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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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Recent Posts
The Higher Education Act and the Education Industry | Comment [2]
A Good Day for History Teaching | Comment [4]
Good Luck, President Simon and MSU! | Comment [7]
A Curious Pair of Obituaries | Comment [5]
Bronislaw Geremek: Scholar-Statesman | Comment
Featured Articles By the Author
The Big Test and College Admissions
The Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley has quietly been doing some of the most significant higher education policy research I know of. Spurred by the vote in California in 1996 to end affirmative action in the state’s colleges and universities, and blessed with a vast database on student performance in the huge UC system, researchers at CSHE have been asking the Big Question about college admissions — what are the most reliable objective predictors of success in college for high-school students? When the first results were published several years ago, I found them both troubling and significant, for the researchers found that the best predictor of college success (measured by course grades) was grades in high-school college preparatory courses. They also argued that using grades as the criterion for admissions had the least adverse effect on the success of poor and minority college applicants. And, significantly, high-school grades were not just predictive of success in the freshman year, but of cumulative GPA over four years, and four-year graduation rates.
An important follow-up report by Saul Geiser of CSHE was published a few days ago. It is entitled Back to the Basics: In Defense of Achievement (and Achievement Tests) in College Admissions (click here), and it is a strong confirmation of the earlier findings. It is, in particular, a criticism of the usefulness of the SAT I examination as a general predictor of college success. But it is even more critical of the assumption that the SAT I will identify promising poor and minority students more adequately than high-school GPA — the theory was that if one could test for ability to learn rather than actual learning outcomes, one could discount the negative impact of the poor secondary schools to which the poor and minorities were assigned. But the California data, we are told, shows that the achievement test adds nothing to the predictive value of course grades and achievement tests. They show, in fact, that the SAT “has a more adverse impact on poor and minority applicants than high-school grades and achievement tests.” The report finds that AP courses (though not AP scores) are “good predictors of student success in college,” but AP courses are limited by their availability across high-school systems nationally.
I am not a testing expert, but I have been following the CSHE data analysis with great interest and increasing conviction. I share the center’s concern both with accuracy of prediction of college success, and the relationship of prediction to equity in admissions. These data seem to me to add tremendous force to the growing lack of confidence in the reliability of aptitude tests. And most important, in an era in which affirmative action in college admissions seems to be rapidly disappearing, tests that disadvantage the poor seem particularly objectionable, given the relationship between higher education and life outcomes. I have to confess that the CSHE conclusions reinforce my teacher’s bias for subject-matter mastery as the criterion of achievement. And, if nothing else, it should be reassuring to students to know that some fair measure of what they have actually learned will be the primary criterion upon which admissions decisions are based — rather than the black box of achievement tests. If nothing else, we should be grateful to CSHE for providing a solid statistical basis for public discussion of what is too often more an emotional and political than a policy debate.
(Brainstorm image partly derived from a photo by Flickr user Editor B under a Creative Commons license)
Posted at 10:07:55 AM on July 6, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
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I don’t know that the debate on standardized testing has been so little data-driven as you claim, though there’s no denying it is both emotional and political. Dating back at least to Banesh Hoffman’s terrific jeremiad against The Tyranny of Testing (unbelievably, a book almost fifty years old) there has been a fairly steady stream of data that at least strongly suggested, if not always confirmed, that standardized-test results correlate better with family incomes than with college success or academic ability. The chief source of data disconfirming this, and data supporting the tests’ usefulness, has always been the testing industry, which is essentially a self-supporting monopoly as stuck in its own institutional inertia as any government agency or Detroit automaker.
— Roger · Jul 6, 11:14 AM · #
You’re obviously using the new definition of affirmative action, which now means equal outcomes and not equal opportunities. Universities bend over backwards to encourage minority applications, and now we have “holistic” evaluation of those applications to ensure that the right kind of diversity is achieved. Why don’t we focus on equal outcomes in elementary schools before we expect equal outcomes at our prestigious universities?
— Bill in Pasadena · Jul 6, 10:06 PM · #
One issue you don’t mention is fairness in the classroom. How can you prove that the grades given to students are unbiased? For example, a teacher may have given a student some “slack “ because of personal problems (and I have seen this happen). A standardized test treats all students the same regardless of race, gender and socio-economic standings. I know the old argument that the SATs are bias— and yes— they may have been when first implemented but that is no longer the case. Test questions undergo a long process before it shows up on the test and a majority of the people who review the questions are teachers themselves.
— from California · Jul 7, 03:26 PM · #