Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement | Hacker News Reader

Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

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111 pointspseudolus153 comments

As someone who dealt with severe depression during high school, I feel like the SATs really helped me out during college admissions time. Just getting out of bed every day was a real struggle for me and as a result my attendance was poor, my grades were spotty, and I didn’t have any formal extra curriculars I could show off. But I did get the highest SAT scores in my class, and I feel like that helped demonstrate that I had some raw potential even if it wasn’t expressed in all the traditional ways.

It made my high school teachers and principal who might otherwise have written me off pay more attention to me. This was helpful in terms of getting recommendation letters, and also just being allowed to graduate despite a substantial number of absences. It helped get me into a college with a decent computer science program, and I met with much more success there than I had in high school. The freedom and challenges of the college environment really brought something out of me that high school hadn’t.

I think there are a lot of kids in my situation, who are smart but haven’t really “figured it all out yet” in high school. Hopefully there are other ways aside from standardized tests for them to demonstrate that they have potential, and hopefully teachers and colleges are paying attention.

I do think this is an important take. colleges should avoid relying excessively on a single measure of aptitude to evaluate applicants for this reason. there are lots of bright kids who struggle in high school but really blossom in college if they're given a chance.

that said, I was in a similar position to you in high school. I would always get one of the highest scores in the class on tests/exams but usually get a poor overall grade due to missed homework assignments. the teachers did recognize that I was smart, but they concluded that the only possible explanation for my poor performance was that I was just lazy and pretty much wrote me off. in my my life at least, educators have been very willing to make exception after exception for less bright students who seem to try hard but will happily let smart underperformers fail without inquiring why.

They don’t need to inquire why when the vast majority of students fall into the former category.

What you and the GP are saying is completely in line with the lack of experience in the system needed to teach high aptitude students. Some blame the problem partly on No Child Left Behind, which said everyone needs to pass, but said nothing about those who are well beyond passing. But I think it started way before that. I went through a lot of the educational options, that were later discovered to not work so well. Many are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_education I was tested in 1st grade and the school system said I should go to 2nd, but my mother didn't allow it. That was a mistake. Same thing happened in 8th grade. This time, the school system wouldn't let me progress. I have recently learned this was bad for both me and society, unfortunately.

Likely you and many others here and elsewhere as well, including children of those reading this, which is why I write it. If you have a gifted child, promote them! Learn about their needs and get them the educational resources they and society deserve.

The problems you both mention are the result of forcing gifted students to follow a mass education system. Evidence shows that such students should be in an IEP (Individualized Education Program). Many times, the gifted students also have problems with anxiety, depression, social isolation which makes them what's called "Twice Exceptional" students. Such students are written off, like you were, because teachers can't comprehend why such a bright student would struggle.

Such students are also misdiagnosed with ADHD, aspergers, anti-socialism, etc. A poignant distinction between giftedness and aspergers I just read recently is that the aspergers student is a social outcast and has no idea. The gifted student is a social outcast and feels terrible about it.

I think it's a huge injustice. The minds and capabilities of our brightest are a gift to our society and we are letting the treasures waste away.

I've been struggling a lot lately with a lot of issues and re-discovering the problems gifted people have in society has helped me put it back into perspective. What I and you and probably lots others are experiencing aren't the result of something being "wrong" with you, but rather perhaps too much of a good thing can be a bad thing?

For more info:

http://www.sengifted.org

https://www.sengifted.org/post/can-you-hear-the-flowers-sing...

http://www.stephanietolan.com/gifted_ex-child.htm

http://www.metagifted.org/topics/gifted/adultGiftedness/

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/gifted_adults.htm

http://www.giftedservices.com.au/adults.html

Yup, a relative of mine, who shall remain nameless, will get into college thanks to his test scores. And like you, it has insulated him from being completely written off by his teachers.

I was a solid B student in high school. I got a 35 on the ACT, which apparently helped me land a scholarship. So same boat as you.

Except I then it lost due to being a depressed anxious wreck, not showing up to classes, switching majors 2-3 times and finally dropping out after 5 years full time + 2 years part time + 50k in student loan debt.

It's fine now though, apparently degrees aren't all that important for most software development jobs.

Did you end up moving? I’ve heard the change in location, diet and lack of friend group can sometimes cause depression.

I moved for college to a small town with a decent engineering school, along with two very good friends from high school (we're still friends today). The town itself was rather depressing, the school was mostly male, and there wasn't much to do outside of drink or video games. The town is an economic black hole, about what you'd expect for somewhere with 10,000 people in rural America. The school was good though.

I'm doing much better these days. I ended up taking an internship somewhere local, working more / doing worse at school because I was actively avoiding it. I will say this was mostly a personal problem - I really don't do well sitting and listening to people talk about subjects I don't find interesting.

I eventually moved to Seattle, switched jobs a few times, and now work remotely for a company I (so far) love. Remote + unlimited PTO (ish, it's capped at 2 continuous weeks per quarter) has given me an excuse to travel to wherever I want. Life's now a blast :)

I completely agree with this. Also, I feel like scandals always come out where certain high schools were inflating grades to reach funding goals, etc. It might even come to the point where admissions office take into account the high school you attended to calculate an effective grade which given a lack of standardized tests might very well lead to an even larger admissions gap based on wealth

> It might even come to the point where admissions office take into account the high school you attended to calculate an effective grade

"Might even come to the point"? They do this now. They've been doing it for many, many years.

I had the opposite -- near perfect test scores and shoddy grades. Ended up having to go to community college because no schools would have me. (It ended up working out for the better, I eventually made my way through an associates and saved a TON of money, got my bachelors, and have been quite successful.)

Community colleges are awesome. My high school let me take a class at a local community college during the summer to make up for an “incomplete” mark I got during the school year. I remember the class being made up of people like me who didn’t have a good run in high school for whatever reason and were trying to get their lives on track. Or people who had moved to the US from other countries with very little and were trying to improve their lives. I enjoyed that class, and for someone who had grown up in a relatively sheltered suburban town it helped open my eyes to the real world.

If I had not been accepted into college out of high school (and I’m sure I came very, very close) I probably would have gone the same route as you. My state even has a program where if you get good grades at a community college for 2 years, you can transfer to a state university and also get a huge discount on tuition (effectively paying community college prices to attend a flagship state university).

Out of HS I attended a 'flagship' school for 5 years, then returned to my hometown where a CC had been built in the interim. So the differences were obvious.

For -some- futures, doing the first year (or two) in a CC can be a better choice. Getting required electives out of the way, for example, probably at a lower cost. Getting feet wet and all the Frosh experiences out of the way.

OTOH, the competition and expertise attracted by a 'flagship' can be motivating and invaluable, from the get-go ... the opportunities to explore far more numerous ... not to mention the more diverse cultural and relationship environment.

