The implication of the “test scores don’t matter” argument is that we have the wrong people staffing virtually every credential-based position. There’s lots of kids with 4.0 GPAs from high school at directional state university getting education degrees. Test scores is what distinguishes those kids from the ones at Stanford. And Stanford is where everyone from Big Tech to Big Banks to Big Law to Big Consulting goes to hire. Who is working at Pfizer or Astra Zeneca doing drug development? It’s the people with high test scores. Every single Supreme Court justice in the last half century got there based on test scores. (The nominee whose test scores led her to a law school ranked outside the top 50, Harriet Miers, has to withdraw because of that.) Warren Buffett got into Wharton based on test scores. Charlie Munger got into Caltech based on his scores on the army’s intelligence test. Bill Gates got an 1590 on the SAT. Even the professors saying test scores don’t matter got where they are because of test scores.
Maybe that’s all true. But it’s quite a remarkable claim that would turn the world as we know it upside down.
If you structured society such that only the top 0.5% of households by income could send their kids to college, you'd find that a lot of your successful entrepreneurs, judges, scientists, etc. went to college and had a high income growing up.
But I don't know that proposing something else, like standardized testing, as an alternative to this would be quite a remarkable claim. You're just saying that the scoring function produces a lot of false negatives.
In your hypothetical, institutions would quickly realize that a bunch of non-college graduates were just as smart as college graduates. Which is actually the public perception in places where jobs are filled based on social status and connections rather than objective metrics.
What I’m saying that the current scoring function appears to match up pretty well with our intuition about who is smart enough to work on Wall Street or at Facebook. At least, these profit-seeking institutions don’t seem to think it would be better for them to shift their hiring from Stanford to kids with 4.1s and lower SATs who went to UCSB instead.
> In your hypothetical, institutions would quickly realize that a bunch of non-college graduates were just as smart as college graduates.
Which would cause those institutions to move away from income as a means of deciding who gets in; much like in institutions now are moving away from standardized testing as a means of deciding who gets in.
> At least, these profit-seeking institutions don’t seem to think it would be better for them to shift their hiring from Stanford to kids with 4.1s and lower SATs who went to UCSB instead.
There's two assumptions here that you may want to reexamine:
1. Profit selling institutions are purely rational at hiring, and only hire based on merit. As in, if you're hired to work at a Wall Street firm, it's not because you went to Harvard; it's because you're smart. Which is very optimistic, to say the least.
2. That people are intrinsically smart or not, and the institution you go to doesn't change that. If test scores didn't correlate at all with merit, you'd still want to hire from Stanford over UCSB; not because the SAT scores are higher at Stanford but because Stanford is a better institution for educating people. So even if the people who go in are the same caliber, the people who come out are different.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing that test scores can measure aptitude. I'm disagreeing with the line of reasoning where we have the following premises:
1. We live in a society where resources are allocated by performance in standardized testing.
2. Having more resources increases the likelihood you're successful.
3. People who are successful have high standardized test scores.
And conclude that standardized test scores are an accurate predictor of future success.
So a test score opens doors. It’s more of a statement about how our society and institutions are structured. That implication says nothing about the quality and acumen of a person once they step through those doors. Test scores do not determine qualities and acumen, only that you meet a standard (acumen and standard is not always one-to-one). All those you named got the opportunity to demonstrate their qualities and acumen because a test score opened a door for them to do so. So I don’t believe test scores have ever mattered to society or institutions other than that: opening a door and not a guarantee of any sort of success once you step through it.
I don't think test scores are a predictor of success, but I do think they are one of the best metrics we have, and actually help poor kids to "make it" to good schools. Rich kids might have access to better teachers, but Math is the same for everyone, a poor kids using materials freely available in a public library can do very well in exams, allowing him to get into an elite school, otherwise only reserved for the elites.
Maybe that’s all true. But it’s quite a remarkable claim that would turn the world as we know it upside down.