Hopefully you will find the time to give me some more information, because you apparently have substantial knowledge about something here and it is important enough for you to mention it. That is a rarity, so I like to soak up whatever knowledge I can find when that happens.

Given that, I can only try to glean from the most salient points of your comment what is going on.

The first tipoff was your term "defenders". Gosh, I wasn't even aware there were attackers! I want to make sure I don't get labeled as a "defender", because that is definitely not what I'm up to! I am not a SAT "defender". But that gives me some hint to help better understand, as we said in my day, "where you are coming from".

My best reading between your lines is that you disagree with SAT being used in college admissions decisions, for whatever reason, and you feel strongly about it. And I take it the additional things you cite are being presented as evidence against such practice. You won't get any argument out of me on that! My saying it is an achievement test was not meant as a "defense" of the test. In fact, the point I am trying to make doesn't really have anything to do with SAT being valid for that purpose, although I realize that is its major charge. Besides, I err on the side of the downtrodden, anyway. If we are doing a rebellion here, I'm down! Tell me where to send money and sign up. Its a big powerful thing that keeps some people from getting what they want, and I'll side with those people any day! That's why I am here at TalkLeft!

One thing that puzzles me is that I can't quite tell how you are using the quotes on "achievement". That is, are you saying SAT publishers are measuring something else (like SES) and using the quotes sarcastically, or are you questioning my use of the construct altogether?

Yes, most ability and achievement measures are all contaminated with SES, whiteness, etc. In fact, at that point we are getting far beyond operational definitions into theory, which is a long way from the comparatively pragmatic issue of college admissions. In that vein, we don't have any good measures of ability, and a great deal of ability variance is cultural knowledge. On the other hand, there is evidence it is fair to talk about an ability construct which is orthogonal to cultural knowledge. It just isn't very amenable to measurement at this time.

In fact, those are the very issues why I see SAT as an achievement test. Because it is further from that pure ability measure than most other ability measures, particularly the most widely accepted, and because it is enmeshed in the trappings of group academic tests. Even if there are components of pure ability measured by such tests, they are hidden behind things that one has to go to school to learn, and thus those things can interfere with the measurement of ability. When that is the case, the test seems to me best classified as an achievement test, because the relatively small amount of "pure" ability variance relies on achievement for expression. As always, this isn't a "defense". It is more of a characterization of what the test is most like.