Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > May > 08 > Entry
The NBA and the SAT
Imagine you were given a chance to put together a pro basketball team for a one-time exhibition between two teams made up of some of the best players in the National Basketball Association. You and an opponent could each pick players from among all NBA rosters.
There’s just one hitch for you. The players on your team must be in the top 10 percent of the league for free throw shooting.
Your opponent choose any players based on whatever criteria I choose.He can build a team or shooters, dribblers, rebounders or defensive wizards. Or he can just go with his gut and try to pick players who will be a good mix and make a great team. In other words he gets to select a team the way managers of sports teams, or any other competitive enterprise for that matter, would actually assemble a winning team.
What would happen? Well, it just so happens that in the NBA, some of the very best players — including many of the 2005 all stars — stink at free throw shooting.
So why would anyone building a basketball team be so focused on one measure of performance — in this example, free throw shooting — that they would be willing to exclude great players who might actually help them win?
They wouldn’t, because to do so would be crazy. And that’s the point of this analogy, a clever lesson about why it may not make sense for colleges to limit admission to only those who can reach a minimum score on the SAT.
I stumbled across this example in an education journal called “Radical Pedagogy,” so perhaps it’s no surprise that Georgia State professor Jonathan Gayles’ lesson is a little out there. Gayles wanted to demonstrate for his students the pitfalls of over-relying on one measure of performance when judging overall performance. So he got creative.
He let his class pick an NBA all star team while adhering to an arbitrary minimum requirement on one measure — their players must be among the league’s top 10 percent in free throw shooting. Gayles’ team had no restrictions. With rosters chosen, the two teams played a video game — in which the outcome is supposed to simulate a real result based on statistics.
As you might guess, Gayles’ team won, dominating five of seven statistical categories in the game. The students’ team bested Gayles on rebounds, and their players made every free throw they shot, but they lost.
What does this exercise tell us about the way colleges, especially elite schools, select their students? Some schools pride themselves on evaluating the whole student, with the SAT score just one of many factors they consider. But the vast majority of schools draw an arbitrary line on the grading scale, often requiring applicants SAT scores be among the very highest in the nation at elite schools, and they won’t even look a student with an SAT score that falls short.
This may relegate the academic version of Shaquille O’Neal — a student limited in test performance but amazingly gifted on other measures — to a lower ranked school and, perhaps, a less effective education.
Interestingly, one of the few extreme talents that will cause a college to overlook a low SAT score is, of course, basketball skill.
What do you think of this analogy and professor Gayles’ class activity?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Testing
Comments
By Mary
May 8, 2006 9:36 PM | Link to this
Faulty analogies and tall people come to mind in this discussion. I do not see a serious correlation to academics and SAT and real college students. Remember basketball is simply a game with an industry attached. Besides, inability to shoot free throws has been an issue on basketball teams (sometimes games are lost because of lousy free throw shooting averages). Then there are comparisons of men’s and women’s styles of playing (women’s teams get higher marks from some men who made careers in basketball). Then we need to define what success really is in the more serious pursuits in life. Is it wealth or is it serious contributions to mankind through jobs well done, children well raised, etc?By Oldprof
May 8, 2006 5:37 PM | Link to this
And here I thought we were reading an entry that would propose ending intercollegiate athletics! It’s long been known that SAT or ACT is only a weak indicator of success at college, and then only for the first year. The greatest predictor of student success: competitivenes, e.g., a stubborn refusal to fail. That’s best indicated, perhaps, by class rank. But I agree with the premise; no single measure is sufficiently predictive. (Open-admissions Community Colleges skip the screening, take everyone, and weed out the underachievers—is that a better plan?)By Dave
May 8, 2006 4:18 PM | Link to this
Argument by analogy is always tricky. Is a SAT score analogous to free-throw percentage, or to scoring average, or to average time spent in the shower after practice? Metrics (like the SAT) can be very useful, but must be used carefully and with thought. And other screening approaches (like interviews) have problems, too.