It's a cynical move to hit their enrollment numbers, sold to the public as something to improve "diversity". But it's really just laying the groundwork for schools to cope with life after the college boom is over.

For elite schools, it also makes it easier to provide cover for legacy and donor admissions. You no longer have to explain how Keese James Shackleford IV got into the the Shackleford school of dkljalfjaf while scoring just 950 on his SAT.

Exactly. Colleges are in the business of marketing prestige, why lend credibility to a test anyone can take to prove they are intelligent without paying to attend for four years.

Ex professor here. Faculty have the power to end this bezzle if we admit students are learning nothing and we'd all be better off with real jobs.

> Ex professor here. Faculty have the power to end this bezzle if we admit students are learning nothing and we'd all be better off with real jobs.

I learned quite a lot in most of my classes in college; if your students weren't maybe that's not an indictment of the education system so much as their particular institution & instructors.

Motivated individuals can learn tons in Universities. I certainly did. The average student is wasting their time and furthering inequality. This is true at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley etc.

I’ve also learned a lot in my degrees, and greatly enjoyed my time in the university. However, I’ve only ever needed a tiny fraction of what I learned there in my jobs at Google and Facebook.

Depending on your job, i think people confuse the true idea of what a college education is meant to be.

It is not a trade, nor is it career-prepping with the exception of a handful of programs (engineering, nursing, accounting).

So in your case, depending on your field, your education was designed to give you a basic understanding of the fundamentals that you will need and the critical thinking skills that will allow you to alter those fundamentals into something workable for the project you’re doing at Google or Facebook.

Edit: I once spoke to a MechE graduate from MIT. They held internships at one of the Big Three automakers. During our conversation, I asked explicitly: what do they teach you at school? engine design? safety harness mechanisms?

They said, “No. They teach us the foundations of engineering.”

You could ask the same to a law school student. Do they teach you the law?

No, they don’t. They explain the law to you and encourage you to apply the law under your own discretion. They do not give you simple A, B, C answers to a case. The example of “John murdered Steve, but Steve was a slave and John had a contract of borrowing Steve. Is John responsible for Steve’s death or is Steve considered property under federal statue — as he’s a slave — and therefore would not be protected by standard of care?”

As you can see, no true education gives you direct cause-and-effect answers, unless specifically those mentioned in my above paragraph.

That’s the theory that people keep repeating, but research keeps failing to substantiate that. University syllabuses keep teaching people things that is not going to be useful to anyone, or will only be useful to tiny fraction of people, who’d likely just learn it as needed anyway. Experiments show that transfer learning basically doesn’t exist, average people simply cannot apply principles they’ve learned in one context in a completely different context. Finally, many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field, which suggests that whatever people learn in their degrees doesn’t really matter all that much.

Again, I’d like to emphasize that I personally have greatly enjoyed my time at the university, and have learned a lot of extremely interesting things. It’s just not the learning you get that is responsible for correlation between higher education and life outcomes. I recommend Bryan Caplan’s book “The Case Against Education”.

> Experiments show that transfer learning basically doesn’t exist, average people simply cannot apply principles they’ve learned in one context in a completely different context.

This is an exceptionally bold claim. Sounds dubious.

> Finally, many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field, which suggests that whatever people learn in their degrees doesn’t really matter all that much.

No it doesn’t. For that to be true you would need to demonstrate that, say, having an engineering degree does not influence likelihood or magnitude of success in engineering careers.

In reality there are likely going to be many recipes for success. Nepotism or social skills is one. Learned Competence is also one. Dumb luck is a third. The fact that you can succeed without such things does not mean such things are worthless

Though in large part what you are saying is accurate and studies likely confirm it, the comment above makes the distinction of select courses of study. Engineers, lawyers and doctors aren't average, even within the university context.

>...many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field...

This sounds a great deal like transfer learning. Applying format, structures, and approaches to unrelated fields. Much of an engineering degree is designed around learning to learn well. That's the only degree I can speak of, but it has been my understanding that other programs have similar intent.

Engineers, lawyers and doctors aren't average, even within the university context.

You need to talk to lawyers and doctors too. Lawyers typically know jack shit about the law outside the fields they practice in. Doctor education varies greatly between countries. For example, in Poland medical school is whole 2 years longer than in the US, and the students have to learn all Latin names of all possible bones and muscles in the whole body. Every doctor will tell you that it’s absolutely useless in their actual practice. Do the two missing years make US doctors 25% worse? Clearly not, doctors forget most of what they learn anyway. It’s not like your rheumatologist remembers symptoms of all those rare internal diseases they had to memorize for the test.

Applying format, structures, and approaches to unrelated fields. Much of an engineering degree is designed around learning to learn well. That's the only degree I can speak of, but it has been my understanding that other programs have similar intent.

And engineering students, especially from top programs, typically are great at that, but not because they learned it at university, but rather because you need to be really smart to get into and successfully graduate with science or engineering degree.

Many people in western countries these days, especially the smartest and best educated, have extreme hard time accepting that innate differences in cognitive ability is a real, observable thing, and consequently their models of reality are deficient, because they put the causation on wrong factors.

In some countries you can even go straight to medical school without a college degree.

In most countries, in fact. The pre-med thing that US and some other countries have is bizarre.

> "However, I’ve only ever needed a tiny fraction of what I learned there in my jobs at Google and Facebook."

That's interesting. What did you do at those positions?

I was at a different FAANG and used the hell out what I learned at university. RF knowledge, embedded systems, creating physics simulations, and a bunch of other stuff. Hell, I wish I'd learned more; some DSP knowledge would be hella handy right about now.

If people are finding that they aren't using what they learned at university in their career, it's the career that's the problem, not the university education. The university is not responsible for the career path people choose to take.

I worked in Chrome for a while, but for past few years I worked in security related areas, both at Google and at Facebook. You could make the case that the mathematics I’ve learned helped me understand how RSA and ECC work, but that has actually been mostly irrelevant in my experience, unlike things like system design, vulnerability detection and management, fuzzing, reverse engineering, which I have mostly learned on the job, not at university.

If people are finding that they aren't using what they learned at university in their career, it's the career that's the problem, not the university education.

This is a bit myopic with respect to how normal people view university education. For a typical person, the point of education is not to learn things, but to obtain a degree. The point of degree is to get a good job. If they manage to get a good job, that’s a success, and nothing more is expected from the university education: people learn how to do the job mostly on the job anyway. In this context, if people don’t use what they learned in the university in the careers, that’s okay, what matters for normal people is the career, not the learning. Of course, it might be different for you (it is different for me, I love learning for learning’s sake), but that’s observably not how most people approach life.

> This is a bit myopic with respect to how normal people view university education. For a typical person, the point of education is not to learn things, but to obtain a degree. The point of degree is to get a good job. If they manage to get a good job, that’s a success, and nothing more is expected from the university education

The point of a university, however, is for people to learn things. The fact that most people today treat universities as trade schools is unfortunate, and IMO is having a negative effect on universities and people (like myself) that went/are going there to actually learn something.

