Comment on Peter Sacks and the SAT

Last April Peter Sacks launched an attack on the US News and World Report college rankings. There is lot with which I would agree with him about, especially the role of the survey of senior administrators' opinions ("beauty contest") about their peers.

Where I think he is completely wrong is in his condemnation of the inclusion of the average SAT (aptitude tests) scores of students as a measure of university quality. He says that:

I'm not a statistician, but it hardly requires a degree in econometrics to determine that graduation rates, student-faculty ratios, acceptance rates, alumni giving rates, and all the factors in the U.S. News methodology are profoundly correlated to the institution's selectivity -- how many freshman the institution accepts for admission relative to the number who apply. And none of these factors is related to selectivity more than freshmen SAT scores. In the U.S. News worldview of college quality, it matters not a bit what students actually learn on campus, or how a college actually contributes to the intellectual, ethical and personal growth of students while on campus, or how that institution contributes to the public good. College quality in the U.S. News paradigm boils down to the supposed quality of freshmen the day they pass through the ivory gates -- long before they write a single college essay or solve a physics problem.

Sacks then goes on to praise a young woman, a daughter of affluent Harvard-educated parents who has renounced expensive tutoring for the SAT since she feels that with all her advantages she does not deserve any extra help.

Leaders of these institutions ought to take a lesson from one young Massachusetts woman named Esther Mobley. Attending a top-notch high school in an affluent suburb of Boston where parents buying high-priced SAT tutoring for their kids is like death and taxes, Mobley opted out, declining to take an SAT prep course. According to the New York Times, she did so on the simple principle that kids like her, growing up with Harvard-educated parents and every educational advantage, don't need or deserve such extra help.

The problem is that if the SAT is not used to admit students to elite institutions, then what will? Esther Mobley did not give up her advanced placement Latin, did not restrain herself from talking about the subjunctive in Catullus or Kierkegaard's existential choices, did not stop acting, did not resign as president of the church youth group or ask her parents to transfer her to a school with less competitive classmates and less motivated and qualified teachers. She eventually got into Smith College.

In the end, isn't this all more dependent on parental wealth, education and status than the qualities measured by the SAT. Surely an SAT-free admission policy will favour the children of the affluent and educated much more than current practices.