SAT

I've decided that I need to be posting more of the discussions I have (largely by email) over the course of the day. I yak all day long about things that might be of interest to readers of the Ivey Files, and I need to get over the fact that reproducing things I've written in an email will by necessity offer up writing that is less than polished (although Lord knows that's true for blog postings as well).

So, just today, I was chatting with some people who were commenting on the habit of finance employers to ask job applicants for their SAT scores (as well as LSAT or GMAT scores, as the case may be). On the one hand, we laughed our butts off -- we're in our mid-thirties and can't imagine that a test we took back in, oh, 1989 (!!) could possibly say anything meaningful about us. Can SAT scores say anything meaningful about someone who just graduated from college? Maybe yes, maybe no. Some argued that SAT scores do say something about raw horsepower under the hood, while others argued that good SAT scores just prove you're good at taking the SATs. Either way, to people who aren't routinely dealing with recruiting practices in the the finance world, it seems weird to ask for the scores.

However, if employers are asking for the scores, then employers obviously see some value in that information, and I'm very curious where that value comes from.

From one of my emails:This is, I suspect, also a reflection of the fact that college grades, and college transcripts  as a whole, don't really mean squat [to the interviewer].Unless you have very inside-baseball *and* recent knowledge of a school's grading practices, as well as knowledge of the grading practices and substantive difficulty of individual courses and professors, transcripts really mean nothing. When I look at a transcript, I have no idea whether PHYS 325 is string theory or "Physics for Poets" (as the gut physics class was called at Columbia in my day). And when I was still on the job market, I was bummed that my law school transcript didn't say who taught my Financial Accounting class at the business school -- it was Roman Weil, and that actually means something to some people, but I never got the benefit of that on my transcript.

The uselessness of transcripts also leads to over-reliance on the name brand of the school to signal something about the applicant.We went on to discuss grade inflation more generally, and I recalled a Boston Globe article from the early 2000's about the fact that 91% of Harvard undergraduates had graduated with honors that year. (The rest of the ivies are pretty inflationary too, so I'm not just picking on Harvard, although it has seemed to be the worst offender.)

So I throw that out there, because transcripts are so unhelpful not just in the job hiring process, but also in the graduate school admissions process.  When applicants complain about the seeming over-reliance on standardized test scores, understand that most transcript are in fact very, very hard to interpret in any meaningful way.

And another article in which I discuss what I perceive as one of the downsides of conventional college rankings: that they focus on and try to measure the quality of incoming freshmen (SAT scores etc.) rather than the quality of education they receive at their respective colleges or the value added by those colleges. Basically, it's an input vs. output argument. I'm not the first or only person to make it (the Spellings Commission has been grappling with the output side of the equation for a while now), but it's something to keep in mind as you use rankings to help you think about different schools, whether at the college or the graduate school level.

Learned about this cool new test prep service based in NYC -- it promises a "holistic" approach to test prep, so you're not just learning how to ace the test (SAT, GMAT, LSAT, etc.), but also learning how to tackle your test anxiety and stress using tools like hypnosis. I haven't ever tried a holistic approach to test prep, but given the number of applicants I hear from who feel absolutely crippled by their test anxiety, I thought I'd share it with you here. Apparently the founder (Bara Sapir) also has a 5-CD course coming out.

More info here.

I received an interesting question recently from Nick, instructor at Mentor Test Prep in DC:

Several LSAT students have asked me what sort of discount an LSAT score that is won under accommodated testing conditions (usually extra time) is given in the minds of law school admissions officers.

I've told most of them that you likely won't hear it from the lips of admissions officers, but I imagine there would be a not-insubstantial discounting of that score, given the implications for the student's ability to excel under the strict timing requirements of law school exams and later practice.

Would you care to tackle that one?  I'm operating on pure gut instinct, and I'd like to be able to speak with some measure of authority on this matter.

This is a controversial topic, and I’m sure I’ll be receiving some hate mail in response, but here goes.

First: As an applicant, purely for admissions purposes, you're likely better off applying with a higher accommodated score than a lower unaccommodated one. (For human development purposes, though, I agree with Paragon to Pieces that accommodations can have a corrupting effect.) Law schools care an inordinate amount about the numbers, no matter what they say publicly. They don’t have to report accommodated scores to the ABA (and by extension to US News), but even so, higher numbers are always better. What an applicant has to worry about is how he stacks up with his higher accommodated number against someone with the same unaccommodated number. Better to be in that particular horse race, though, than to be outside of striking distance because of a lower number.

Second: Plenty of admissions officers are skeptical about accommodations for learning disabilities. They won't say that, but it's true. LSAC might accommodate someone who has trouble “processing information quickly” (or some variation on that theme), and law schools might accommodate such a person in the classroom. The real world won’t, however, and I worry – and plenty of admissions officers worry – about how people who lack skills that are fundamental to practicing law are going to do when they’re outside of the protective cocoon of law school.

Third: Admissions officers generally don’t like to read the reports that explain what the disability is, or what the specific accommodations were. All they look at is the asterisk next to the LSAT score designating it as accommodated. There are universities whose in-house counsel won’t even let admissions officers read the underlying reports. Why? Because knowing what the disability is opens admissions officers up to lawsuits under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Universities prefer to live in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell regime.

Fourth: What all that means for applicants is that if your disability is a physical one (rather than a learning disability), it’s in your interest to write an addendum explaining the nature of the disability. Someone who’s in a wheelchair is still going to have an easier time practicing law than someone who has trouble processing words quickly. If your disability is a learning disability, keep your mouth shut. Do not volunteer any information about the disability; just take the upside of the higher score, and the upside of don’t-ask-don’t-tell.

Fifth: This whole issue is likely to go the way of the dodo. As a result of lawsuits (naturally), neither the GMAT, the GRE, nor the SAT designates scores as accommodated anymore. The days of asterisked LSAT scores have to be numbered. See here, here, and here.

More Ivey Files postings on this issue here and here.

Interesting posting at blog 'Number 2 Pencil' here. (Her "About Me" page is interesting too.)

Article by an attorney who specializes in accommodations issues here.

Article in favor of non-designated scores here.