Reality-Phobes and the SAT

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I took the SAT in 1979. Like most of my classmates, I didn’t do any prep work. Kaplan and other test-prep companies weren’t a big thing back then, and the College Board hadn’t been forced yet to publish copies of previous SATs (those very valuable prep tools finally became available in either 1980 or 1981). I just got up early one Saturday morning and went to my high school gym to take the test.

I did okay on the test. My math score was in the low 600s (I was competent at algebra) and my verbal score was in the high 400s (I wasn’t a reader in my youth). This put my composite score around 1100, which was right around the 80th percentile of all SAT test-takers that year.

Because I had a decent math score, the University of Buffalo, which was known primarily for engineering, took pity on me and accepted my application. I wish it hadn’t. I was neither cognitively nor emotionally ready for college. And this deficiency on my part became more glaring the more I hobnobbed with more accomplished peers (i.e., fellow students who had SAT scores in the 1200 and 1300s).

The Differences Between an 1100 SAT Score and a 1300 SAT Score

You wouldn’t think there would be a huge difference academically speaking between someone who scored around 1100 on the SAT and someone who scored around 1300 on the SAT. But a 200-point beat is equivalent to a standard deviation, and in the world of psychometrics, being one standard deviation below one’s peers is a severe disadvantage. Here are four examples of how that disadvantage played out:

1. Thirteen-hundred scorers were cognitively sharper than I. A math or science concept that took them an hour to grasp would take me four hours to grasp.
2. Thirteen-hundred scorers were far more disciplined than I. They could spend hours in the library poring over a calculus or organic chemistry textbook. I couldn’t spend 20 minutes poring over anything that dense.
3. Thirteen-hundred scorers had far more sophisticated non-academic interests than I. When my thirteen-hundred-scoring friends weren’t studying or working, which was rare, they would typically amuse themselves by engaging in something mentally stimulating. Two such fellows, for instance, bought a 1961 Corvair and spent several semesters restoring that clanking, “unsafe at any speed” monstrosity in their spare time.* Another such fellow was frequently tinkering with electronics, building everything from amplifiers to ham radios. And if my thirteen-hundred-scoring buddies weren’t dirtying their hands with cars or electronics, they were commonly playing Risk or reading Popular Mechanics. What was I doing when I wasn’t studying or working, which was commonplace? Sleeping. Drinking beer. Watching television.
4. Finally, thirteen-hundred scorers had a strong affinity for hard academic programs. Every thirteen-hundred scorer I knew was either majoring in engineering or pre-law or pre-med. I flirted with being an accounting major for a semester and quickly discovered that that major would require way too much work for my delicate constitution. I decided to become a sociology major instead.

* Quick aside: My car-restoring buddies never got around to fully restoring that 1961 Corvair. The cost of authentic parts was just too dear for them. They eventually sold the Corvair for a small profit to a restorer with far deeper pockets. Prior to the sale, though, they did manage to get the Corvair running. And the first time they were able to wake the Corvair’s engine from its slumber, they turned on the Corvair’s radio to see if it was working. It was. And the song crackling from the speakers was non-other than Runaround Sue from Dion and The Belmonts—the number one song of 1961. Yes, there is a God.

Our Woke Overlords War on Reality

I think the SAT is a wonderful tool for separating the cognitive elite from the cognitive dross and for separating the industrious from the lazy. My math score on the SAT indicated competence and my verbal score indicated laziness. In other words, the SAT nailed it. I definitely had potential, but I was far too lazy to ever realize that potential. Laziness plus slightly above average intelligence does not equal success in education that is truly higher. My five years at the University of Buffalo were thus an utter waste of time and money.

Our woke overlords, however, aren’t fans of the SAT. They see it as a tool of “white supremacy,” a way to keep black and brown bodies out of elite colleges. But does this viewpoint jive with reality? I’ll answer this by critiquing an anti-SAT article I came across last week.

The article in question was written by Erin Einhorn and it explores the growing trend of colleges going test-optional and no longer requiring the SAT (here’s the link). The article’s main arguments favoring the demise of the SAT (and the ACT, for that matter), and my response to those arguments, are as follows:

Article: [Hilary Cabrera Orozco], the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, and a nearly straight-A student, had her heart set on attending Cornell University, the elite campus in upstate New York where her older cousin was already enrolled…But her SAT scores were discouragingly low.

Me: Grade inflation is the way the education-industrial complex makes its customers more compliant. Just hand out a lot more Bs and As. Onerous school taxes are much more palatable when all of the district’s students are “above average.” The SAT is an excellent antidote to such shenanigans.

Article: I worked hard throughout all my years in high school [lamented Cabrera Orozco], and then one test will determine if I’m good enough for a school. I feel like that’s kind of unfair.

Me: I worked hard throughout all my years in high school to become a very good running back. But no D1 football program recruited me because I ran a 4.9 forty-yard dash rather than a 4.5 forty-yard dash. Is it fair that that one crummy speed test determined my fitness for D1 football?

Article: Test-optional and test-blind admissions had begun to gain steam before the pandemic, with proponents arguing that tests hurt the odds of applicants who have traditionally not done as well on them, including students whose first language isn’t English, students whose parents didn’t go to college, Black and Hispanic students, immigrant students and students whose families can’t afford expensive test prep programs.

