Admissions and the SAT

[rogpodge]

https://garryslist.org/posts/uc-regents-knew-sat-ban-was-wrong-voted-for-it-anyway

I still maintain that standardized testing has pulled more poor kids (of all races) out of poverty than anything else we have done in the education space.

[Mick]

One woman, Janet Napolitano (easily my second-least favorite SCU alum after Gavin Newsom) is one of those Progressives who can’t hallucinate enough. She knew the SAT / ACT scores were useful and predictive. And she killed it anyway. It was plainly and solely an ideological move and it resulted in a legion of unqualified, unprepared students.

Cal wasn’t the only one. The list of universities that suspended or put a moratorium on ACTs/SATs included MIT, CalTech, Dartmouth, Brown, Yale, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and yes, Stanford among hundreds of others. Same was true at the great public university systems, not just UC, but Ohio State, Purdue, Texas, Miami, Georgia, etc.

Incidentally…I suspect that one of the reasons they eliminated the test was because of the gender disparity. Men do better than women overall, but in particular in the higher scores. 9% of all men scored over 1400 whereas just 6% of all women scored over 400. 17% of men scored between 1200 and 1390, whereas just 16% of women scored in that range. Below 1200, women take over until 800, then men again outnumber women, 19% to 17%. Males at the tails, as it were:

2024 Total Group SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report

By the way, you can’t find granular SAT score data by gender any more. The latest I could find was from 2012, where 100k women more than men took the SAT, but the number of men with perfect 1600 scores dwarfed the women who had 1600s. Same at 1590. And 1580. And 1570. And so on, all the way down to 1170 (74th percentile) when women outnumbered men, and did so at every decile until the very lowest scores, in which men outnumbered women again.

[Author]

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