What do you do there, exactly? Are you building hardware, or are you implying those skills were somehow transferable to software development?

I work on the software side but have had a lot of jobs that dealt with interfacing with hardware and sensors.

... what were your degrees? I'm assuming you're a programmer?

I only had a BA in comp sci, and almost every CS course I've taken has been useful to some degree. Operating Systems, Data Structures, Programming Languages, even Theory of Computation.

Sure most of the day-to-day is people skills and rote programming. Strategically Comp Sci has been very valuable in the long run.

I have bachelors degrees in Computer Science and in Mathematics, and a Master degree in Mathematics (getting Masters is common and expected in the country I’m from).

My friends who only have mathematics degrees have jobs where their extensive training in abstract mathematics is mostly (eg insurance and finance jobs, which only use small fraction of what you learn in a math degree), or wholly (lots of them are software engineers) irrelevant.

I use literally nothing I learnt in college in my day to day work.

At the same time, I’m almost 100% sure I wouldn’t be half as good at my job if it wasn’t for the stuff I learned in college.

Right from technical courses which taught me to analyze, and convert words and images (documentation) into actual working products, to the writing courses which mean I communicate much better than I would have otherwise to the economic and financial courses that help me understand the dynamics of the company that I work for.

For me it's very close to that. Nothing is directly used, but for those of us who really payed attention and didn't just do assignments to get them out of the way, the underlying principles of the stuff from college has help significantly.

With a BS in CS, I have two explicit examples:

* Understanding time complexity has helped with a couple performance issues, but one big one was recognizing a Schlemiel the Painter algorithm [0] that multiple other devs (including a senior) hadn't noticed - fixing it brought one process's the nightly runtime from something like 2 hours to 5 minutes.

* In an information retrieval course, we built a basic inverted index as a semester-long project. That experience has helped with understanding how Lucene and Solr do things under the hood, which helped with various things relating to it - understanding why it's fast, understanding why doing certain queries things didn't improve performance, and understanding what people are even talking about online when trying to diagnose memory issues.

If some of this (particularly the time complexity one) sounds basic, it kinda is. But that's the problem - my experience is that people who get into software development through bootcamps or are self-taught end up missing this foundational knowledge, because they don't even know it's something that's out there.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

Cause most folks at Google are just moving protobufs, myself included. /s

Ex professor here. Faculty have the power to end this bezzle if we admit students are learning nothing and we'd all be better off with real jobs.

Some already have. https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...

Moreover, almost everyone involved figures out what's going on, sooner or later: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz..., and typically sooner.

Notice the date stamp on both of those. This is hardly new news. Years ago I was teaching the LSAT and the guy who owned the company told me to read Beer & Circus by Murray Sperber, which fits the genre.

Not just enrollment, but also % of applicants accepted.

Why would a school want to increase their acceptance rate? Generally selectivity is seen as a proxy for "quality".

more students will apply if they think they have a chance despite a lower test score, which will keep the acceptance rate low :>

Acceptance is typically a fixed-ish number, while applications vary.

You want to maximize applications

No disagreement that there are fundamental elements of our socio-economic system that suppress certain groups of people, but this approach seems to be tackling this problem from an extremely misguided direction.

The end goal is certainly to increase college enrollment among groups who have historically been underrepresented, and removing all academic and skill prerequisites from academic and skilled trades programs would certainly increase enrollment numbers, but by totally devaluing those programs in the process.

The enrollment and degree isn't what we should be trying to provide these groups it's the underlying knowledge and skills so they are prepared for these academic programs in the first place. This approach, though, is almost worse than doing nothing because it's pretending to help when it's actually just hurting everyone and serving the interests of the student loan industry in the process.

There was a story in the news that broke recently of a high school doing exactly what this is describing, sneaking disadvantaged kids into ivy league colleges when they didn't have any of the skills or knowledge required for the degree programs. Obviously it didn't go well.

You can find more information at

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/03/672817734/the-reality-of-t-m-...

There was also a really great Feakonomics podcast talking about America's math curriculum and how the SAT is changing to focus on the right kinds of skills.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/

Agreed, this approach is misguided.

Removing standardized tests removes a useful metric admissions can use to analyze applicants as part of a holistic process. Is it a perfect metric? No, but the scores are good predictors for diligence which is crucial for college success.

If you need to go to college to develop fundamental critical thinking skills, then something is very, very wrong with your basic education system.

Wouldn’t it be more optimal to develop those skills from the beginning of life, through the family, bolstered by a rigorous basic education BEFORE you start college?

The challenge is that the environment that is predisposed to produce teenagers with a well rounded educational foundation and well developed critical thinking and studying skills... tend to be affluent households that can afford to move to areas with great schools, and send their kids to a constant stream of extracurriculars.

That’s not to say it’s impossible to succeed in adverse conditions, but it’s inane to pretend conditions are on average not more adverse for certain populations.

There’s a fundamental question of identity some colleges are struggling with. To put it in exaggerated terms - do they want to be ivory tower institutes of learning, or do they want to be a kaleidoscope of all of the next generation who do not want to go on to trade work?

For people who want to go to college purely for rigorous academic study with the brightest young academic minds, this is going to be a shift. The populations will be formed less so based purely on that narrow selection criteria.

It’s a progression which has been happening for decades, but as it seems in many things, the rate of change is accelerating.

>For people who want to go to college purely for rigorous academic study with the brightest young academic minds, this is going to be a shift.

Will it? The academic cheating scandal and what we know about legacy admission tells us that many prestigious colleges very decidedly don't put pure academic rigor above all else. I've heard tell that getting into Harvard and surviving its social scene is harder than actually graduating from it. Anecdata, but of all the big-name schools, I've only heard of a handful that deliver on their "chew you up if you're not intellectually ready" reputations: MIT, CalArts, several UCs... That's about it.

I'm of the opinion that the radical and purposeful shift we should be moving towards is one of parity in rigor and support for all students passed a certain level of demonstrated competence. Then, lottery.

You might not fail out of a lot of big name schools that like to keep their graduation rate high, but you'll come out with a boatload of C's. You may have a degree, but that's not a great outcome, and why go to school for four years if you aren't learning effectively? I know that people say that it's a networking opportunity, but most of my friends that got good jobs they were happy with out of college were the ones that worked hard. The ones who just floated by continued to float by.

Because the networking thing is real, and often supercedes one's grades or demonstrated competence in a job market based primarily on networking.

The problem is that SAT isn't actually a good predictor, even though it seems like it should be.

This guy gets it

I would add to what you have stated that there's now a great deal of pressure for universities to continue to grow and increase profits. With enrollment beginning to slow it's rapid uptick of the last decade due to reduced unemployment, Universities are looking for the next bump.

