[ghaff]

Furthermore...

This was years ago but there's no particular reason I'd expect things to have changed. But basically if you looked at outcomes--I think this included post-uni outcomes like salary--the quantitative measures like SAT score had a lot more predictive value than interview/letters of recommendation/essays/etc.

(The way the one school I'm familiar with used to do things was that basically everyone went on an X-Y graph with X being a normalized quant score and the Y being a normalized everything else score. Everyone up and to the right. No one down and to the left did. Those in the middle band were looked at a bit more carefully.

[chris11]

> the quantitative measures like SAT score had a lot more predictive value than interview/letters of recommendation/essays/etc.

I've also read SAT scores are highly correlated to family income. Family income probably has a huge impact on post university outcomes.

[Robotbeat]

I would imagine the socialization benefits of family income probably massively enhance interview skill and (even more) letters of recommendation as well, no? And for the essay, this seems easiest to fix with wealth as you can hire someone to either write it for you or massively edit it and assist you with it.

Any time someone proposes to get rid of this or that requirement for being correlated to wealth, I'd like to see what the alternative is and see if it's any better.

We want something somewhat meritocratic, where we can tell the difference between natural capability and hard work on the one hand and simply being lucky to be born into wealth on the other... but it's not clear to me that objective measures like the SAT are going to be worse than interviews/letters-of-rec/essays in discerning that.