Comment by jamjam on American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive · 2025-04-08T02:59:08.227Z · LW · GW

Why are we equating high test scores with "high achieving students" 1-1? While the correlation is undeniable, it feels overly simplistic to say "there are 19,000 top scoring students on the SAT/ACT,  these are the students who 'deserve' the available 12,000 seats" and make your claim from there. The strongest refutation of this is the simple fact that the difference between two scores can be pure chance, which matters more the closer you are to a perfect score.

 So if you suppose that the same proportion of ACT takers who score a 35 or 36 (together 0.895%) would achieve a 1540 on the SAT, then that’s roughly 34,000 students. If there’s an intermediate score threshold of 1550 or 1560 that represents the top 0.5% of students, then about 19,000 students who graduate each year meet that bar.

If the difference between students receiving a 1540 and a 1560 can be that student A guessed between two remaining choices correctly, and student B guessed incorrectly, ^[1] then is it fair to drop the pool of those "qualified" from 34,000 to 19,000 based on this 20 point gap? You also have to consider indirect luck, where student A encounters an obscure question type that they happened to have encountered previously and can therefore solve trivially, while student B had not. There are also obvious socioeconomic factors, such as studying with incredibly expensive private tutors consistently increasing score, time investment to make up the gap between a 1400 and a 1600 being high (children from economically struggling families often have to work, take care of family, or have other required responsibilities that reduce available time), and even availability of direct resources (I used a 300 dollar calculator on the SAT that could solve algebra natively, it literally handed out the answers to multiple questions and helped greatly on others. This was explicitly permitted). I strongly agree that the admissions system is greatly flawed, but in my view this post failed to tackle the problems with the nuance they need. The goal of admissions is (ideally) to give the limited space to the people who deserve it, but its incredibly difficult to agree what parameters define a deserving student, much less a fair and realistically implementable method to measure those parameters. Despite how much I hate the current admissions system, I believe basing admission decisions solely on exam scores and grades would be a step away from the goal of fairness. 

1. ^{^}

   Which it can, due to the way the SAT sections are weighted a single mistake on certain questions can dock 20 full points, and conversely you can get a 1600 with 1 or sometimes 2 incorrect answers