Have all the commenters here assuming that this is a misguided attempt that'll end up letting any idiot into degree programs as long as they are labeled "diverse" considered that maybe, possibly standardized tests aren't necessarily a good measure of one's ability to a learn well through a degree program? That maybe the ability to answer hundreds of multiple choice questions and write five-paragraph essays in several high-pressure thirty minute sprints isn't a prerequisite to success in a field? Are they not bothered by the fact that these tests are surrounded by an industry of expensive prep classes specifically meant to teach you how to take a test?

This doesn't say you can't submit scores. Most still will. But it does say that performance on one specific exam doesn't have to be a deciding factor, which I see as a step forward.

It is well known and universally acknowledged that SAT scores are highly predictive of educational outcomes. See eg. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/educators/higher-e... . You can use other alternative measures to predict educational success, but it’s important to get it right, otherwise you’ll end up with low quality student body that isn’t able to learn much and will drop out at high rates. Currently, high school GPA is also good at predicting success, but it’s highly variable among schools. Should SAT testing be abolished, parents who now pay for prepping will instead put their children in schools where they are guaranteed high GPAs.

With all of its flaws, standardized testing is still the best of all available alternatives for the purpose it’s used for. You need to acknowledge that no matter what approach you use, it will be gamed.Thus, if you want to ensure fairness, you need to choose one that’s hardest to game. Clearly, high school GPA, essays and volunteering is much easier to game than SAT score.

> See eg. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/educators/higher-e....

Quoting the company that sells you those tests to tell you those tests are predictive is quite fun.

Their result match everyone else’s, so I see no reason to not cite them.

And apparently you see no reason to cite "everyone else's", even when that would have strengthened the persuasiveness of your argument. Hm.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-08398-001 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221546.1998.11... (this one summarizes something like 20 other studies in a nice table) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15326977EA0801_... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/073998639301530... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001316447903900... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1968-09427-001

You want more? I could give you probably 50 more studies. The literature here is vast and consistent.

That doesn't jive with the submitted article in the Washington Post:

"Research has consistently shown that ACT and SAT scores are strongly linked to family income, mother’s education level and race. The College Board and ACT Inc., which owns the ACT, say their tests are predictive of college success, but (as with many education issues) there is also research showing otherwise."

There are studies that have shown rigor of high school course work is the strongest predictor of college success: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Study-Says-Rigor-of/8973

I think we can all agree that allowing two private companies to be the gate keepers of higher education is a terrible idea.

This WaPo quote is a good example of a common practice in modern journalism, which is to write something which literally is true, but leaves the reader with the wrong impression of the reality.

Yes, the rich people tend to do better on SAT. So? Why would anyone expect all groups to do equally well on SAT? There is no problem with that. It would only be a problem if SAT had different predictive validity between the rich and the poor, that is, poor people with a given SAT score had different outcome in predicted variable than the rich people. By and large it is not true.

> The College Board and ACT Inc., which owns the ACT, say their tests are predictive of college success, but (as with many education issues) there is also research showing otherwise."

Of course there is research showing otherwise. There always is. The real question here, which WaPo is eliding, is what’s the preponderance of evidence, and it overwhelmingly is on the side of high predictive validity of SAT. Don’t believe me, see for yourself: go to Google Scholar and search for “sat predictive validity”.

> There are studies that have shown rigor of high school course work is the strongest predictor of college success: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Study-Says-Rigor-of/8973

It is marginally better than SAT, and it’s worse than GPA + SAT. I predict if we dropped SAT, it’s predictive validity would fall significantly, because it’s much easier to game GPA than to game SAT.

> I think we can all agree that allowing two private companies to be the gate keepers of higher education is a terrible idea.

Where I went to school, a government agency designs the test, of which all students take the exact same version on exact same date. Universities by and large exclusively consider the score in admissions. I think it’s superior system, more fair and egalitarian.

I thought the best measure was to combine school grades and tests. But grades are so subjective - who has time to evaluate the rigor of a school curriculum, the teacher teaching it and a student learning it each year? Hence standardized tests.

> Research has consistently shown that ACT and SAT scores are strongly linked to family income, mother’s education level and race.

So is IQ, school and career success - and anything that predicts them, which is supposedly what we want.

But innate differences are crimethink, so best shift from measure with predictive ability to those that give the desired results.

> I think we can all agree that allowing two private companies to be the gate keepers of higher education is a terrible idea

Yes, in my country this is done by the government.

This is because all of these factors are heavily g loaded.

I do agree with your last sentence.

These are excellent points, but I don't think this is as much a political thing as a personal one. The highly-numerate, low-social-skills set that makes up the bulk of the posters here tends to be disproportionately successful on standardized tests.

I think to a lot of us (and again, I actually agree on the policy angle here that testing is at best a flawed predictor of future success) this feels like a rejection of our own qualifications.

Ignoring the debate about its usefulness, I have a really hard time with the line of thinking that minority/disadvantaged populations do poorly on the test therefore it is discriminatory.

Everyone takes the same test. Preparing for it more (prep classes etc) will make you do better. That is true, but what does a non discriminatory measure look like then? Unless it has exactly proportional results then it can be called discriminatory. What sort of test/measure can you create that will make having resources to prepare for it more than someone else not matter? Would that even be a good measure?

If groups perform differently on tests vs grades, different groups will lose or gain depending on the relative weightings between the two.

The best thing about having 2 measures that don't agree is you can pick which one you want to be the true source, and which one is terrible and wrong. Then you can write a story that fits your desired narrative.

If disadvantaged minorities did better on tests vs grades, do you have any doubt we wouldn't have a scandal about teacher's highly subjective racist marking?

>What sort of test/measure can you create that will make having resources to prepare for it more than someone else not matter?

because on that dependence on resources the SAT/ACT results statistics is also an index for discrimination like DJIA/NASDAQ is an index for economy. And right now the index is shamefully low. So, like in that joke, there are 2 ways to fix the situation - a "fantasy" way of successfully fighting discrimination and making sure that everybody has sufficient resources, etc. and a "realistically practical" way of just dropping the index. Looks like the society is choosing the realistically practical way.

One suggestion I like is to totally change the test format every year. This would basically invalidate test prep and put everyone on the same footing.

This would give the wealthy even more advantage because they have the time and resources to throw at the test compared to the poor.

The test changes every year? No problem, just prep for the meta test like how people prep for the FAANG interviews. Multiple formats? No problem, just spend more time preparing for each format. Changing topics? No problem, just cover as many topics as necessary.

I think the key is to see that the poor, by definition, have much less time and money to tackle the problem. Therefore, to have a level playing field we should design the test such that prep may help, but there is a ceiling to it, and I think the SAT is somewhat decent in this respect.

