You can absolutely make a bet on who's more likely to succeed based on a 100 point difference, though. It's not absolute, but it's highly predictive. And the reason the SAT was dropped wasn't because admissions were being forced to blindly accept 620 over 610 (they never were), but so that people who scored hundreds of points below the mean could be admitted (in the pursuit of other institutional goals).
replyWe have decades of data (test score vs grades and degree completion). They should gather it up and calculate the answers.
replyFlip answer: the bucket width should be 2.5 times the score improved of a prep course.
Any working system has to rely on some arbitrary rules. Drawing a line between students who scored 600 and 625 is still infinitely better than drawing it based on the decision-makers' moods.
replyOr, treat 600-625 as a tie, and use a lottery.
replyAs imperfect standardized tests are, they are still more fair and less biased than using arbitrary judgement on extra curriculars
replyBucket to the observed predictive power of the score, resolve ties with a lottery .
replyWould this be fixed buckets? I.e. would you treat 649-650 more predictive than 648-649? Presumably that wouldn't work. I'm sure there's some algorithm that could do this but it seems subtle.
replyObviously, if a school has a cutoff score bucketing is easy, but with excess applicants ordering becomes necessary. I guess this sort of probabilistic score would induce an order for any given student relative to sufficiently superior or inferior applicants.... I'm now kinda curious to figure this problem out. Did not expect an algorithms problem to arise in this thread lol
who uses SAT scores as "potential succeed"??
replyThe original argument for standardized tests was to pick based on how well you would do in university (vs who your parents know).
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