College performance predictions and the SAT

Jesse M Rothstein

Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley

Abstract: The methods used in most SAT validity studies cannot be justified by any sample selection assumptions and are uninformative about the source of the SAT's predictive power. A new omitted variables estimator is proposed; plausibly consistent estimates of the SAT's contribution to predictions of University of California freshman grade point averages are about 20% smaller than the usual methods imply. Moreover, much of the SAT's predictive power is found to derive from its correlation with high school demographic characteristics: The orthogonal portion of SAT scores is notably less predictive of future performance than is the unadjusted score. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: SAT validity; college admissions; sample selection; omitted variables; Statistics; Applied Economics; Econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-07-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (82)

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