Are colleges reducing admissions standards to compensate for this? If anything, it sounds like admissions are vastly more competitive today than when I applied 20 years ago because students are more capable.
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Admission score is a bad metric for passing university. Raising it will proportionally push out both the good and the bad. The problems outlined in the article are amplified in higher education, where students have to self-regulate their work, as opposed to lower levels, where you're more "forced."
Taking in the students and letting them fail is more fair. But it's also unfair to decent students if the level of education is dropped to make more students pass.
I doubt it for a few reasons:
- The SAT has been bastardized as a test and no longer effectively measures this stuff
- College admissions have deemphasized the SAT and other standardized tests of reading comprehension
- Elite college admissions is lousy with "consultants" who workshop students' essays to ensure they've got a better chance of admission
That being said, if you were going to find the kids who CAN read, you would probably find them at elite schools.
I doubt that the SATs were ever that effective at screening this sort of thing, at least for the past several decades. They're an aptitude test.
By the time you're graduating secondary school you should be able to demonstrate end-to-end ability in multiple subjects (in something like an AP or an A-Level), which should be a better proxy for doing well in university than something as handwavey as the SAT.
SAT scores track pretty damn well with college success. Thats why schools are quietly reintroducing them as part of admissions since the "no SAT" policy fucked up kids who weren't cutting it.
In the absence of a better standardised test, I don't doubt it. However, I really don't think that the SAT does a good job of testing the kind of longer-form literacy that the OP is talking about. I showed the SAT English component to a British A-level English teacher a few weeks ago, and after reading a dozen questions he was red with rage, shouting about how idiotic it was to ask such asinine questions under such a heavy time pressure.
I guess I sorta can see what you're talking about, but from what I remember, the English section was easy BECAUSE it was so asinine. It was generally obvious how the question was guiding you to the solution.
This specific thing, I don't know one way or the other. But the old SAT was basically an IQ test that happened to be out of 1600.
The top schools can compete for the best students, but below that, not so much, just due to basic demographics--the number of high school grads is dropping.