Thanks for your response. It seems you have misread my entire article. I am neither a fan or detractor of SAT.
College success depends on more than just entrance scores. As students move from high school to college, the academic effort required doubles or triples. If students don't make this adjustment, all the A's they earned in high school won't save them.
-------------------
In Canada, there are two main requirements to enter a university: grades from high schools and home province. Out-of-province students are at a little disadvantage. A distant third criterion would be students of lower grades but of higher family prominence. It happens, but not much. There might some preference for First Nations people; if so, it is not commonly known.
------------
It what you say is true about SAT not being a major criterion, then I have to ask why go this great expense of administering SAT? In my situation, I and two other administrators were paid $150 each for the day. Then there was the expense of setting up the registrations (we did not do this) and then conveying the scores to the post secondary institutions. SAT might have been a well oiled bureaucratic machine, but it was expensive----especially compared to just using the high school marks.
----------
As an educator, I have seen too often of students getting into college programs with scores lower than what the prerequisites suggested. The failure rate for these students is high. A few make it through, but most fail out when they never really had the skills to find success in the first place.
In my original article, I would like to know the correlation between SAT scores and dropout rates (or graduations, if one wants to be on the positive side). My SAT article was somewhat popular (for me), but no one provided any further insight into this matter. At this point, I don't know what that correlation is. But it's not a huge leap to hypothesize that lower scores means a higher dropout rate.
----------------
I believe that the 5% figure I quoted (from Charles Bastelle) is not a reflection of colleges not wanting to admit African Americans. Rather, I believe it reflects more on poverty stricken neighborhoods, which often mean poorly funded schools in those neighborhoods not being to train youth to attain a good SAT score. African Americans, proportionally speaking, come from these neighborhoods.
----------
My article hinted twice that affirmative action eases white liberal guilt. The USA was chasing the wrong solution for too long as a means to alleviate the imbalance in college admissions/graduations. Other readers seem to have got this arc.
