no tuition. Every student has a full scholarship.....so, if you have a child that is interested in Engineering.....

 

Actually no. Your high school grades are a much better predictor of college performance than a standardized test.

But believe whatever you want.

 

That's a racist statement and you know it.

 

Grades are more of a work-ethic indicator.

The test is an intelligence indicator.

 

I guess there's a philosophical difference here...

Would you rather have A) sharp kids with average grades, or B) average kids with great grades?

If I were in admissions, I'd take A. Most of the grade-grubbers I knew in high school were not particularly interesting or intelligent people.

(This obviously isn't an issue for schools like Harvard, which can get a class full of kids who have perfect SAT scores, perfect grades, and also built a homeless shelter in their spare time).

 

Nice post.

 

Don't use Rollins as a standard for ANYTHING. It's been a safety/party school for several decades.

Mad Dog went there.

What else do you need to know, Bunky?

 

Shame on me for using facts and statistics in my argument -- stats that show the greatest predictor of SAT success is not race or gender, but FAMILY INCOME.

From the LA Times, March 2006, written by Joanne V. Creighton, president of Mount Holyoke:


In 2001, Mount Holyoke made the SAT optional for admission. We have been studying the effects of that policy — with a grant from the Mellon Foundation — and the results are striking. So far, we have found no meaningful difference in academic performance between students who did not submit scores and those who did. The study shows a one-tenth of a point difference between the aggregate grade point averages of submitters and non-submitters, and this difference is mitigated the further along the student is in her college career.


It seems self-evident that a one-size-fits-all test could not adequately assess the diverse populations of students and schools that make up the U.S. educational landscape. In fact, one need only visit many of our nation's most prestigious institutions to see the cumulative effect of reliance on the SAT: campuses that are populated predominately by whites, Asians and the rich. Even the wealthiest universities, many of which waive tuition for poorer students, end up educating an embarrassingly small number of students from the lower fifth, economically, of the U.S. population. This is not the meritocracy the SAT's early proponents had in mind.

Nicholas Lemann wrote in "The Big Test" about how the SAT's creator, Carl Brigham, who had only egalitarian instincts, eventually came to reject his own theories and what he called "one of the most glorious fallacies in the history of science, namely that the tests measured native intelligence purely and simply without regard to training or school. The test scores very definitely are a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English and everything else, relevant and irrelevant."

 

So, long story short, we need a better test?

 

rather than classify or label things, why not deal in facts.

African American students whose families have high incomes score as well(or poorly) as white children of low incomes.
African American students score lower within the exact same school as their white classmantes.


Standardized tests cut through the WASP dominated University system and the quotas on Jews. Without standardized tests, we'll go back to quotas, limits on certain students, and if the past has any value, Jewish kids will be the one hurt. Followed, in this country, by Asian Americans, who already occupy significant and disporportionate populations on many campus'.

Those that advocate abandoning standardized tests are racist.

 

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

You can bury your head, beacuse you have that luxury