The optimal test strategy can be covered in one afternoon. The format is well known and cheap study guides/sample tests are available pretty much everywhere. If the test changes every year, imagine how much more difficult it would be for a poor student to prep for it.

Edit: typo

If is it just resources how do the poor from certain cultures manage to do well on the standardised tests while other cultures with upper middle class incomes underperform? The problem is a lot more complex than just money.

Agree with you that resources is just one factor and probably not the dominating factor. I am arguing from the point of all things being equal, a test that doesn’t change from year to year requires less time and resources to prep for compared to a test that does change year to year. And for a poor student, the former is probably more equitable than the latter.

As for standardized test scores and ethnicity/culture, that is a sensitive and contentious topic that I prefer not get into.

I've definitely like that as a thought experiment. Whether these tests assess your capabilities is already questionable. I wonder if there would be any objective way to measure outcomes if the tests were entirely different from one year to the next.

I wasn't the best student in high school (2.65GPA) but I did have excellent standardized test scores. I feel like they really helped me in my college hunt and were a significant factor into getting accepted into some of the schools I did.

There are other people like myself who are just bad students for one reason or another. A student's future prospects of education shouldn't be dependent on just test scores or a GPA (what this is playing into) because those scores aren't reflective of a student. It's reflective of them playing into the system. The system rewards the typical student — or what we think of as a typical student — and completely neglects the overall picture of the student.

Does my GPA reflect being sexually assaulted by a teacher? Having my best friend die? Having an increasingly troubled home setting? Running out of my medication routinely? Being bullied? No. My GPA simply indicates how I did in the classroom.

A student has an array of attributes. Only one of those attributes is score. Other attributes factor contribute and influence score. I realize it's hard to quantify or quality non-tangibles into these attributes. But it needs to be done for the betterment of future students.

And it corrects for kids who go to fancy private schools where grades are highly inflated (it's what parents are paying for, after all). The standardized tests correct for inflated grades.

The article says it's top ranked schools but then gives a list of a lot of lesser known colleges, for profit mills like U. Phoenix, a whole bunch of theological schools, Yeshivas and Talmud institutes, trade colleges, and bottom tier state colleges (for example for new high school grads, CSU is test optional but UC is not).

Yes there's also a handful of colleges that are known.

Most the ones listed it's understandable they don't mandate the tests and rely on other criteria or are colleges that simply have very high acceptance rates. Also most of them, like all the theology and trade schools, have never mandated the tests so there's no real change there.

For academically rigorous schools just because the test is optional doesn't mean you won't need a stellar application and recommendations in order to be accepted if you choose not to send in test results. Also doesn't mean you won't completely lose out on very helpful scholarships that have standardized test cut off points.

The GRE is increasingly being dropped as well. The motivation is racial diversity.

For example at Brown: https://www.brown.edu/news/2019-10-03/gre

The GRE is no longer needed for...

American Studies

Biotechnology

Biomedical Engineering

Chemistry

Comparative Literature

Computational Biology

Computer Science

Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

English

French Studies

German Studies

Hispanic Studies

Italian Studies

Mathematics

Modern Culture and Media

Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry

Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology

Neuroscience

Pathobiology

Portuguese and Brazilian Studies

Religious Studies

Slavic Studies

Theatre and Performance Studies

> "Computer Science"

While I like to rag on pseudo-diversity as much as the next person, the Computer Science GRE was discontinued in 2013; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examinations#G.... Can't require something that no longer exists.

They are most likely referring to the regular GRE, not the subject test. Most CS programs require the regular GRE.

How about a SAT test but instead of getting into a college you get a job. Bring back aptitude testing for employment so we don't have to go through this college rigmarole.

I don’t think employers want that. They like 4 year college degrees not only because they demonstrate a modicum of intelligence but also because they demonstrate conformity and conscientiousness, as well as the ability to delay gratification. Employers like conformist workers who will put up with boring work without complaint.

A person who does really well in high school and aces their SATs but refuses to go to college sends a signal of nonconformity and a lack of conscientiousness. This is the type of person who may be very smart and highly skilled and also likely to get bored and leave for a different job.

So you agree that college has nothing to do with education or job preparation, but rather some abstract general measure of character.

There are other ways to filter for people with these traits. Being smart in general (or being conscientious enough to study hard for the knowledge-based SATs) highly correlates to low time preference, so it may be redundant to do any other tests. There are other ways to teach a job skill without spending 4 years to do it or making a competition out of getting access to learning. In the last century before the college boom, big employers would expect to have to train new employees.

Forcing young people to incur significant unforgivable debt to the education-industrial complex just to prove they have some brain configuration seems wasteful and cruel.

They won’t be able to verify it for fresh high school grads, granted, but for people in their mid twenties and older, their conscientiousness and conformity will be apparent in their employment history.

My friend runs a retail business, and he keeps repeating that in his experience, for the relatively simple jobs he has, best predictor of employee quality is whether they had and kept a single job for past 2 years. If they cannot keep a single job for any significant amount of time, it’s bad sign.

This explanation seems somehow off... Wouldn't a 1-2 years degree still show conformity and conscientiousness and delayed gratification? 1-2 years is no small thing.

Don't normal employees also get bored and leave for a different job?

I know for one I would hire kids out of high-school at my company if I had the need for extra work. If they pass the same tests as a college student does, I don't see why not?

Not to mention that from past experience college students learn their 'trade' at the 1st job. There is really not a lot of value add in many college degrees.

I am an employer. Why the fuck would I ever want that type of employee?

These people are in Silicon Valley now mostly. Anecdotally, it doesn’t matter which major they graduated, they all seem to gravitate the same way

Not legal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

And a more recent case from an employer that was trying to be more careful: https://fortune.com/2015/08/24/target-discriminatory-hiring/

That does exist, some government positions are filled using civil service exams.

I did the GMAT years ago and more than anything it is a test of how diligently you prepare for it. Guess what, people who diligently prepare for things tend to succeed at them! That’s Batman’s entire superpower! And those are the kind of people who will succeed regardless of what universities they go to.

Sounds like a really useful signal detector then.

The SAT and ACT are a fantastic detector to identify rich and motivated parents who are willing to drop off their kid for 2 years at cramming centers for weekly tutoring sessions and trial tests... and who are willing to pay thousands for it.

I’ve been there, his scores went up significantly. I don’t think it made him smarter in any way.

Combine that with our ability to buy a house in a very good school district and send him to expensive summer camps in Tahoe where he can “develop leadership skills” and “contribute to the community” and you have the perfect applicant.

I’m proud parent, and I want my child to get all the opportunities, but the cards were very heavily stacked in favor of him.

It’s all bullshit.

> "The SAT and ACT are a fantastic detector to identify rich and motivated parents who are willing to drop off their kid for 2 years at cramming centers for weekly tutoring sessions and trial tests... and who are willing to pay thousands for it."

