Real question - what is the history of the SAT? It has essentially created a toll tax on every student attempting to enter college/university in the US. Is it a private company?
The SAT is designed and delivered by a private, for-profit company. They are providing additional information that they think will add product value for their customers (schools). Do we want our public schools to continue encouraging/requiring such products?
Sorry I meant the Korean one (CSAT?) which is indeed run by the government. That's interesting that American SAT is not run by the government directly.
this is a perfect example of why governmental services are so important - even if they are often run poorly. Without them, dis-equities inherently perpetuate due to external incentives.
The SAT is treated as a standardized test but it, as you note, is inaccessible to many. It is not government run or organized. I've found, from teaching undergraduates, that most of the students who go to college presume that everyone takes the SATs, that it is government administered, and that it is free.
compare this to the, still far from perfect and problematic in other ways, centralized university admissions testing system in many other countries.
What's the antitrust angle? SAT and ACT are administered by different companies, right? Do Caltech or Harvard have some sort of stake in either of them?
I actually worked with them to develop a fake SAT test. It was released, and they had an online competition where they gave $26k to the highest scoring test taker.
I suppose this explains why some companies simply use universities to do their filtering for them.
It's been a while since I took the GRE and LSAT, which I tutored for a while, but they have questions much like the ones listed here. Some of these tests take place on a computer now, others are still large proctored exams. I'm pretty sure I was fingerprinted before taking them.
I thought that it was potentially illegal to use exams like this to hire, which is why it's convenient to use universities. I'm not so cynical as to believe that universities don't impart valuable knowledge and critical thinking to some of their student. However, the quality of education doesn't vary nearly as much as people claim between a very very elite university and a strong state school.
The real value is largely in the filter, high standardized testing scores, along with (at elite privates) a number of students admitted because they come from powerful and wealthy families.
Supposedly research shows that people who post these kinds of numbers but attend less prestigious universities do about as well as the people who post these numbers and attend a prestigious university (I'm figuring this is because they almost always attend a reasonably good university, and the quality of teaching doesn't really drop off much).
Anyway, I think that companies can't ask for SAT scores, but maybe they can just administer their own SAT? Having an outside company do this is probably valuable from a liability point of view. My guess is that some kind of end-run is going on here...
Yes, the SAT prep industry is nearly entirely fraudulent. People will pay you for something they want, regardless of whether you can actually give it to them.
Is "owning" a typo for "earning"? I don't see how anyone can own a slot.
To add to your cynicism, university exams started as way to select WASPy prep school students instead of "overachieving" Jewish public school students. See, the tests included a section on Latin, which was much more often taught in private prep schools than public high schools.
To detract from your cynicism, the intrinsic assumption is the SATs are meaningful indicator of "rightfulness."
My understanding is that at best it shows a correlation with the first year of college, and that high school grades show a better correlation than the (gameable) SAT.
Don't know if the WSJ article covers any of this - don't have a subscription. But the header suggests this change is only for the next year, as a response to the pandemic, and not (yet?) a long-term change, so it likely doesn't touch on these issues.
It's decentralized, but tightly coupled. If US News & World Report drops the SAT category for ranking colleges, you will see schools stop using the SAT overnight.
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