Examining the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium Exams, Scholastic Aptitude Test, and High School Grade Point Average as Predictors of College Readiness
type: CreativeWork
description: The lack of college readiness in the United States is a critical issue that jeopardizes our economy. The demographic inequality of the crisis, particularly for low-income as well as Black and Latinx students, emerges from systemic problems of race and class in American education and society which suppress students’ educational and economic mobility. As part of the national reform efforts, state-based standardized tests such as the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) were designed to be better aligned with K-12 Common Core standards and provide a more efficient and equitable measure of academic performance and college readiness in middle and high school when compared to traditional measures such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and grade point average (GPA). Although the SBAC test is being used across the nation, there is a large research gap regarding how the SBAC compares with GPA and the SAT for prediction of college readiness and the degree to which it is unbiased by demographic or school variables. Therefore, the research problem of this study was to investigate the predictive power of the 8th-grade and 11th-grade SBAC tests, as compared to GPA, the SAT, curricular intensity, and college aspirations, for college readiness as measured by college enrollment and persistence, and how such predictability may be biased by nonacademic factors of poverty, race, and school size. The purpose of this quantitative, ex post facto study, which was conducted on archived data from a large, urban, and demographically diverse school district in southern California, was to investigate the problem using rigorous statistical analyses of path analysis, discriminant function analysis, and logistic regressions. There were several important findings. Both middle and high school SBAC tests were not reliable predictors of college readiness, despite their intended design, in contrast to high school GPA, SAT, curricular intensity, and college aspirations which tended to stron…
abstract: The lack of college readiness in the United States is a critical issue that jeopardizes our economy. The demographic inequality of the crisis, particularly for low-income as well as Black and Latinx students, emerges from systemic problems of race and class in American education and society which suppress students’ educational and economic mobility. As part of the national reform efforts, state-based standardized tests such as the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) were designed to be better aligned with K-12 Common Core standards and provide a more efficient and equitable measure of academic performance and college readiness in middle and high school when compared to traditional measures such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and grade point average (GPA). Although the SBAC test is being used across the nation, there is a large research gap regarding how the SBAC compares with GPA and the SAT for prediction of college readiness and the degree to which it is unbiased by demographic or school variables. Therefore, the research problem of this study was to investigate the predictive power of the 8th-grade and 11th-grade SBAC tests, as compared to GPA, the SAT, curricular intensity, and college aspirations, for college readiness as measured by college enrollment and persistence, and how such predictability may be biased by nonacademic factors of poverty, race, and school size. The purpose of this quantitative, ex post facto study, which was conducted on archived data from a large, urban, and demographically diverse school district in southern California, was to investigate the problem using rigorous statistical analyses of path analysis, discriminant function analysis, and logistic regressions. There were several important findings. Both middle and high school SBAC tests were not reliable predictors of college readiness, despite their intended design, in contrast to high school GPA, SAT, curricular intensity, and college aspirations which tended to stron…
author: Alexander, Carol Ann
keywords: Assessment Bias, College Enrollment, College Persistence, College Readiness, High School Predictors, Smarter Balanced Assessment, Education
date published: 2022-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:39:59Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University