Vanessa averaged A's in high school but tested a 22 on the ACT: she was the top of her class, but her class was very far behind the students in the rest of the country. Her high school was clearly ineffective and set her up for failure on her first test. Good for her for sticking with it and working through/around/with a terribly unequal system that disadvantaged her from the start.
Perhaps instead of an SAT or an ACT, there should be a test where different colleges contribute questions that are representative of intro level classes at the school. Questions would progress from relatively easy (large state school questions) to more complex, esoteric questions that would show up for the more selective, private school caliber students.
This would overcome an important informational friction: high school students don't see college-level test questions until they're enrolled and sitting in class, with the test in front of them. If you are going to make a $200k investment, you should have as much information as possible about your chances of success before signing on the dotted line.
Wow, did you really just say that state schools are easy, while private school are complex, and then use the phrase "private school caliber students" to punctuate that judgment?
I went to a private college. I am not better than my friends who went to state schools.
My charitable interpretation is that the OP is suggesting that large state schools might choose questions from broad, comprehensive body of material, to determine general aptitude. A liberal arts college might select more narrow or field-specific questions that would improve the resolution of the test for specific subjects.
It's not even that any person is better than another... Classes at elite public schools like Berkeley, UCLA, UMich, etc. are more demanding than at any but a few private colleges.
And it isn't really fair to paint with even this broad a brush. The fact is that large public universities generally have a broader charter than small, elite private schools. This is a factor of how they're governed on the one hand (things like mandating x% of students are admitted from in-state, or enforcing affirmative action), and the fact that they [usually] have to provide a reasonably comprehensive set of study options on the other. I went to an "elite" state school and studied history & comparative religion. My wife went to a small private women's college (~750 students) and studied biology. The resources available at my uni, which has a $2b/yr operating budget, were orders of magnitude better than hers, but the education I received was far less personal and -- again speaking in generalities -- not as good as what she received with the small class sizes and personal tutelage from her professors.
I was speaking in general terms because I did not want to pick out specific schools that are considered "better" and more academically rigorous than others. I simply wanted to acknowledge that the average freshman at Harvard or Williams probably sees a harder test than her counterpart at Ohio State. The price and prestige of a school are not always good indicators of quality, but I am very confident that selective schools that receive the top students have curricula to challenge those students. There are certainly exceptions: I go to a private university that is leagues behind some of the top public institutions: Berkeley, UCLA, UMich (among others) provide excellent educations, and they are much more academically rigorous than my private institution and many like it.
I am not saying that students who go to a private college are "better" or more likely to succeed. My point is that more selective (and generally private) schools are accustomed to receiving students that have been groomed for academic success throughout high school, and thus the bar for academic rigor starts out at a higher level. The crux of my original comment was to propose a solution for identifying just how high the bar is set on that first batch of exams, to see if you are ready. Knowing what is coming would prevent the overwhelming feeling of depression and "not belonging" that comes with failing a test in a new, scary environment. My point was somewhat obscured and vague, so thank you for challenging me to clarify.
As a rising senior in college, this is just a personal observation derived from my choices and conversations I have had with friends.
Do you not think the SAT/ACT work well for measuring aptitude? Quite a bit of research has gone into these tests, although the organizations behind these tests are not very forthcoming about what they measure (for example, the FAQ on the ACT’s website claims that the ACT is an “achievement” test and the SAT is an “aptitude” test, which is a bunch of crap, since they’ve both been shown to be highly g-loaded and are pretty similar tests). Unfortunately, the College Board is yet again making changes to the SAT, presumably for political reasons (e.g., no longer asking questions about “obscure” vocab words) and won’t really have the data to know how these changes affect the test until they’ve been giving it for several years, so that sort undermines my confidence in the groups behind these exams, and/or makes me think that they’re useful only because it’s apparently pretty difficult to make a test with absolutely no correlation with aptitude, despite the political factors at play, not because they actually have a coherent model of what they’re trying to measure and how to do it.
Perhaps instead of an SAT or an ACT, there should be a test where different colleges contribute questions that are representative of intro level classes at the school. Questions would progress from relatively easy (large state school questions) to more complex, esoteric questions that would show up for the more selective, private school caliber students.
This would overcome an important informational friction: high school students don't see college-level test questions until they're enrolled and sitting in class, with the test in front of them. If you are going to make a $200k investment, you should have as much information as possible about your chances of success before signing on the dotted line.