Perspective: No one likes the SAT. It’s still the fairest thing about admissions.
By Jonathan Wai , Matt Brown and Christopher Chabris March 22 at 10:49 AM The 33 hedge fund managers, Hollywood actresses, CEOs and other well-connected parents indicted this month didn’t just commit fraud or pay bribes to get their kids into elite schools. They also hired stooges or “tutors” to increase their children’s scores on the SAT and ACT standardized tests that colleges use to make admissions decisions.
It has become a mantra in some quarters to assert that standardized tests measure wealth more than intellectual ability or academic potential, but this is not actually the case. These tests clearly assess verbal and mathematical skills, which a century of psychological science shows are not mere reflections of upbringing.
What about coaching and other forms of test preparation? Highly paid tutors make bold claims about how much they can raise SAT scores , but there is no peer-reviewed scientific evidence that coaching can reliably provide more than a modest boost — especially once simple practice effects and other expected improvements from retaking a test are accounted for. For the typical rich kid, a more realistic gain of 50 points would represent the difference between the average students at Syracuse and No.
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