>Rich students don't need to game anything. They simply get admitted because their family name is on a building.
The mean parental income for Ivy League students is 170k, which is above middle class, but not Bezos-level rich.
What is considered to be rich is a huge spectrum. The difference between 7 figure rich vs. 9 figure rich..is up to a factor of 1000. Those whose parents can donate enough to be commemorated on a building, is an outlier even for the rich. Unless your parents are dynastically rich, being rich is not that much of an advantage for admissions.
> instead to guarantee a standard distribution of scores
Which is precisely what you want in an assessment test. Any assessment test.
You only want a normal distribution if the quality under assessment is normally distributed, but you do want a test where the worst candidate does better than chance, and exactly one candidate gets a perfect score. That's an ideal which is only approximated, but it is the ideal.
For context I graduated high school in the late nighties (I took the paper/scantron test).
At the time, the SAT was purported to provide a score that predict ability to perform academically at higher learning institutions.
Along with other factors such as GPA, and participation in extra curricular activities, a school could reasonably determine how well a student would do.
In practice, the normal distribution for scores correlated with the distribution of college performance. It was a reasonable predictor of success, but it did penalize students from certain backgrounds.
Because the test was devised by psychologists and statisticians, uncovering the pattern to the types of questions and the expected answered allowed test prep people to devise tricks to improve scores beyond the expected deviation.
Your first post claims it isn't a test of scholastic aptitude, and then this one says that it does predict scholastic success, and what could reliably predict scholastic success other than a test of scholastic aptitude?
Sure, a big donation by the student's dad, but that's a known quantity. I took the same SAT you did if it matters.
Which certain backgrounds are you referring to? I'd ask you for the references to show the supposed boost that test prep gives to SAT scores, but then I'd have to find the papers that fail to reproduce it...
When I took the SAT it was only 1600 (pre 2400), and SAT prep did in fact help scores significantly.
Back than, the test was designed not for scholastic aptitude (as it's name suggests) but instead to guarantee a standard distribution of scores.
It's been a long time since I cared about the SAT's so I assume once the word got out that the test could be gamed, the people behind it updated it.
> It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT.
Rich students don't need to game anything. They simply get admitted because their family name is on a building.