It was great for me, as a poor minority who was highly dedicated to education and self-learning. Felt pretty good to do as well or better than the wealthier kids despite not having access to a tenth of resources they did.

> "It’s all bullshit."

Sure, if you're wealthy, you can find a bullshit way to get your kids into a better school that they deserve. But this changes nothing; the wealthy will find some new way to leverage their wealth to do the same and it will be back to business as usual. Meanwhile, it shafts the poor but hard-working students (including minorities!) who had a (semi-)objective way to show that they had talent and dedication, all in the name of pretend "diversity".

That's the real bullshit here.

Congratulations on making it in.

The problem with these kind of discussions is that you can always find examples where the system worked in ways that favored those who would in general not benefit from it.

I think there is no question that rich people on average have a huge leg up compared those who are not. That’s fundamentally broken.

The fact that you, as member of the non-rich, were able to use that to your advantage doesn’t change that overall conclusion.

> "I think there is no question that rich people on average have a huge leg up compared those who are not. That’s fundamentally broken."

We already know that it's fundamentally broken but we also know that this action isn't going to change that. So what exactly are you trying to say here?

The way I read it, your initial comment seemed to defend the current system for non-rich people since it allows a few non-rich to take advantage of it (at the expense of other non-rich.)

I’m proud parent, and I want my child to get all the opportunities

Every parent believes this, and so here we are. It was in your power to opt out but you chose not to.

I can’t stand the policies of Ayn Rand, but don’t hold it against her that she relied on social security at the end of her life.

I ask my accountant to make me pay what I own the government in taxes and not a cent more, yet I would have no issue whatsoever if the government raised them by 10% if that meant universal healthcare.

I don’t see a contradiction in seeing issues in the world and wanting the rules to change for everybody yet at the same time playing by those rules.

And in this case in particular, it’d be impacting his future, not even mine.

> It’s all bullshit.

And it's terrible for most upper (middle) kids because they end up thinking they're better than everyone else and that they deserve what they have.

It's easier for the upper class kids to pad their applications (and self-esteems) out with arts, sports, volunteering, and fundraising that a normal family couldn't afford.

Speaking as a current grad student, this whole anti-test movement in America is a complete train wreck and will devastate the nation over the long term. Short term, yes, lots of kids will get into lots of programs they are mentally unequipped for. But once they get in, a few will get their shit together and actually do well. Good for them! But the vast majority simply withdraw in the 3rd week before the W shows up on the transcript. The ones who don’t withdraw and don’t get their shit together are the toxic bunch. That’s a significant bunch. They are the ones who show up in labs & loudly say God I hate this class so much! They are trying to build sympathy for their case that the course is too hard. But perhaps it’s too hard because they are just not ready for it - haven’t taken the prereqs, or not doing homework, or not mentally mature. The SAT is supposed to test to precisely these things. But they’ve bypassed that hurdle. So now the TAs and adjuncts have to gently break the truth to them. That no, 7/0 + 5/0 is not 12/0. No I won’t give you a point for that because it’s the most obvious conclusion. I actually had to escort the kid to the Professor because he threw a tantrum and said stats is supposed to be easy, it’s mostly arithmetic!

But in the grand scheme of things, undergrads are mostly harmless. They don’t produce research, they are just there to pass courses and join the economy as worker bees. The really harmful cohort are grad students who get into grad programs without passing the subject GREs. In my opinion, the Physics subject GRE and the Math Subject GRE are probably the 2 toughest exam papers we have in the USA. The vast majority of students cannot for the life of them pass it. The ones who do pass tend to do incredibly well in the grad courses. Especially the math GRE, which tests calculus, gradient, hessian, lagrange’s theorem, greens theorem, stokes, very basic algebra like elementary group theory, abelian & non commutative groups, cosets, fields & rings, basic number theory, chinese remainder, basic analysis like cauchy schwartz and mean value theorems. If you don’t know this material and get into grad school in some math-heavy discipline like math/stat/applied math/... you are going to struggle a lot. If it’s some lightweight discipline like OR/IE/Applied Stats/CS/Eng, ok maybe you don’t need to know this shit. But then, you shouldn’t also show up to graduate probability /statistics classes and then raise your hand in middle of lecture and say you don’t know how to compute the distribution of the ratio of 2 gaussians. This is exactly why have the Math GRE, so you can take a few practice tests for free, realize you don’t know how to integrate, and maybe work some calculus problems before you apply to grad school, not after. End of rant.

Next: no grades needed to get BS, MA, PhD. and no attendance necessary. After all some groups are at a disadvantage and they will not be able to attend the classes.. While we're at it - why don't we have The Degree Lottery (tm), or better yet, give degrees right after conception.

As long as you keep taking out those sweet sweet tuition loans subsidized by fed, schools will be glad to take on more and more students. Performance doesn’t matter as long as we can keep selling prestige and keep enrollment growing

I went to Santa Clara University for my Master’s degree. People who never showed up got B’s for their final grade. It made me ashamed to get my degree there.

> Next: no grades needed to get BS, MA, PhD. and no attendance necessary.

"Soft-science" degrees from diploma-mill universities are already waaay ahead of you!

Or Masters degrees from U.K. ex-polys for any overseas student.

On my degree (chemical technology, Poland) it was very easy to get into (200 places with low cutoff score), but on the second year there was only 100 pupils. There is a general correlation between initial points (Polish standardised high school test) and future academic success, but if they were to admit 100 people, only about 65 would manage to go to the second year. Changing admission standards doesn't mean that they change graduation standards.

Regarding mandatory attendance - welcome to the German model. Most universites don't have mandatory attendance, which is good for subjects where there are many more students than available seats :). Also it's very handy for students who (have to) work in order to finance their studies.

Eh, in my experience (entirely in USA) attendance is only part of the grade when the course is kind of squishy. Attendance was never even mentioned in the math or physics courses I took. However, it was very important in history and literature.

In a society that seems to require a college degree for everything, that's probably the right answer. Find a way to give everyone a degree.

Sounds like they're just trying to get more people through the meat grinder. Unpopular opinion on HN, but if I'm really honest, I didn't learn much about my chosen profession (embedded software development) at college and felt it was mostly a waste of four years. It was all about jumping through the right hoops, getting the credential so I could pass through the Career Gatekeepers.

Half of the software engineering curriculum was too abstract and math-y, and not practical enough. The other half that actually focused on programming were way below my existing programming skill level at the time. I'm trying not to make it a humblebrag, but there were about 3-4 of us who were self-taught and already knew a few languages, who slept through the classes and got straight As and the rest struggled to get hello_world.c to even compile before getting their D and moving on to major in Business. There were some neat software-related electives like compiler construction and one or two cool labs (build a computer from a 68000 and some wires) but they were the exception.

