Standardized Tests

Standardized tests are a good thing. That is a complete sentence.

The first time I took the SATs was in seventh grade. True story. The reason I took them in seventh grade was to see if I would score high enough to be accepted to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY), a summer program for gifted children. The idea at the time was that, if as a seventh grader, you could score higher than the average for a high school senior, you were considered academically gifted and eligible to take advanced classes. There were about 40 kids in my town that took the test, and just 4 qualified. I was the only one that went.

CTY was an interesting experience. I was (allegedly) the smartest kid in my town, at least measured by my SAT scores, but I was piled in there with 700 other kids who were also the smartest kids in their respective towns. And most of them were smarter than me. There was a girl who was 14 who had scored a 1600 on the SAT (in seventh grade) who was working for NASA. There was a boy who was 9, from Norway, who was in my Probability and Statistics class. His name was Knut, and he did not have much of a sense of humor. One of my tennis buddies published his first academic paper in computer science at the age of 14, and went on to be the head of engineering at Facebook—and took it public. He is now an almost-billionaire and basically is a venture capitalist just for fun. And on and on. In each of my four years at CTY, I was always in the bottom half of the class. Mostly I went there to meet girls.

I don’t know if it is now, but back then, CTY was completely colorblind. If you scored high enough, you could get in. So certain minorities were over- or underrepresented, which is another way of saying that there were a lot of Asian kids. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Nobody did. I can tell you that the experience would not have been as rich if the admissions folks had meddled with the process.

The SATs are like an IQ test, but not exactly like an IQ test. It supposedly is a test of scholastic aptitude. But regardless of your scholastic aptitude, some of the questions are easy and some of them are hard, and smart people will get the hard ones right, and dumb people will get the easy ones wrong. Performance can be improved slightly by preparation. Before I took the test, in seventh grade, I got a Princeton Review SAT test prep book from Waldenbooks. I’m not sure how much it helped. Basically, if you didn’t know the answer, the test prep made it easier to pick it out of a lineup. Either way, if you’re not educated enough to know the answer, there’s some pretty sophisticated reasoning that goes on that enables you to pick the correct one. The sophisticated reasoning is also known as intelligence.

Most schools have done away with standardized tests, but not all. College admissions departments were unhappy that the tests were not producing the desired results, thinking that more affluent families had the resources to pay for test prep, creating differentials between rich and poor students. The interesting thing about all of this is that every other aspect of a high school senior’s application, from essays to grades to activities, are all much more highly correlated to socioeconomic status than test scores are. In fact, test scores were the most unbiased part of the application. It is true that rich students can pay for test prep, but it is also true that really smart poor kids will ace the test, anyway. Colleges are no longer accepting and admitting the smartest kids—but everyone knew that. There are other goals, as well. You have to field sports teams. You need musicians. You need legacy students to please donors. And you need a diverse student body. If an Ivy League school admitted students solely on the basis of test scores, it would probably look like CTY in 1989. Anyway, this is all above my paygrade and is currently being litigated in the courts.

This is especially true at the Coast Guard Academy, my alma mater. I was once able to view the spreadsheet of my class’s admissions data, and what struck me about it was the exceptionally wide range in SAT scores, from above 1500 at the top end, to below 900 at the bottom end. More recently, I heard that range of SAT scores from an incoming class was 1000 points, meaning that the top score was probably around 1550 and the bottom score was around…550. Having lived through this, I can tell you that the people at the top end of the distribution become very frustrated with the people at the bottom end of the distribution when they are sitting in class together.

But the Coast Guard Academy is sort of an extreme example of what is going on at colleges and universities across the country. The Academy admits about 300 cadets each year. There are 17 sports teams to fill, plus music programs and activities and other crap. The service academies have legacy students as well. And anyone who is an Eagle Scout gets special attention. Applicants who don’t fit into any of these categories must have exceptionally high test scores to be admitted. Like me. Though to be fair, I was legacy as well—I was a third generation Coast Guard Academy graduate. All of this creates huge disparities in academic ability, which creates a lot of tension in cadet culture. This is, obviously, an understatement.

Usually in these essays I am arguing for something or against something, and what I am arguing against here is the idea that standardized test scores should be disregarded. They are the best predictor of a student’s success in college. Standardized tests are tests, and students take a lot of tests in college. Someone who does well on tests will tend to do well in college. If the goal is meritocracy (and I’m not sure it is), then you won’t have the student that grew up dirt poor, from a crappy family in a crappy neighborhood with crappy values (kind of like J.D. Vance) go on to succeed in college, go to Yale Law School under the tutelage of Amy Chua, become a venture capitalist, and a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Regardless of what you think of Vance’s politics (I am not much of a fan), he doesn’t exist if it wasn’t for the SAT. And he knows it. And maybe I don’t exist if not for the SAT. I was brilliant but lazy in high school, a terrible student, phoning it in most of the time, and my class rank ended up at 38 out of 440, barely in the top 10 percent. I’d make the argument that there’s no fucking way on earth that I would get into a service academy or Ivy League school today, without the use of standardized tests.

Right or wrong?

Ace Greenberg said he wanted to hire poor, smart, and determined. That’s fine and all, but you can’t hire poor, smart, and determined out of high school. Maybe the thinking goes that we shouldn’t help smart people out, because they are capable of helping themselves out. I have seen many counterexamples. I have seen plenty of poor smart kids end up driving forklifts, because they grew up in crappy families in crappy neighborhoods with crappy values. The standardized test is the only ticket out. I was pretty fucking poor growing up, child of a single mother who happened to be a victim of domestic violence, in a 1200 square foot house adjacent to a rough section of town. A social scientist would have looked at my situation and declared my case hopeless. Without standardized tests, I’d still be there, probably looking a lot like Casey Affleck in that Dunkin Donuts skit from years ago.

The good news is that the name brand of the college isn’t everything—but it almost is. Goldman and McKinsey don’t recruit at UConn, for an obvious example. Our intellectual and cultural elite come from the top ten schools in the country. It is also our social sorting machine, how we look down on people, like Harvard looks down on Cornell which looks down on Michigan which looks down on Michigan State which looks down on Oconomowoc Community College. From the 1980s to the 2010s, we had a meritocracy of smart. What kind of meritocracy will it be going forward? Or will it be an aristocracy?

I have a lot of readers, which gives me power and influence, but I have nowhere near as much power as a college admissions officer, who can change lives for the better, or destroy them. That is real power. Admissions officers are fallible, but standardized tests are not.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music Recommendation: Anjunadeep 11 – Mixed By Jody Wisternoff and James Grant. Hands down the best compilation ever created. I must have played this nonstop for 60 days in a row when it came out during the pandemic. Pure bliss.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.