Me: The SAT is a glorified algebra and reading exam. You don’t need expensive test prep to do well on it. You just need to get good at algebra and be a reader, and the stuff you need to be accomplished at algebra and reading (i.e., books, Khan Academy, previous SATs, etc.) aren’t expensive. How is it that Asian-Americans don’t have a problem with the SAT? Instead of griping, maybe all those “who have traditionally not done as well” on the SAT should turn to Asian-Americans and copy their study habits.

Article: The effects [of going test-optional] were immediate, [noted Jon Burdick, the vice provost for enrollment at Cornell]. Like many other colleges and universities, Cornell was inundated with applications—roughly 71,000 compared to 50,000 in a typical year…And the new applications—particularly those that arrived without test scores attached—were far more likely to come from “students that have felt historically excluded,” Burdick said. 

Me: How did Mr. Burdick know that any of the students who submitted applications without test scores “felt historically excluded”? Was Mr. Burdick projecting? And why is Mr. Burdick even introducing such an inflammatory word into the conversation? No college is denying admission to any “oppressed minority” who meets or exceeds the median SAT score of its incoming class. Being out-competed doesn’t equate to “exclusion.” The NFL and NBA, for instance, aren’t “excluding” white, Hispanic, and Asian players. White, Hispanic, and Asian players are just being out-competed by black players.

Article: “If I had to include my score, I wouldn’t have applied to the schools I applied to,” said Kate Hidalgo, 19, who said her immigrant family in Elmsford, New York, also in Westchester, didn’t know that she could start taking and preparing for the SAT in the ninth grade to boost her score. “I knew I had the potential, but I didn’t have the resources that other people had.”

Me: We’re doing an amazing job of producing another generation of excuse-makers. Just because Miss Hidalgo “didn’t have the resources” of more wealthy peers doesn’t mean she didn’t have all the resources she needed to do well on the SAT. The Khan Academy is free. Libraries are free. From the time she was cognitively ready for algebra and more challenging reads—roughly the 9th grade—no one was stopping her from answering 20 algebra questions per day and reading an acclaimed novel for an hour per day.

Article: Research on colleges that went test-optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds and do about as well in their classes once they arrive as peers who did submit test scores.

Me: The claim that non-submitter students do “about as well in their classes” as submitter students do strikes me as rather weaselly. Were the non-submitter SAT scores comparable to submitter SAT scores? And if they weren’t—if non-submitter SATs scores were substantially below submitter SAT scores, were non-submitter students pursuing less-challenging majors than submitter students? After all, I was doing just as well in my phony-baloney sociology classes as my better SAT-scoring peers were doing in their engineering classes.

Article: The University of Chicago shifted to test-optional admissions in 2018 as a way of expanding diversity and has been thrilled with the results, said Veronica Hauad, the deputy director of admissions. The current class of freshmen has 56 percent more Black students, 26 percent more Hispanic and Latino students, 33 percent more rural students, and 36 percent more first-generation students than the last class that enrolled before the policy change.

Me: How many colleges that go test-optional find that their enrollment of black and Hispanic students goes down? I suspect that this is very rare. And if that’s the case, isn’t the test-optional policy just a means of providing moral cover for those college admission officers who want to act on their anti-white, anti-Asian prejudices?

Article: “We’d be fooling ourselves to think that this one decision or one trend is going to be the game-changer that addresses years of systemic inequity in admissions,” [said Craig Robinson, CEO of College Possible], but added that dropping test scores is a good start. 

Me: Ah, yes, more inflammatory language. Just because some groups don’t do as well as other groups doesn’t mean something nefarious is going on. Would Mr. Robinson refer to the severe underrepresentation of white players in the NFL and NBA for the past 50 years as “systemic inequity”?

Final Thoughts

Our woke overlords are reality-phobes. They’re doing everything they can to erode this country’s grip on reality.

A few weeks ago, I presented a stark example of this irrationality: “transgenderism.” Our woke overlords not only insist that a guy in a dress taking estrogen injections is as much a woman as a biological woman but they also insist that you’re a knuckle-dragging bigot if you don’t submit to this twisted fantasy.

And now we have another stark example of this irrationality: the war on the SAT. According to our woke overlords, the people who design the SAT are utter morons. Those who score 900 on the SAT are just as capable of flourishing in the computer science program at MIT as those who score 1500 on the SAT. As far as our woke overlords are concerned, the only reason the SAT exists is to sustain “white supremacy.” Just how a test that is dominated by Asians more than whites sustains “white supremacy” is a mystery to any rational person. But believe me, our woke overlords have a peer-reviewed study from researchers at some well-respected university that explains away this inconvenient truth. Asians aren’t really people of color—they’re white adjacent or something.

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Is the SAT a great way to tell if one is truly ready for higher education (i.e., succeeding in hard majors such as physics and chemical engineering as opposed to fluff majors such as sociology and journalism)? Or is the SAT just a sinister way to curtail the advancement of blacks, Hispanics, and the whole lengthy cacophony of “marginalized” people being “systematically” abused in the United States of Oppression? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.