Your A student is average, David Blobaum explains:
The most common refrain from parents is that their child “is a good student but a bad test-taker.” This comment reveals a fundamental disconnect between what parents understand about grades from school and standardized test scores.
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In most cases, an alternate explanation is true: Despite having a sky-high GPA in honors classes, the student is actually just an average student.
According to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute Freshman Survey, 86 percent of the surveyed students at BA-granting universities had A-averages in high school. Thus, A-averages are not rare at all. They are, in fact, average.
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The median SAT score is 1020. The median ACT score is 18.
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“SAT and ACT tests are better predictors of Harvard grades than high school grades.”
“Test scores are the single largest predictor of a student’s academic performance at Yale, and this is true over all four years, and it’s true even when we control for every other available variable that we can.”– Mark Dunn, assistant director of admissions at Yale, on the Yale Admissions Podcast
“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.” – Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, quoted by the New York Times (2024)
“SAT scores have significant predictive value for academic achievement over and above other measures such as high school GPA.” – Dartmouth Admissions Research
Dartmouth puts numbers behind its statement: “High school GPA by itself explains 9 percent of the variation” in the first-year GPA of Dartmouth students. An SAT score by itself explains “about 22 percent of the variation.” Thus, at least for Dartmouth students, SAT/ACT scores are about 2.4 times more predictive of academic success than high school grades.
The SAT and ACT are, in fact, the only truly useful part of the status quo school system. Let me dictate, and I will assort the students by sex, class, race, and SAT/ACT-like test performance, attrite the dumb, poach competent men from industry to supercharge the smart, and waste the lives of the youth no longer.
Teachers are incentivized, by bureaucratic fiat, institutional pressure from administration and colleagues and parental social pressure, to construct their instruction and assessments such that any student who reaches proficiency should be between a B and an A.
This makes no sense when we consider that mandatory public education performance data should perfectly reflect the public; i.e. it should mirror a normal distribution. That is until we understand that universal education is actually a giant society sized kabuki theater designed to do three things, none of which it admits to:
1) Provide daycare (Parent benefit)
2) Socialize (Government benefit)
3) Ensure employment (Teacher benefit)
You will notice that students don’t really factor in here.
Phileas, your words cut like a knife.
Well, I am a member of that self-serving order of sophists whose benefit is employment, so I retain an intimate familiarity with the discrepancy between the nominal object and the practical reality of my work. That, and I’m too cynical to lie about it.
I do love history though and being paid to share it, even with those who could care less, is a great blessing.