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Therer are So. Darn. Many. things wrong with this article I don’t know where to start! It fails on logical and statistical grounds in enough places that a full response would be a moderate length paper in itself, so I’ll just address two of the biggest issues here that I think impeach the entire endevor:
1) The last sentence of the Sackett et al. (2012) abstract (the full paper is behind a pay wall) is highly suggestive of the first major issue with this article: “The SES of enrolled students was very similar to that of specific schools’ applicant pools, which suggests that the barrier to college for low-SES students in the United States is a lower rate of entering the college admissions process, rather than exclusion on the part of colleges.” This should tip anyone off to the possibility of a major selection bias at work here.
Consider that the between-school correlation of socio-economic status (SES, i.e. wealth) to SAT scores is rather high, while the between-school correlation of SES with high school GPA is low; and that the within-school SES to SAT correlation is low and similar to both with-school and between-school SES to GPA correlations (Zwick, 2012; and, Mattern, Shaw, & Williams, 2008). Together, these mean that your family’s relative wealth in your community isn’t very predictive of either your GPA or your SAT score, but that your community’s wealth is much more predictive of your SAT scores… but not very predictive of your GPA. To put it even more simply, the smart kids in poor communities do well in school, and the smart kids in rich communities do well in school, but the average SAT score in the rich community is usually much higher than the average in a poor community.
Now combine this with the selection bias hinted at in the quotation above, and consider the following scenario: Chris is from a poor community and gets relatively good grades in school, while Pat is from a rich community and gets relatively good grades in school. They are of equal capability as students. Both kids are at the margin of the admission criteria for Prestige State University based on their grades, so the SAT will be important for them. Chris does well on the SAT compared to others at the poor school, but is below the average for PSU, while Pat also does well compared to others at the rich school… but therefore is above the average for PSU. Pat gets good college application advice at the rich school and applies to PSU. Chris might get some advice (or maybe just looks at PSU’s averages) and doesn’t apply. Pat will go to PSU and Chris will be looking for a low-wage job or going to a community college. Even worse, Chris won’t even show up in PSU’s applicant pool even though the kids were as smart and as qualified as one another before taking the SAT.
While there may be, as you say, “plenty of low-income students who get good scores on the SAT,” there will be systematically fewer (at every given level of capability) who apply to colleges (at every corresponding level of prestige). If you don’t apply, you can’t get in. Contrary to your repeated assertions, this will be due precisely to the influence of the SAT, and skews applications (and thereby admissions) away from people from low-income areas. This brings me to the next, and connected, issue with your article.
2) Let’s address the giant, trumpeting, stampeding elephant in the room: you completely ignore cultural competency and the repeatedly demonstrated and documented FACT that middle class white kids do better on the SAT for reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence or achievement potential (JE Helms, 2006; RO Freedle 2003; and so so so many others – just do a Google Scholar search). In my model above, Chris has a much greater chance of being some shade of brown than Pat does. Again, this is just a demographic fact. For an enormously complex set of reasons, race and class are inextricably intertwined in the United States, and while there are lots of poor white kids out there, there are proportionally many more poor ethnic minorities. These kids are not exposed to the same cultural influences that the middle-class-to-rich kids (who are skewed towards white) are, and they aren’t given the same level of community support or resources either. All in all, this creates a larger set of hurdles to high SAT scores for minority kids, and in turn the SAT creates a convenient filtering mechanism that boots them out of the college track before they even apply. Moreover, that mechanism creates a self-reinforcing cycle, eliminating most of the good students with bad SAT scores from the universities, and thereby eliminating the very people who would decrease the SAT-HSGPA and SAT-CollegeGPA correlations in the applicant samples!
The fact that two middle-aged, white male professors fail to address the relationship between race/culture and SAT scores in their article shouldn’t surprise me, but frankly it does. How in the name of all the gods of statistics do you write about this issue and not even mention race and culture… oh right, it would destroy (or at least seriously weaken) your overall argument.
Don’t even get me started on the IQ section of your article – I was seriously expecting to come across references to “The Bell Curve” with your treatment of it. One thing you say though is very true: the SAT is basically a thinly veiled intelligence test… and they’re both flawed for the same reasons. I’m not saying that either is meaningless, it’s quite the opposite in fact: they are both too laden with meaning to be well understood or used in a fully responsible way. They are both semi-useful parts of the system we have right now, but that’s no excuse for lazy analysis, not searching for better alternatives, or being an apologist for a deeply broken system.
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