It's not sufficient that a metric be objective. The student's astrological sign is objective. But it's not a useful measure of college readiness.
Standardized test scores do very little to predict college success when controlling for other variables. And they're trivial to game.
They're a relic of back when people believed in IQ tests were useful selection criteria. Maybe there will be standardized tests in the future that are more useful, but we don't have those yet.
Yes of course it's in dispute. It's so dominant a dispute in intelligence research that it's hard to imagine anyone being familiar with research on IQ and not knowing that it's in dispute.
IQ tests are maybe ok at doing population-level correlations, but not at predicting the success of any given individual. Tons of things are correlated with intelligence, and IQ has the virtue that it's easy to measure. So it has uses for things like research studies.
But as an actual filter when you care about performance it's not great. Things like high school GPA are easier to measure and more predictive of college success.
standardized test scores, that is to say IQ test scores, are by far the strongest predictors of success available in any domain of the social sciences; nothing comes close, not even wealth. obviously high scores are no guarantee of anything, but there is nothing else that compares. to disregard them is to abandon the pretense of objectivity for nepotism.
>OP's point was "This sucks, they're doing away with objective criteria."
Actually, standardized testing does not represent objective criteria for a number of reasons, so that's an incorrect assumption.
But, my point was why do we also just assume that it "sucks" to do away with it? Where's the evidence that they are effective criteria?
If we're demanding proof that they are not effective, then it's fair to question how we established they are effective in the first place. Else, it's really just a default assumption that represents a positive assertion (i.e. an unsubstantiated claim).
I've been on HN for several years. The quality was once much higher than it is now, but HNers have always been willing to call out posturing and logical holes.
>You have absolutely nothing to contribute but useless rhetoric. I asked for sources to whomever I responded to,..
Right. And if you already agreed with SquishyPanda's statement, you would not have requested a source. So, I just asked you to source why you believe what you believe. Why is that any different? In fact, that answer would add more to the thread.
I mean, if you believe standardized tests are valid for the stated purposes, then that's the positive assertion. Have you questioned it?
If not, then why not? If so, then what did you conclude and on what evidence? Please share.
>Just don't waste my time with these pointless comments of yours.
To be fair, I asked you for a source, just as you did of someone else. You wasted your own time with your unsolicited rant.
This is so dangerously drunk on Kool Aid, I can barely manage to reply. The SAT was begun in the first place to even out the different schools people came from so that elite schools couldn't just slide people in, or due to grade inflation, or whatever (and race!)
You make a distinction without a difference in this case, and what other variables are you controlling for? Class rank? That can't be gamed, you think? Rich people will always game the system, whatever it is. In many cases, the alternatives are AP exams, which aren't even available in all schools.
Standardized test scores do very little to predict college success when controlling for other variables. And they're trivial to game.
They're a relic of back when people believed in IQ tests were useful selection criteria. Maybe there will be standardized tests in the future that are more useful, but we don't have those yet.