Thu 11 May 2006
There is a fun discussion about athletics going on at WSO. Good points made all around. One comment surprised me. Nicholas Fersen ‘08 claimed:
Just a little sidenote to add to this conversation. Next year’s incoming tips for the football team have an SAT average of 1405. So the argument that tips are getting into Williams with low academic standards is somewhere between absurd and down right insane. Maybe the Record staff should do their homework before attacking athletes as the cause of all problems at Williams.
Really? Now Fersen plays linebacker, so we can assume that he has good sources on this topic. But 1405 (I am assuming this is math + verbal) would be a shockingly high average for the football tips for the class of 2010.
Why is this “too” high? Don’t forget that the average SATs at Williams is around 1420. The bottom quartile starts at 1340 or so. Traditionally, it has been the case that this bottom quartile is dominated by two broad categories of students: tipped athletes and under-represented minorities. (There might also be some very poor students and some donor children in this area, but their numbers are small.)
If football tips are no longer in the bottom quartile, who is?
I suspect that Fersen might be (unintentionally) wrong. Note that there are many (25? 40?) men in the class of 2010 who played football in high school. (Recall Dick Nesbitt’s description (here and here) of the pool.) Some of these are “tips,” meaning that the football coach highlighted them as high impact players who would not have gotten into Williams if they were on the coach’s list. Some of these are “protects”, meaning students with Williams-caliber academics who might or might not have gotten in without football talent. The rest might try out for the team and might even make it, but they would have been accepted to Williams even without football.
I think that there are around 14 tips for football and 7 protects. There might also be another 10 or 20 football players who are most likely to end up on the rugby team.
I find it surpising that the average for the 14 football tips is 1405. The average for tips and protects might be 1405. The average for every incoming student who played football in high school could easily be 1405.
Recall Nesbitt’s report that the 66 tips had an average SAT score that was 100 points lower than the class as a whole. If the 14 football tips are only 20 points lower, than it is hard to believe that this difference still holds true.
Is Fersen really talking about just the 14 tips? I’ll e-mail him and ask.
UPDATE: Fersen confirmed that the 1405 average referred to the 14 football tips in the class of 2010. Interesting. This would suggest that the 66 tips as a group are much closer than 100 points to the overall average. (I can’t imagine why admissions would have lower standards for others sports.) This also suggests that we will see a non-trivial boost in the overall SAT average at Williams, assuming that other policies (like preferences for poorer students) haven’t changed significantly.
8 Responses to “1405?”
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It is unlikely that a student would know who the “tips” are. Most students wouldn’t understand the difference between “tips”, “protects”, and academic 1’s/2’s who happen to play football. Most likely, his “average” is probably for the entire group of football recruits from all three categories.
Also, using the SAT as the sole barometer is a bit disingenuous. We already know that Williams’ athletes tend to be whiter than the student body as a whole. We also can see from the rosters that Williams recruiting is disproportionately done at private and parochial schools. Both of those factors would tend to push SAT statistics higher, which may or may not be indicative of academic performance in high school.
For example, I’m sure there are many kids from St. Pauls or Choate who finished outside the top of their class academically, but who had very high SATs. For most applicants, high SATs and mediocre academic performance in high school is the absolute kiss of death in admissions.
I put in an UPDATE after hwc’s comment above, but the information seems solid. Why would Fersen’s coach lie to him?
Being white and going to a prep/parochial school does not “push up” one’s SAT score (or at least I have never seen any study about such an effect).
If the members of the football team averaged 100 SAT points above the general student body average, there would continue to be those who advocated elimination of inter-collegiate football. I have a theory about what is at bottom of this hypothetical, but I’m not going to express it because its disclosure would flush out innumerable outraged emotional cripples - making me so damn angry that I would have apoplexy.
David: Being White and attending a prep school has not been studied to my knowledge, but being white and wealthy has. (see here: http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/sat.shtml) While you can argue that these are not the same, I am guessing that most white kids at prep schools are doing pretty well financially. So it would make sense that their SAT’s would be a bit higher.
