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Being poor will help your SAT score
greenblood
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https://www.columbian.com/news/2019/jan/28/2-changes-coming-to-wiaa-classifications-in-2020/
Several elite schools have dropped the SAT as a requirement. Some did a long time ago. But recently the University of Chicago, of all places, joined their ranks. They are fighting to remain relevant.
One little secret in educational circles is that the SAT is written for one particular paradigm: the New England boarding school student. Those kids do better on that test than pretty much every demographic, and by a margin.
I have not read them, but I've read reports of the studies that show the #1 predictor of who well you'll do in college is HS GPA coupled with rigor of HS curriculum. Take hard classes, and do well in them, and you won't find college to be much of a challenge. My understanding is that the SAT and ACT are not good predictors in that high scoring and low scoring kids are all over the place in their college performance. But kids who took a heavy course load in HS and did well tend to do well. Shocking result.
This escalated quickly
One could argue that the academic barriers to entry to those schools makes that group of students a skewed sample. On many variables, they probably are.
I just know that I wasn't tasked in HS with analyzing obscure Virginia Wolf essays and passages to the same extent my kids were, and they all did better than I did on the SATs and ACTs.
Learn something new every day.
And boarding schools have plenty of Jews and Asians. I guess you didn't know that.
A little research, which I hear you're good at, will reveal the history of the College Board goes back a long way and associations with NE boarding schools had much to do with its creation.
Some say they haven't strayed very far from their origins.
You can go to the websites of various prestigious New England Prep Schools-- representing a very small population--and see that their standardized test averages are much higher than the averages of any huge racial demographic, like Asians, to use your example.
Today? Yes. Lots of Jews, lots of Asians.
I assumed you brought that up because that demographic does well on standardized tests. At any rate, I didn't say that only NE boarding school kids do well on those tests, so it doesn't matter.
But boarding school group almost uniformly does do well on those tests, and a lot of people who look at these things cite the classical style of education they receive at those schools as one reason for this, since that kind of preparation helps on the tests.
Kids from all over go get coaching and do all manner of other things to give them a leg up. It's not the only way.
Again, The College Board is fighting for their lives. The University of Chicago dropping the requirement is a watershed event.
history of the College Board goes back a long way and associations with NE boarding schools had much to do with its creation.
One little secret in educational circles is that the SAT is written for one particular paradigm: the New England boarding school student. Those kids do better on that test than pretty much every demographic, and by a margin.
I don't doubt that boarding schools kids do better on the SAT than your average High School student.
But Jews and Asians, historically not the typical NE boarding school student, have been out performing everyone else on the SAT for many years now.
Jews and Asians have done well on the test by going out and getting the kind of education one needs to do well on the test, along with coaching prep and basically studying the test.
The basic, non-categorical, assertion is that for those who aren't normally exposed to that kind of education have to go out and make up for it some other way. In Seattle, if you attend Lakeside, you are getting an education that was more or less modeled after what you get at Phillips Exeter, and although those kids also do prep and all that, the baseline curriculum prepares them for the exam. If you go to Rainier Beach, not so much, and you're going to have to do more to mimic the kind of exposure that lends to doing well on the test.