Does Socioeconomic Status Explain the Relationship Between Admissions Tests and Post-Secondary Academic Performance?

Critics of educational admissions tests assert that tests measure nothing more than socioeconomic status (SES) and that their apparent validity in predicting academic performance is an artifact of SES. The authors examined multiple large data sets containing data on admissions and related tests, SES, and grades showing that (a) SES is related to test scores (r = .42 among the population of SAT takers), (b) test scores are predictive of academic performance, and (c) statistically controlling for SES reduces the estimated test-grade correlation from r = .47 to r = .44. Thus, the vast majority of the test-academic performance relationship was independent of SES: The authors concluded that the test-grade relationship is not an artifact of common influences of SES on both test scores and grades.