Grey,
There is much confusion here. The cite you provide can charitably be described as statistically challenged. Do not rely on it for anything that you care about.
More importantly, there is not doubt that the SAT is correlated with things like race and income. Asian men, for example, do well on the math section. Prep school students also do well. But this is, obviously, different from causation.
Consider how it might make sense to claim that attending a prep school does “push up” ones SAT scores. Take 100 8th graders. Randomly assign 50 to the local high school and 50 to Exeter. If, in 12th grade, the 50 at Exeter score significantly better, then it would be fair to say that attending Exeter instead of the local high school caused an increase in SAT scores.
(Although no experiments like this have been done, there is no evidence using observational data that this is true, by the way.)
Note that this makes no sense in terms of race. How would we conduct an equivalent experiment? Take 100 8th grades and randomly assign 50 to be white and 50 to be non-white? It makes no sense.
Now, it is the case that prep school students do better, but the obvious explanation — that smarter students go to prep schools — has never been disproven.
I should also object to HWC, even though he and I are, generally, on the same “side” in the tips debate.
We (and everyone else who studies this stuff) have used SAT scores as a useful measure. There is nothing “disingenuous” about it. It would also be interesting to see what the academic rank of the tips is, but, unless you have information to the contrary, there is no reason to suspect that the 14 tips with an average SAT of 1400 have any different an academic rank than 14 other Williams students with the same average SAT score.
It wasn’t the best site, but it was the first thing that google popped out. (oh google, what would we do without you?)
Your point about correlation and causation is interesting, but in this case, irrelevant. We are discussing whether or not white students from a prep school would be statistically more likely to score higher on the SAT’s than say, White kids at a public school, or minority kids at a prep school. statistically, I think this is probably true. I also think if you controlled for academic performance (grades in HS, grades first year of college) this would still be true.
I doubt this is caused by the teaching at the prep school. I think it has a lot more to do with resources spent on preparing for the test. I’ll look for some good studies on this, Jay Matthews, of the Washington Post and Newsweek, has some interesting thoughts on this (I suspect you don’t like him).
I only know about one of the football tips for the class of 2010. Repeated 10th grade at a presitigious NH boarding school after being suspended from his previous high school for an alcohol infraction. Very high SATs (well above 1500), but a mediocre class rank at his prep school. The kind of kid who would have had ZERO chance of getting into Williams without a tip. As I say, under-performing your SAT score in high school is the kiss of death. Ask all of the kids scoring perfect 1600s these schools love to crow about rejecting.
That is why I would suggest taking hand-picked average SAT stats with a grain of salt.
Will this kid be a positive contributor to the campus community? Maybe. The questions he was most interested in asking as a rising freshman, in a public forum, was how easy it would be for him to buy booze and cocaine.
As to the Sports teams being “whiter” then the college as a whole, that is not the fault of the coaches, at least in football. I know that they heavily try an recruit minority students, but they are highly recruited at many schools and many choose to go else where because Williams is in the middle of nowhere.
Will the kid that HWC is talking about be a “positive contributor” (what is that anyway? sounds like PC BS), no one knows. But athlete or not maybe if the school got rid of this embaressing grade inflation, where the only way to do poorly is to actually attempt to fail, then students would have the proper incentives to put in work, rather then the very skewed set that we have now.
Also, the amount that alcohol is bashed on this forum you’d think it was the devil incarnate. People drink because its fun, not so they can go destroy stuff or not be a “positive contributor”. I know just as many people at Williams, who instead of drinking, sat in there rooms playing computer games, which I think contributes far less to the community. Why don’t we start saying that no introverted people should be allowed in because they might not be “positive contributors”. Drinking also has positive externalites like maybe getting some who is shy to make new friends or strengthening current friendships. The only problem with drinking is that the age has been arbitrarily set at 21, when it should be 18 or 19.
Drugs I am never going to defend.