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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

That's why it's not up to you and Harvard has a $40B endowment ;)

But more seriously, grades do not correlate across schools in the slightest. The rigor of a public school in rural Kansas vs. a private school in NY could be wildly different. AP scores and SATs correlate well (same test for everyone that takes it), but normal grades do not

And good grades are already a prerequisite for admission, you generally need to averaging an A- average GPA to be competitive. schools want to see that you can balance a ton of things on your plate well (or your parents can afford to send you to classes/camps) rather than just optimize for a 5.0 GPA

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> The rigor of a public school in rural Kansas vs. a private school in NY could be wildly different. AP scores and SATs correlate well (same test for everyone that takes it), but normal grades do not.

That assumes students in rural Kansas have the same AP & SAT preparation as students in the elite NY private schools. The income disaparity between the two schools is probably quite noticable with one having more access to elite college prep than the other. By focusing purely on SAT scores and ignoring economic advantages you are discriminating against those from poor places without access to college prep. It's easy to be blind to that when you fall into the "elite NY private school" camp and have no idea how bad educational resources are in rural Kansas. It is a process of the elite admitting the elite and excluding the poor. You can tout how "fair" SAT scores are and how they equalize talent while conveniently ignoring you are just using it as a filter to keep out poor folks. The elite private NY school may send dozens of kids to HYP every year. The rural Kansas school may never send anyone to elite college in its entire existence. And it would be questionable if that rural Kansas school never had at least one student that would have excelled at an ivy (if given the same opportunities as students in the elite NY private school). Take the kids from the elite NY private school, strip them of their high parential income, put them into the rural Kansas school and take the kids in the rural Kansas school and put them into the elite NY private school with high parential income. Now see how many from each get admitted where.There are students at Harvard that have parential income of over $500,000. It wouldn't be unusual to find not one kid with the same parential income in the rural Kansas school.

Yea I agree, my point wasn't that the preparation is fair, but that it's easier (not necessarily "better") to compare 2 candidates based on the same nationwide test rather than a GPA from different schools with 4 years of different classes

It's not a value judgement and the SATs are far from perfect, but just another piece in the puzzle

And yea life isn't fair at the end of the day, nurture and nature are both super important for determining future achievement

I agree it is easier to compare two candidates on a standardized metric, but my point is these kids get different levels of preparation for that metric. It isn't a suprise those with more resources to prep tend to do better overall than those that lack resources. It doesn't mean the kid from Kansas that scored lower is dumber than the kid from NY that scored higher, if the Kansas kid didn't have elite prep and the NY kid did. Luckily the internet is flattening those disadvantages to a degree, and the Kansis kid could likely go to a library and study online after school but there is no denying that poor Kansas kid has a lot more to overcome than the elite rich NY kid to get to the same point in life.

AP scores might, but class rank is a far better correlator than SAT scores [1].

Although I couldn't find any research on it for overall collegiate performance, the only research i could find in a short Google Scholar search found slight correlations between SAT performance and freshman year performance (but not overall).

[1] http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~norman/SAT.pdf

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