Legitimacy of SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT tests?

[beeksc1]

Validity and reliability of collegiate standardized tests (SAT, GRE, etc)?

The College Board states that

the SAT measures critical thinking skills that are needed for academic success in college.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT

ACT, Inc. says that

the ACT assessment measures high school students' general educational development and their capability to complete college-level work with the multiple-choice tests covering four skill areas: English, mathematics, reading, and science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(examination)

The SAT and GRE are very similar; that is, the former is used for entrance into graduate studies. (IQ tests and collegiate standardized tests specifically claim to assess different aspects of cognition.)

Would academic institutions, colleges, and Universities be better off if they substituted another criterion, in place of tests such as the SAT and GRE? Or would the schools benefit from doing away with them all together?

The tests (SAT, GRE) are often considered just a “weeding-out” tool for admission offices; nevertheless, are these standardized tests legitimate?

One view posted on this forum is that IQ tests measure a person's ability to take IQ tests. And IQ tests claim to measure "intelligence" and the SAT, GRE, etc claim to assess critical thinking skills.

Do these collegiate standardized tests assess what they claim to measure?

 

[drkitten]

Would academic institutions, colleges, and Universities be better off if they substituted another criterion, in place of tests such as the SAT and GRE? Or would the schools benefit from doing away with them all together?

The tests (SAT, GRE) are often considered just a “weeding-out” tool for admission offices; nevertheless, are these standardized tests legitimate?

The question that you need to ask yourself first is "what purpose do these tests serve?" In the case of the SAT, in particular, both the makers of the test and the schools (generally) are very explicit.

The SAT predicts -- with very high reliability --- students' first-year grades. It has not been validated to predict overall college GPA or "IQ" or any other magical faerie quantities. But it does a very good job of predicting first-year grades.

Since most students who fail out do so at the end of their first year, it makes sense to have an instrument that will predict in advance whether or not a random student will be able to progress on to their second year. It is quite reasonable to decide that a student whom you don't expect to complete the program should not be offered an admissions slot, in favor of students whom you do expect to complete the program.

 

[Delvo]

One of the most famous and most published intelligence researchers, Charles Murray, says the SAT should not be administered or used, not because it doesn't work for its job of revealing which students have the most ability and are most likely to succeed in college, but because it does that too well:

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/july-august-magazine-contents/abolish-the-sat

Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.

But data trump gratitude. The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose. Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life. And so I find myself arguing that the SAT should be ended.

Originally, the point of the SAT—whose initials, after all, stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test—was to measure aptitude, defined by the dictionary as “inherent ability,” rather than to measure academic achievement. But in the aftermath of the 1960s, the concept of aptitude became troublesome. The temper of the times meant that long-observed ethnic and class differences in mental test scores had to be interpreted as the fault of the tests that produced them. Like all other mental tests, the SAT persistently showed such differences; therefore, the SAT had to be a bad test, culturally biased in favor of upper-middle-class white kids...

...the image of the SAT has done a 180-degree turn. No longer seen as a compensating resource for the unprivileged, it has become a corrosive symbol of privilege. “Back when kids just got a good night’s sleep and took the SAT, it was a leveler that helped you find the diamond in the rough,” Lawrence University’s dean of admissions told The New York Times recently. “Now that most of the great scores are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”...

...It makes no difference, however, that the charges about coaching are wrong, just as it makes no difference that the whole idea that rich parents can buy their children high SAT scores is wrong. One part of the indictment is true, and that one part overrides everything else: the children of the affluent and well educated really do get most of the top scores...

...In that glaring relationship of high test scores to advanced parental education, which in turn means high parental IQ, lies the reason that the College Board, politically correct even unto self-destruction, cannot bring itself to declare the truth: the test isn’t the problem. The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids. They are smart because their parents are smart.

In other words, the results you get from selecting students using the SAT so closely match the results you'd get without it, that, instead of being a way for students from unprivileged backgrounds to show off their abilities to colleges, as originally intended, it's become a part of the reason why those students might think "the system" just doesn't care about their abilities. So it doesn't contribute to colleges' ability to identify good potential students, but does contribute to the major thing that's still left holding back "disadvantaged" students: lack of hope or belief that they will be given a fair chance, which causes a lack of motivation to bother trying. So he figures it would be good to get rid of something that has no real benefits to anybody and is perceived as a sign of the system working against those students, even if that perception is false:

Because upper-middle-class families produce most of the smartest kids, there is no way to reform the system (short of disregarding intellectual ability altogether) to prevent their children from coming out on top. We can only make sure that high-ability students from disadvantaged backgrounds realize that the nation’s best colleges yearn for their applications and that their chance of breaking out of their disadvantaged situations has never been better—in short, that the system is not rigged. Now, the widespread belief is that the system is rigged, and the SAT is a major reason for that belief. The most immediate effect of getting rid of the SAT is to remove an extremely large and bright red herring.