MIT Returns to Using SAT to Keep Out the Riffraff

During the pandemic, many colleges and universities decided to drop the most infamous discriminatory tools of the college admissions trade: the SAT and ACT. Now that wishful thinking regarding Covid has entirely displaced rational analysis in our nation's policymaking centers, it's not surprising to see the first of America's most privileged universities for the most privileged move backward to once again adopting a screening tool born in an era, unlike now, when colleges did not feel compelled to hire PR firms to disguise their racism and bigotry.

So MIT says forget the research showing how the SAT, ACT, GRE, or any other standardized test cannot account for stereotype threat or the benefits accrued by test-takers family wealth and income. 

Below is a clip from a brief paper by Tom Rudd in 2011, and below that are the charts which demonstrate clearly the points about family income and SAT scores. So congratulations MIT: you have shown us your reestablished priorities to protect your institution's white wealthy elitism. One would think such rarefied air would reek less of untreated sewage. 

A close look at the distribution of average SAT scores by race and family income suggests that what the SAT does a very good job of measuring is “access to opportunity.” The correlation between SAT scores and reported family income is very high. In 2009, the highest average score on the SAT was posted by students who reported their family income as greater than $200,000 annually.  For these students, high access to opportunity, generally evidenced by high SAT scores, is cumulative. Access to high performing primary and secondary schools leads to high SAT scores that lead to heightened opportunity to attend selective colleges and universities which leads to greater opportunity to choose a life that “one has reason to value.” Despite historic and impassioned prognostications about the public mission of the academy to energize fundamental democratic values including racial and ethnic diversity, it appears that most highly selective colleges and universities use the SAT (or the ACT) as a key component of their admissions strategy.

By Catherine Rampell, New York Times Economic Blog 2009:

Source: College Board

Source: College Board

Source: College Board

Here are all three test sections next to each other (zoomed in on the vertical axis, so you can see the variation among income groups a little more clearly):

Source: College Board

A few observations:

• There’s a very strong positive correlation between income and test scores. (For the math geeks out there, the R² for each test average/income range chart is about 0.95.) 
• On every test section, moving up an income category was associated with an average score boost of over 12 points.
• Moving from the second-highest income group and the highest income group seemed to show the biggest score boost. However, keep in mind the top income category is uncapped, so it includes a much broader spectrum of families by wealth.

Stereotype Threat and Jack O'Connell's 22,000 Annual Failures

From the Fresno Bee:

New questions are being raised about California's high school exit exam after a recent study -- which examined test results for Fresno Unified and three other large school districts -- found the test disproportionately hurts minority and female students.

The exam, a state graduation requirement since 2006, is keeping diplomas each year out of the hands of as many as 22,500 students who would otherwise fulfill all their graduation requirements in California, the study estimated. The study was released last week by the Institute for Research on Education Policy & Practice at Stanford University.

Sean Reardon, associate professor of education at Stanford and the study's lead researcher, said the test has not boosted achievement, especially among low-achieving and minority students.

"I'm all for having high standards," he said. "But what I'm not for is high standards that [differ] by race or gender."

The study looked at school districts in Fresno, Long Beach, San Diego and San Francisco but did not report the findings by district. The patterns were similar in all four, Reardon said.

"It's not a Fresno problem. It's a statewide problem," he said.

Girls and minorities failed the exam more often than white boys who are their academic equals, based on other standardized test scores, the study concluded. Girls struggled more on math.

Part of the failure, according to the study, is consistent with "stereotype threat," a theory that negative stereotypes become self-fulfilling. Reardon said girls assume they can't do well in math and minorities assume they aren't as smart as whites. The added stress and worry about confirming negative stereotypes may hurt their performance on the exit exam, he said. . . .

Mapping the Gender Math Gap and the Emancipation Gap

Below is important news of a new study on the relationship of social equality to academic performance. When combined with what we know about the effects of stereotype threat in reducing performance by women and minorities, a compelling picture emerges.

Nine years before the 19th Amendment granted American women the right to vote, a committee of Swedish scientists in 1911 awarded a second Nobel Prize to Marie Curie, a French Pole, in recognition of her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. Nine years before Title IX cracked down on gender discrimination in American education, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to rocket into space, piloting Vostok 6 in 1963. Across generations and cultures, women have reached remarkable levels of scientific and social achievement. Yet five years into the 21st century, the leader of one of the world’s most elite universities, in one of the oldest democracies, opined upon “the unfortunate truth” that women probably are not as mentally equipped for work in math and science as men (Summers 2005). While this would be most unfortunate, is it true? A recent study in the journal Science shows that “the so-called gender gap in math seems to be linked to environmental factors, which means it could be eliminated by education or social programs.” So said Paola Sapienza (Finance), one of the authors, along with Luigi Guiso (Instituto Universitario Europeo) and Ferdinando Monte and Luigi Zingales (both of the University of Chicago). In fact, she continued, “this gap doesn’t exist in countries in which there is greater gender equality.”

Better Grades, Poorer Scores

American girls, on average, earn higher grades than boys in most subjects in high school. According to the College Board, which administers the SAT college entrance exams in the United States, the average SAT-taking girl who graduated from high school in 2007 had a grade point average of 3.40, higher than the average boy’s 3.24. Girls were better represented than boys among the best students, comprising 57 percent of the SAT-takers who graduated among the top 10 percent of the class of 2007. Yet the girls’ average score on the math portion of the SAT was 499 points, compared with 533 for boys, out of a possible 800 (College Board 2007). . . . .

Stereotype Threat, NCLB, and the Half-Way Solution

From Ed Week:

Stanford University psychologist Claude M. Steele made headlines in 1995 with a study that introduced the phrase “stereotype threat” into the national lexicon. Put simply, it’s the idea that people tend to underperform when confronted with situations that might confirm negative stereotypes about their social group.

Could there ever be devised a more consistent, hammering confirmation of stereotype for minority children and parents living economically disadvantaged lives: the more you struggle, the steeper the hill gets over time, and the more likely you are to fail the high stakes tests on which NCLB is built?

It is sadly interesting to note, too, that now as we finally start talking about interventions to address stereotypes and the achievement gap, there is a focus almost entirely on psychological interventions--as if the poverty that drives the achievement gap can be fixed by tinkering inside the heads of students and teachers. While surely the psychological space is critical in terms of shaping learning and education, fixation on the psychological can lead to a debilitating blindness to the equally-strong sociological realities that shape children's lives. All the tinkering inside the head can only go so far in getting to a full solution to the educational achievement gap, as John Dewey knew over a hundred years ago. Focusing on they psychological, alone, can bring more negative consequences, in fact:

--this educational process has two sides--one psychological and the one sociological--and that neither can be subordianted to the other , or neglected, without evil results following (My Pedagogic Creed, Article I).