[majormajor]

Why would one expect socioeconomic factors to do one or both of:

a) influence grades in primary and secondary school

b) influence standardized test scores

but not also do:

c) influence college performance (esp. freshman year when you're least removed from those same effects in HS)?

[xyzzyz]

Not sure what your point is. My point is that controlling for SES is useless in context of the predictive validity of SAT. Regardless of the degree in which socioeconomic factor casually influence test scores and educational outcomes, you get no substantial gain from learning them above what you learn from test scores alone, as long as the goal is to select students who are most likely to learn and succeed at your university.

This means that admission officers who want to learn about SES of candidates in addition to learning their test scores usually either are looking for something else the student’s aptitude for learning and ability to succeed, or are completely unfamiliar with state of the research (this is sadly quite common, and this is often willful ignorance too).

[throwaway09223]

They certainly do all three.

This doesn't mean that SAT scores can't still be similarly predictive across socioeconomic gradients. Both of these things can be true without any inherent conflict.

[majormajor]

Sure, it just means it's a bit of a pointless debate...

Questions that are much more interesting to me are:

* should any level of the education system attempt to correct for underlying socioeconomic factors?

* if so, how? (I would love more discussion about this because it both seems like an extremely difficult problem and because otherwise we waste all our time and energy on non-effective things like removing standardized tests from admissions requirements.)

In the software engineering interview world, for instance, a whole lot of active discussion is spent around interviewing methods. Let's make that bigger! Let's figure out how to get the people who never even make it to the interview stage today a better opportunity.

Otherwise it's like taking two plants, reducing the amount of sunlight one gets to 50% of what the other one gets for several years, then moving them both to a new environment, waiting four more years, and saying "huh, the one that was taller before we moved them 4 years ago is still taller, guess that's a good measurement to use to pick plants, since even controlling for that, the taller ones from the light-limited cohort are also ended up taller than their cohort-mates after the last 4 years!"

[pannSun]

> Questions that are much more interesting to me are

Sure, but it's still worthwhile to point out factually inaccurate articles and deceptive papers. If they want to argue for how the education system should correct socioeconomic factors, they should do so honestly, not by lying to us that tests are useless.

[throwaway09223]

What debate?

The test scores are useful. That's the point. There's nothing to debate.