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I think the Indian system seems fairer on the outset and more merit-based but there are definitely conditions attached to the entrance examinations. For instance,

- It’s more than just a Boolean to get into the right school. Your score dictates what major you’ll study for the next 3-4 years. This idea single-handedly ruins it for most students as they try and game the system because they want to study what they’re interested in. On the flip side you’re training students in majors that they personally may have no interest in

- The Indian system adds “quotas” for minorities but these percentages are fixed and don’t fluctuate over time. To make it worse they very publicly lower the bar for admissions since there’s two different scores that can now get you into the same university. This again leads a lot of students to try and game the system and forces the general populace to think of the system as unfair.

- There is no age barrier and combined with the above reasons, you’ll see a lot of students take the entrance exams many years in a row after graduating high school to land the right school and major. A lot that don’t succeed settle for a major/school or worse - commit suicide.

I think there’s a midpoint somewhere between the West’s opaque approach to college admissions and the East’s transparent yet rigid approach.

> Your score dictates what major you’ll study for the next 3-4 years.

Do you have more info available on that? That sounds really bizarre to me.

Unlike in American colleges, students in India apply to both a college and a major at that college. So competition for desirable majors in the top schools is cutthroat. If you don't get enough marks you don't get to study that major at that college - either go to a different college or (in the case of really high reputation institutes like the IITs) study something else at that college.

Generally you can't change your major without changing your college and starting over (or at least from year 2) so it's almost never done. I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone explained the Russian system and it sounds similar to what we have in India:

"Majors/minors. It's such a big deal in a lot of fiction, for example. But even though I read about it a lot of times, I still don't quite get it, along with class selection. In Russia, you choose a specialization when you enroll (e.g. Applied Math), and from the day one to the end, all students in your group will attend the same classes and take the same tests and exams. American system seems like a computer game's research tree to me - "you must unlock A, B and C before studying D", and somehow, it's your burden to keep track of what classes you attended and got grades in. WTF. Here, you just get a ready-made complete curriculum, no need to do anything but study. If you feel you chose a wrong specialization in the beginning, you might change it, and then things become a bit complicated, but it only happens rarely, and usually only right after the first semester." [1]

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8qrh78/nonameric...

It's very similar in Spain (and I imagine many other European countries). Your grade (a single number representing a combination of high school grades and standard university admission exam results) determines which major you can study at which university. In fact the cut-off score between majors varies much more than between universities.

There are similar elements in how the electrical engineering computer science and letters & science computer science programs at UC Berkeley admitted people in the early 2000's.

L&SCS admitted you to the university and department, but you didn't get officially into the major until after 2 years of taking prerequisites. Admission to the CS major was very competitive, and yet if you didn't get high enough grades to beat the curve, you didn't get into the major and had 2 years of CS prereqs. Choosing another major at that point required either studying in uni for longer or graduating in a "normal" time while studying something from a very limited set of options.

EECS had a much more competitive acceptance curve. If you were accepted into the department, your position in the major was secured. If you didn't get into the department, you also didn't get into Berkeley.

My closest friends applied to L&S CS, while I applied to EECS. I didn't get into Berkeley, while my friends didn't make it through the meat grinder prerequisite years.

Looking back, I'm happy with my own decision to try to study what I wanted without compromise. It was definitely a blow to my ego at the time, but when I heard about how overcrowded the L&S classrooms were, I honestly think I got a better education experience at a smaller, less prestigious UC. my friends routinely told me about massive overcrowded lecture halls. If they got to class late, all seats might be taken and they had to go home and watch the lecture online. Oh and none of my Berkeley friends made it through the prerequisite grinder, either.

I don't know how the system is now, but if my nephews or nieces were considering that path, I'd look into it and make sure they were informed of how the experience was as a student. In my opinion, it was less about learning and more about proving yourself all the way through. The quality of education still seems objectively lower to me, looking back.

> I can't help but think that college admissions based solely on test scores [...] might be the least unfair way to judge applicants.

Intentionally provocative question: is "least unfair" the right goal to solve for in college admissions?

If a change to an admissions system makes it less "single-input->single-output" from the perspective of an applicant, but produces a positive effect elsewhere, what is the right standard to decide whether it was a good or bad change?

I think optimizing for the lowest total unfairness in the system is a worthwhile goal. Fairness is the ideal that we strive for in every other part of society. The second part of your question is pretty vague so I don't know how to answer it.

The supreme court ruled that you can use a variety of metrics for admissions. Like hiring you have to try and make a transparent decision, not just "I feel like this person would work well", so everything gets measured and quantified.

Harvard hired an analysis of their admissions: 196 page analysis of the admissions process. It seems like they rank 4 things: Academics/ extracurricular/ personality / athletics.

You can see some comparison rankings on page 36 of Harvard's report -

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file...

From https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/diverse-education

I didn't go to harvard, but I work there.

Thanks for providing that information. I respect that the admissions office at Harvard have a tough job and they've made it tougher, for the worthwhile goal of increasing diversity of student life experiences, for themselves by taking into account all these extra factors. And I know that the admissions office at every college is 100% committed to doing their jobs to the very best of their ability.

