This is new research, but it’s not a new conclusion. Colleges used standardized tests for decades in their selection process for decades. Not because they were trying to weed out certain races and ethnicities, but because they were trying to select the people with the highest chance of success. From Lauren Boyer of The College Fix via zerohedge.com:
A research team is on the cusp of releasing a new study that may contribute to the discussion about whether standardized test scores should have a place in the college admissions process.
An abstract for the working paper, published on the National Bureau of Economic Research website, states the researchers analyzed the relationship between students’ standardized test scores, their grades in high school, and grades in college.
“Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA, all conditional on students’ race, gender, and socioeconomic status,” the researchers wrote.
Some universities recently began requiring SAT or ACT scores from applicants after dropping the requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some scholars advocated for the testing requirement to be removed permanently – bringing up issues like systemic bias and racial inequality.
But the new research indicates that standardized tests are not biased and may even have the opposite effect.
Lead author Professor John Friedman, who teaches economics at Brown University, shared with The College Fix some of the details of his team’s work.
Regarding the research sample, Friedman said the team used data from first-year students at “multiple Ivy-plus colleges.”
“The choice to look at first year scores was entirely driven by data, in that we were able to collect comparable data on first year grades from our partner institutions but not for longer-term grades,” Friedman explained to The Fix in a recent interview. “We’ve looked at grades in later years of college within individual schools, and the broad pattern (test scores are predictive, high school GPA is not) remains.”
