Matthew K. Tabor takes to his blog to write an impassioned response to a piece I wrote, backed up by over 250,000 student records on the class of 1999, arguing the SAT and ACT mattered little in college admissions. His evidence? He The New York Daily News found a student who gasp! graduated high school [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'SAT'
Ironic Twist in the SAT Debate
A growing number of top liberal arts colleges, dissatisfied with the SAT, the reliance on a standardized test in admission decisions, and the college rankings culture that feeds it, have opted to make college entrance exams optional. Anyone who’s studied statistics or human behavior could predict the outcome: students with less than stellar SAT scores [...]
Slumdog Ivy Leaguer
Wake Forest University is hosting a conference this week on making the SAT optional for admission, and they invited Daniel Golden to headline. Golden, author of a book called The Price of Admission that documents all the ways children of wealth and privilege are favored in college admissions, was an interesting choice to headline this [...]
Value Added
Colleges and universities distinguish themselves from one another in lots of different ways– scholarly reknown, the size of the endowment, success on the athletic fields, etc. But the most commonly-used measure is probably the “quality” of the freshman class, as measured by standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. Average incoming SAT scores at University [...]
Baylor’s Spending Spree
There’s been fair amount of discussion and derision over Baylor University’s decision to pay already-admitted freshmen to retake the SAT. What’s been less prevalent is an analysis of what they paid and what they got for their money. Here’s what they paid:
- 861 students retook the SAT and earned $300 bookstore credits. Cost: $258,300
- 150 [...]
Baylor, the SATs, and "Merit Aid"
In a move that raises the cynicism and gamemanship bar for college and universities across the land, Baylor University is paying freshmen it has already admitted $300 to re-take the SAT and giving them an additional $1,000 “merit” scholarship if they bump their scores up by 50 points or more. Then it reports their higher [...]
A More Selective Pool of Teachers
ETS released a new research report on teacher quality last week showing that the teacher pool seems to be improving, at least on academic measures. The researchers compared the 1994-1997 and 2002-2005 Praxis test takers and found that the SAT scores and GPAs of teacher candidates have increased from one cohort to the next. Why? [...]
Note to High Performing High Schools: Mind the Gap
On the front page of the Washington Post today, there’s an article about racial achievement gaps in SAT scores at local “high performing” high schools. The gist of the article is that high overall SAT scores at some high schools hide the fact that average scores for African American students at these schools are much [...]
Gender, Race and the SAT
The College Board just released its report on national and state average results from the first-ever cohort of college students (the high-school class of 2006) to take the new SAT, first offered in March 2005, which ditched the old “verbal” section for “critical reading,” added more advanced math content, and added an essay-based writing section.
Most [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman Aldeman's False Fronts is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
03/08/10 | Andrew Rotherham's Eduwonk post on RTT finalists is quoted on Class Struggle.
03/07/10 | Andrew Rotherham is quoted on the success of MATCH in The Times-Picayune.
03/06/10 | Eduwonk's reaction to Ohio's status as a RTT finalist is cited in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
03/05/10 | Andrew Rotherham's reaction to New York's status as a Race to the Top finalist is cited on National Journal.