The required electives and diversity indoctrination classes that were supposed to make me well rounded (or whatever) were a waste of time. Nobody took them seriously. I never got into the greek life or into college sports. So most of it felt like high school minus the wood shop boneheads. "Get this game's level over with, with minimal pain, so I can move on to the next level."

Only later did I find out that all of work life is about grinding through the level so you can pass a career gatekeeper and get to the next level. So at least college prepared me with that skill.

Surprise, surprise, colleges in the business of printing diplomas (which are about 90% of them at this point) make getting in easier, all while continuing to skyrocket the tuition and indebt students.

Higher education is so bankrupt.

Maybe we should institute no-nonsense schools without all the fluff that do have test requirements for entry.

This is because they want to enroll people too stupid to solve basic math problems.

... well, this is the real reason, but I don't think any professional would word it that way!

Here[0] is a story about a group arguing (a bit successfully, I might add!) that "forcing" students to have the ability to at least pass algebra to get a college degree is a civil rights issue!

[0] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/19/538092649/say-goodbye-to-x-y-...

Right because putting people in crippling debt when they fail out of college is going to improve civil rights.

I mean offering a worthless* degree to people is also not helping, right?

* I am using worthless here, to denote that someone that does not even have the capacity deal with a single term of high-school level algebra, can otherwise do very well in it.

Yes and because that will at least get them one semester out of these kids, which will probably need student loans. Even in state tuition will be many thousands of dollars that will trap these kids.

Then they will dumb down the curriculum even more.

So much then for basic Math problem solving.

If they can't solve math problems, then it will be reflected in their math course load and their grades in those courses.

Yes, and they can ignore that information using holistics.

As someone doing hiring we have begun doing a very basic screening exam - quick writing sample, some basic (EXTREMELY basic) applied work - 1st year college quality is fine.

We have folks with degrees who can barely string together the most basic concepts (literally out of the intro to X course) in their field.

I'm seriously curious how this is even possible. Yes - some are from degree mill places - but even those have to be teaching something for the $$? Is it the pressure of being tested that is throwing folks off? Do people forget what they learned and are not really tested as they progress? We let them sit on their own, use computer etc. If you do hiring do a 5-10 minute screening test at some point - it can be eye opening.

Hiring for what?

Sounds like fizz buzz.

I learned something new today - "FizzBuzz" is a basic programming task used for screening.

We do stuff easier than this as a screen, but same idea, yes. We've now done half as multiple choice to speed it up.

It usually takes 3 - 10 minutes range for most folks - so really light weight.

> Vice [...] said "we don't need any more studies."

That's not shocking given who said it, but it makes it seem as if their support of the initiative is rooted on anti-intellectualism.

My family was basically homeless when I was young, the only reason I could get access to quality higher education was the standardized tests we have here.

I'd like to see the data that one college used to decide that there hadn't been any academic impact between students who submitted tests and those who didn't.

When I read this article it struck me as a blatant PR battle between FairTest.org and test vendors. This article ended up providing a more nuanced view:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/coll...

Standardized testing is a good predictor of someone's ability to do well in our STEM oriented society. I score high on these things, but I've also found I'm missing something important compared to people who don't score highly on these things. I think our society is optimized to favor a certain kind of intellectual talent, which certainly exists and is very useful, but does not seem to be the only or even most important personal characteristic.

That being said, these tests should not be abolished, but we should also look at other human characteristics that are beneficial.

Maybe I'm wrong in one or many ways. But I'm reading a lot of people suggesting it's for the dumbening. But I never took anything like the SATs in Canada. I don't think we have that. And our universities seem to be doing great.

Here in Ontario admissions goes by your top 6 "university level" high school class grades. It helps prevent your future from being determined by a single test, which to me seems like a terrible design.

No, it’s a terrible system that we have here in Ontario.

People kill themselves every year at Waterloo when they reach university and discover their 98% grade in high school math was a lie and they are completely unprepared and begin flunking out.

Simultaneously someone who goes to a good high school and learns real math but only gets an 80% (which should be good!) is instead stressing out that they won’t get into university because the published admissions average is 90%+. To their credit Waterloo actually adjusts grades based on which high school you go to, but now that is unfair to someone good who happens to go to a bad high school.

Finally you have rich kids that go from getting 60% in day school to getting 98% in their “accredited” private high school night classes which are economically incentivized to give the highest grades to their customers.

What a joke.

This is a horrible move that will harm international students from no-name schools more than it equalizes nationals.

What’s the alternative to these tests?

Grades and all of the other factors admissions people like to look at, like volunteer work, extra-curricular activities, projects, essays, etc.

The issue I've observed is that those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are put at a disadvantage when these are given higher weighting. The teenager with wealthy parents can participate in (expensive) extracurricular activities like team sports or take summers off to volunteer... not because they're virtuous, but because someone along the way told them it's a good way to pad their admissions applications.

Meanwhile the brilliant high-school student without parents who can afford these things is less likely to participate in activities requiring investment in equipment or logistics of getting to/from events. Instead of being able to spend a summer volunteering on a hospital ship off the coast of Africa, they're working retail to save up spending money for the year or reduce their student loan burden.

Ah yes, those are clearly harder to game than independently administered tests, and totally won’t advantage those families with resources to buy projects and essays, can afford extra curricular activities, and are able to freely choose school with lenient grading policy.

I think there are a lot cynics here, but they should take the test before you really understand why SAT/ACT is stupid as an admission req. Source: Took the test

I think the view of many of these supposed cynics is that the alternatives are even less consistent and are more conducive to biases and corruption than a standardized test, even if the test is not optimal in measuring someone's academic abilities. No one is saying they're perfect.

I have taken both tests and while I clearly found them imperfect (as with virtually every test), I would also say that they're far from useless or "stupid" as a requirement.

I probably wouldn't have got into the university I did or have the career I have if it weren't for SATs. And no, I didn't have wealthy parents who could afford test prep courses. My prep consisted self-directed study using off-the-shelf test prep material.

As a way to discover scholastic talent in populations that is otherwise invisible, it does a good job. If the goal is to discover "talent" that somehow is impervious to measurement of any kind, of course testing is bad at that. But then again the premise seems suspicious.

I mean, they're not ideal, but that's a wonky standard. I also took high school classes and I can tell you that GPA is an even stupider requirement, and don't even get me started on extracurriculars...

Any schools going the other way and dropping grades from consideration?

I got a 1000/1600 on my first try of the SAT. Then I went through a $6,000 SAT summer camp, and got a 1600/1600. I used this score to tutor privileged children charging upwards to $100/hr. The conclusion, for me? The SAT has become just another way for the privileged to incestuously perpetuate privilege among themselves. I believe it's a great move to stop considering these test scores.

Some would say that's a sign the SAT should be improved to be a more accurate prediction of college success, rather than that it should be done away with all together.