But extracurricular activities and personality seem like things that are fundamentally incomparable. What's better, 3 years at a local soup kitchen or 2 summers in a developing nation teaching arts and crafts? Cello or acting? Public speaking skills or organizational ability? Ambitious go-getter or diplomatic consensus-builder? For all I know Harvard has a rubric for judging what's better or worse but at some level they all seem like subjective judgments prone to some sort of bias. My mental model of the implementation details of this system is most likely flawed but I don't see how you can get around this problem. Happy to learn more though.

I don't know much about the Indian system but what is missed in the discussion is that Harvard is NOT a technical university - it is a liberal arts program, and as such, one would expect a broader set of admission criteria than some other institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

Most Indian technical and medical colleges have common entrance exams administered at the state or national level. Other specialized degrees - film & TV, fashion design, advertising & journalism - have their own entrance procedures which take into account high school final marks (a state-level common examination that all high-schoolers take) and possibly aptitude tests and interviews.

Arts, commerce, and science (non-engineering and technical) students (all of which sort of map to a liberal arts education in the US, albeit with different specializations) are admitted solely on the basis of high school final marks. Since a high school education is already pretty broad, wouldn't performance there be predictive of performance in a liberal arts institution? Obviously this is more of a problem in the US because you don't have common high-school final exams at a state or national level so it's hard to compare an A from High School Foo and an A- from High School Bar.

The more I read about the contortions US colleges go through in the name of social justice, the better scores-only admission looks to me.

I'm genuinely curious to know if scores-only admission would deliver a more economically-diverse student population. I don't know how you'd investigate that though.

My hypothesis is, if there's no benefit to doing expensive extracurricular activities, hiring a personal essay coach or college counselors, getting recommendation letters, and all the other ceremony, elite colleges might become more accessible to students of limited means. There's only so much of an advantage that expensive test coaching can give you, right?

The case where it might help is the bright kid from a working class background; you know, the kind who works part-time and therefore doesn't have time for extracurricular activities.

My undergrad was basically scores only (gpa/SAT grid) and I’m in America. This is only an issue at the very elite schools.

Interesting. Thanks for providing that additional viewpoint. My impression, based on my experience navigating the American grad school admissions process, was that the undergrad process was the same thing turned up to 11. I read about personal essay writers and interview coaches and the right set of extracurricular activities.

Not at all, only for the top schools. I got into 2 of my state schools (1 of which is also being sued for this) and I was a very average student (#2 in class, 1500/1600, 66 college credits).

You only need a fancy resume if you apply to the T20 schools, some of which are more selective if you’re from out of state.

> (#2 in class, 1500/1600, 66 college credits)

That doesn't sounds like an average student to me. You were entering college as a junior, effectively.

Thanks for the info, though.

I think you're being overly modest; #2 in your class is by definition not "very average" :-). Unless you're saying that the average applicant at your school was #2 in their class and had a 1500 SAT score. Which again would put your school in the top bracket by my estimation, even if it's a state school.

No kidding. #2 in class and 1500/1600 puts you in the running for Harvard/Stanford, does it not? At the very least that does not sound like a "very average student".

It really doesn't. I was #2 in a class of 39 (lol) and my Math SAT was pretty poor (710) - not good enough to get into schools like CMU, Berkeley, or even GT.

Plus I didn't have research, ISEF awards, USAMO/USACO medals, and everything else that's expected at elite institutions.

Single-gate protocols reward investment in gate-deception.

Multi-gate protocols do that too. The investment just gets more complicated.

Any examples that are applicable here?

Multi-gate protocols increase amount of gate-deception investment required, making it harder only for economically- or socially-disadvantaged students to subvert them.

With a single-gate protocol gate-deception investments have diminishing returns, which could (I'm not an expert) put participants on a more level playing field.

> I can't help but think that college admissions based solely on test scores (as done in India, Russia, maybe China?)

Russian here, this is not entirely correct. Instead of race you have region and when that region is 80-90%+ single ethnicity then a region division serves as "race-by-proxy".

You can also get a certain region overrepresented (with regards to it's total population) and by extension certain ethnicity as well.

I'm sorry I don't think I understood. I didn't mention race anywhere in my comment.

You're saying that students from certain regions in Russia do better on tests and are therefore overrepresented in colleges?

No, I'm saying that certain regions have a mandatory representation "floor", i.e. you can't have < X students of region Y in college Z.

>I thought the American system sounded better when I was a high-schooler in India with not good but not great marks

You would probably have been lumped in and compared to the other Asian high-performers and would not have even gotten an interview.

I wasn't a "high-performer" though. My high school marks were top 20%, my entrance exam scores were maybe 70th percentile if I'm generous with myself (I honestly don't remember). I was academically good, but not a standout performer.

Like teenagers everywhere else I rationalized my laziness and underachievement by saying to myself "Oh but I have other hobbies, and I write well, and I'm not like those swotty scholars with their noses in schoolbooks all the time. An enlightened education system like America's with their personal essays would take all those other intangibles into account and therefore value me just as much!".

Now that I'm older I'm starting to see the dark side of an admissions system with squishier, more malleable standards. I think it's possible that the current system, even with all its evils, is the most corruption- and bias-proof system possible in India. The only way to "hack" it is by outright fraud or other crimes - fake documents, leaking exam papers or otherwise tampering with the examination process. Otherwise everyone has to write the same exams, and study whatever their marks earn them (let's leave the additional complication of reservations out of this for now).