Thread by @biblioracle

Whenever I see these sorts of tweets, first, I want to know what we're talking about with the word "rigor." Is it the rigor of passing an exam after delivering sandwiches for Jimmy John's until 3am? Because that's the kind of challenge students I'm familiar with face.

https://twitter.com/CaitlinPacific/status/1475578475939446786

This debate about the utility of the SAT/ACT for admissions decisions is tedious because it's the same debate over and over, a debate which misses the fact that the vast majority of students attend schools where their test score is largely irrelevant to the admission decision.

But because we put so much weight on selectivity as a metric for "quality" the most selective schools get the vast majority of resources and attention. They are not representative. CUNY is a far more important driver of economic opportunity than the Ivy League.

For those who want to be better informed on the ramifications of standardized admissions tests, I recommend following @jennthetutor and @akilbello as people who work directly with students and understand the institutional operations of schools.

The idea that making the SAT optional or eliminating it is going to somehow erase our ability to identify worthy and talented students assumes that there is a scarcity of these kinds of students and a primary job of the system is to identify them at the time of admission.

I just can't get on board with that attitude. Students aren't defined by a single test on a single day, a test with many known biases. The work of education is to help the students develop. This is what we claim anyway. The SAT is a barrier to that goal.

Oh, and after recently re-taking the SAT, I can pledge that what's covered in the writing and language test covers is an absolute waste of time next the actual demands that students writers will experience in college. educationalendeavors.substack.com/p/taking-the-s…

I don't know about the relationship between the math SAT and college math these days, but the fact that I've forgotten (or never learned huge swaths of) so much of what's tested hasn't seemed to hold me back. educationalendeavors.substack.com/p/taking-the-m…

I'm consistently amazed at the faith folks who scored well on the SAT/ACT have in its predictive power. I did pretty good on it, which is why I knew it didn't mean much because as a student, in terms of student-like behavior, I was well-below average.

The college admission process primarily rewarded my socio-economic advantages and I knew it. I was a precocious and omnivorous reader because my mom owned a bookstore. This paid off big time on the SAT vocabulary stuff, which made me look like a candidate for elite college.

I had a near perfect score on the PSAT verbal which turned into a National Merit honor and a flood of brochures from selective schools. They knew nothing else about me like the fact that I almost never did homework because it was boring.

From my zip code those selective colleges turned on by my PSAT score probably knew that my parents could afford the tuition, though. It just felt fraudulent the whole time because I knew me and that I wasn't a candidate for those schools.