I mean, if a graphics card review told you how many FPS you could expect on Half Life 2, it might not show the differences between modern graphics cards. But that's just a sign the reviewers should use a more modern game for their benchmark, not that they should switch to reviewing whether the card's designer sometimes volunteers at a soup kitchen or whether the maker spends a lot of money on ads in the magazine.

I got 31 on ACT first try then spent all summer playing dota 2 with my friends and got a 35 the second try. We were also poor as hell. I don't think it has anything to do with privilege

I agree the current system has become so warped and profiteering it needs an overhaul. Not sure dropping requirements altogether is the way to go though. At least the tests required people to work for a better score and get some idea of how to seriously study. Considering the abysmal academic skills of most college students I've taught, I can't imagine what fresh degree of ineptitude awaits.

Common sense should tell us that standardized tests like this are not fair assessments of actual student academic potential. To the extent these tests predict success in college, it's only because they are biased in the same ways that most college support structures are biased. And once the "predictive" tests are in place and accepted, they form a reinforcement loop with college results, each proving the other "right".

But as our society has come to realize how deeply ingrained many systemic biases are in our institutions, in order to break the cycle, you can't just change the support structures at the college, but you have to change the external barriers that have grown up over the years in support of that old system as well. And these standardized tests are a huge part of that. So I'm glad to see this is changing.

> Common sense should tell us that standardized tests like this are not fair assessments of actual student academic potential.

Common sense should tell you no such thing!

Why wouldn't a test that measures a list of aptitudes (writing, comprehension, logic, math, etc.) not correlate to some extent to academic success in a liberal arts degree?

Literally the classes you have to take are related to writing, comprehension, logic, math, etc!

> most college support structures are biased

I am not even sure what this is getting at!

If you are arguing that most of our colleges should not be centered on liberal arts, then the alternative is centered on professional or technical degrees ... which, in most cases, lean even more heavily on math, logic, writing, and comprehension!

Many universities have decided that they value diversity (ever how they define that) higher than or equal to pure academic results. And that is fine for them to make that choice, but it is silly to say that, "... common sense should tell you that there is no correlation between people that are good at lots of things and those same people being good at lots of things in college."

> Many universities have decided that they value diversity (ever how they define that) higher than or equal to pure academic results.

This is a rational thing to do, because "pure academic results" are hard to get a useful measure from.

Here's an analogy. Suppose you are looking for the most secure encryption algorithm. One thing you could measure is the number of unbroken messages generated from the algorithm. This seems to make sense, because good algorithms will be broken less easily than bad ones. But a bit of thinking will demonstrate this is a bad idea. There are a ton of DES messages in the world, most of which nobody has bothered to break. So by sheer numbers we would conclude DES is more secure than AES, and both are much more secure than any brand née algorithm. Since this is untrue, our heuristic must be wrong. Meanwhile, another heuristic of giving intentional and honest consideration to new, unproven algorithms seems likely to work better.

In the same way, if you want to select for academic potential or * aptitude, measuring prior academic results* may not be the highest-value signal.

The point is to select for diversity for the purpose of diversity, not for the purpose of academic potential.

Selecting for prior academic success is a good way to predict future academic success — your analogy about encryption makes no sense at all. Academic success doesn’t fail in any of the same ways that encryption does.

But the problem is that selecting for prior academic success does not select for diversity, because the environments which support early adolescent academic success are not as diverse as colleges want their own student populations to be.

So colleges are left trying to increase the diversity of incoming freshman by passing over more academically successful candidates which don’t meet their diversity quotas.

There is tremendous value in having a diverse campus population, but the best way to get there is to have diverse academically successful applicants. Colleges aren’t willing to wait.

One problem is that these applicants are also generally paying a lot of money to attend these colleges, and if they ultimately aren’t going to be successful those colleges are causing significant harm by admitting them.

Note that one of the primary purposes of the SAT is to predict success in the first two years of college.

The not very good alternative is to lower academic standards in the classes themselves, and certainly there is anecdotal evidence of this but I’m not sure about rigorous studies.

The tests have been gamed by a test prep industry that extracts money from wealthy families. Colleges aren't admitting students based only on diversity. They are taking kids with excellent grades, volunteer work, etc. and giving them a closer look. It relies on the judgement of all of the student's high school teachers, rather than a centralized corporate assessment.

Poor kids don't get second or third tries at tests that cost money to take. Even the most brilliant students can have a bad day.

Colleges are held financial accountable to enroll students they can retain, so they can collect a full-term tuition. They aren't going to risk giving a valuable spot to a student that won't be able to perform well academically, just because they are 'diverse'.

Professors would rather teach exceptional, motivated students from all walks of life than the wealthy, entitled children that can afford to spend $5000 on a test prep coach.

> The tests have been gamed by a test prep industry that extracts money from wealthy families.

No matter what you do, it will be gamed by money from wealthy families, because successfully graduating from one of these schools opens doors!

For example, one thing that rich families are doing now is getting apartments in "ghettos" so that certain institutions that use an address as a proxy for "diversity" will include them.

Whenever you have something of value (like an Ivy League education), people are going to compete for it.

Short of a literally random lottery that cannot be sold, there is zero way to change that.

> Professors would rather teach exceptional, motivated students from all walks of life

Exceptional, motivated students have never had a problem getting into schools. Universities have long adored the idea of having "church mouse" geniuses, but it turns out that there are only so many of them. These self-motivated, exceptional students never had to worry about the SAT, because they knocked it out of the park ... without coaching!

>Colleges are held financial accountable to enroll students they can retain, so they can collect a full-term tuition. They aren't going to risk giving a valuable spot to a student that won't be able to perform well academically, just because they are 'diverse'.

One would hope this to be the case, but considering only about 50% of college freshmen come back for a second year, it doesn't seem like they're doing that well picking applicants with staying power.

If you actually take the SAT, you realize that the content is very easy. Instead, its just a test taking strategy test. Who had the better tutor. It doesn't test any 'real' skills, only how well they can bubble answer sheets.

I did actually take the SAT! Granted it was a long time ago, but I thought that it was challenging.

I did very well on it and it helped me move forward in my academic career because I was from a very, very poor family where going to college wasn't in the cards otherwise.

"But as our society has come to realize how deeply ingrained many systemic biases"

Look. If you want to go to an Ivy school just pay off the administrators, proctors and teachers like everyone else.

Do you know Goodhart's law? It explains so much ...

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

It makes sense.

To uphold the value of their degrees, elite institutions are more interested in selecting for real-life performance rather than paperwork-wizards. For some fields--like mathematics--I'm sure those things track closely. For other fields, not so much. Throwing the standardized tests away will probably spare them from a great deal of admissions apologetics.

For less prestigious institutions, they like money--as evidenced by how low their ACT/SAT admission cutoffs already are. This move is great for plausible deniability when admitting illiterates for cash and prizes.

edit: would add that Gates and Zuckerberg are prime examples of pre-selecting performance rather than creating it

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