I am actually familiar with some of the research actually, but thank you for your condescendence.
I didn't mean to imply that the SAT or grades are not predictive of future performance, only that lower socio-economic statuses will correlate to lower SAT grades in the first place, ie your (a) proposal in the second source.
From this same source:
> The SAT-grade relationship is not an artifact of common influences of SES on both test scores and grades
To substantiate my initial comment, test scores are highly predictive yes, but as you just linked, SES is highly predictive of test scores (and this is only for people who get to the damn test). This is the tautological part. High incomes make people test well which lead to jobs with high incomes. But since this correlation is not 100% but merely very high, we can pat ourselves on the back and say hey it's accurate!
Articles that defend the accuracy of the system tend to implicitly defend its legitimacy, which I think is a much more important question than "is SAT indicative of future performance" when considering whether the SAT is useful.
> I didn't mean to imply that the SAT or grades are not predictive of future performance, only that lower socio-economic statuses will correlate to lower SAT grades in the first place, ie your (a) proposal in the second source.
Why then talk about “controlling for SES”? The correlation SES/educational ability very much exists, but why would one want control for SES? The goal is, allegedly, to test scholastic aptitude, so that we can identify students that are likely to succeed at school. If SES correlates with this ability, by controlling for this, all you’ll do is control out the effect.
> High incomes make people test well which lead to jobs with high incomes.
No, there is little evidence that high incomes makes people test well. Here, and in the entire thread, you are committing what is called a “sociologist’s fallacy”. This is from Meehl, P. E. “Nuisance variables and the ex post facto design.”:
> While every sophomore learns that a statistical correlation does not inform us as to the nature of the causality at work (although, except for sampling errors, it does presumably show some kind of causal relation latent to the covariation observed), there has arisen a widespread misconception that we can somehow, in advance, sort nuisance-variables into a class which occurs only at the input side. This is, of course, almost never the case. The usual tendency, found widely among sociologists and quite frequently among psychologists (particularly among those of strong environmentalist persuasion) is to assume sub silentio that there is a set of demographic-type variables, such as social class, domicile, education, and the like, that always operate as nuisance variables to obscure true relationships, and that function primarily as exclusively on the input side from the standpoint of causal analysis. This automatic assumption is often quite unjustified. Example: We study the relationship between some biological or social input variable, such as ethnic or religious background, upon a psychological output variable, such as IQ or achievement. We find that Protestants differ from Catholics or that Whites differ from Blacks. But we find further that the ethnic or religious groups differ in socio-economic class. We conclude, as an immediate inference and almost as a matter of course, that we have to ‘control’ for the socio-economic class variable, in order to find out what is the ‘true’ relationship between the ethnic or religious variable and the psychological output variable. But of course no such immediate inference is defensible, since on certain alternative hypotheses, such as a heavily genetic view of the determiners of social class, the result of such a ‘control’ is to bring about a spurious reduction of unknown magnitude in what is actually a valid difference
This was published over 50 years ago, but nevertheless, this mistake is done over and over in sociological research and discussions.
> Articles that defend the accuracy of the system tend to implicitly defend its legitimacy, which I think is a much more important question (…)
I actually have no idea what you mean by “legitimacy” here.
I didn't mean to imply that the SAT or grades are not predictive of future performance, only that lower socio-economic statuses will correlate to lower SAT grades in the first place, ie your (a) proposal in the second source.
From this same source:
> The SAT-grade relationship is not an artifact of common influences of SES on both test scores and grades
To substantiate my initial comment, test scores are highly predictive yes, but as you just linked, SES is highly predictive of test scores (and this is only for people who get to the damn test). This is the tautological part. High incomes make people test well which lead to jobs with high incomes. But since this correlation is not 100% but merely very high, we can pat ourselves on the back and say hey it's accurate!
Articles that defend the accuracy of the system tend to implicitly defend its legitimacy, which I think is a much more important question than "is SAT indicative of future performance" when considering whether the SAT is useful.