Thread by @JonBoeckenstedt

Thread: This got a little crazy, and it's only been 18 hours. It's still going strong. Some observations:

I stopped trying to ❤️or reply to responses. It's impossible to keep up. So this will have to do: A mass reply-to-all, if you will.

Beyond that, there are a dozen side conversations happening, and I'm not going to get involved in the arguments, no matter how right one side is

I'm glad this touched a nerve with a lot of people. It was intended to (just maybe not so many?)

We in admissions never used to be the subject of much academic scrutiny; now the research appears to be non-stop. That's both good and bad, of course.

What's good is sunshine.

What's bad is that so many researchers have never worked in admissions, and often times don't even talk to admissions professionals, or if they do, they stop at the offices of @Stanvard which isn't exactly reality.

What's worse is that a lot of people with a lot of self-image or self-worth wrapped up in a decades-old test score like tests. Not surprising, of course.

Here's what I know from almost 40 years of doing this, AND from reading the research:

Test scores are not worthless. They measure some intellectual skill, but whether that skill is important in college is debatable.

They also don't measure things almost all of us would consider important for people to be successful.

They vary strongly with ethnicity and income

The chart I included showed what message gets sent when one university admissions officer says--publicly--we like a 33, but we LOVE a 34.

It says, "that's who's welcomed here." Look at who is included in those scores. Not a lot of low-income students.

The tests were designed to help high rejective colleges find the worthiest of the unwashed masses.

Does that sound familiar? "We need the SAT to find out who in these poorly-resourced high schools is actually smart."

I suppose it's their right to use it that way (if they're private." If they're public? This is what UC Regent Lark Park said during the hearings about the SAT requirements. It's profoundly good:

Are we just here to take the best and turn them into graduates? Or are we here to change lives?

If you use the SAT to allocate admissions slots, you should consider what you're saying:

You're saying that the only ones who deserve a college degree of the type you're awarding are the students who've already been advantaged most of their lives.

Or the lucky ones who hit the SAT lottery despite the odds.

Read that again.

So, to new followers (lots of them) welcome.

You might want to read about my Twitter approach. Especially the second-to-last bullet point.

jonboeckenstedt.com/twitter.html

To everyone (mostly law professors today, for some odd reason) who love the SAT, keep on lovin' it. It's like the McRib, so enjoy it while you can.

That's it for today. Only people I follow can reply to this thread, because I'm going to cook dinner and check out PBS Masterpiece, as is our habit on Sunday night.

No more trolls for me today.

As Ringo says,

Oh, and #EMTalk