BTW, I found out years later that they took a chance on admitting me, and I very nearly flunked out my freshman year before I found my "sea legs". I was rejected by MIT, Harvard, and Stanford.
If an independent company comes along that can reliably get students to equivalent GRE subject test scores in a hard science most quickly than the university itself does, the result could be many of the best students stop applying. Some would just take the nontraditional route, save a fortune, ace their GREs and apply as a graduate student. Others would take their tests as evidence of their skills and and go directly into industry.
Making this move now, before such a challenger exists seems like a "good" idea from the selfish perspective of universities.
I concluded that the only purpose of the GRE was to filter out the complete frauds.
In my opinion, the GRE mostly checks how good you are as a test taker. None of that is important to academic success. It invariably filters for a fairly streamlined and optimized class of people, who have the money and time to invest into such a test.
The fact that the ETS seems to have a clear profit motive really rubs me in the wrong way. It is a private organization attaching itself to education and siphoning the money off students by selling their tests and training materials. Universities should design their own admissions tests and not rely on such parasitic entities.
I did not optimize for the GRE, I did not prep for it, I did not look at a study guide for it, I simply went and took the test cold. The questions were on material one would expect to cover in basic engineering and science courses.
I don't buy the notion that anyone who does well on the GRE is doing it with tricks and fake/useless knowledge and/or cheated.
In a sense, you're like an athlete who doesn't take steroids or doesn't push the limits of doping policy by trying to game the countermeasures, and instead of feeling aggrieved that others are achieving similar/better results as you via their just-within-the-letter-of-the-law tactics (or sometimes wildly outside the law tactics, a la Varsity Blues), instead you still feel some allegiance to an idealized view of a fair system that simply doesn't exist.
People are always looking for an edge, and entrepreneurs are always going to be trying to sell them one, whether it works or not. (Look at all the diet books out there, it's a billion dollar industry.)
> idealized view of a fair system that simply doesn't exist.
I'm not suggesting it is ideal or perfectly fair. I'm suggesting it isn't nearly as irrelevant as many argue.
For those who want to prep or game the system, why not do it right? Take the math classes, and actually learn math.
Admissions to the top US universities—and hence, most chances for social advancement in the US—will henceforth be based entirely on shifting and nebulous criteria that rich, well-connected kids and their parents spend most of their lives figuring out, rather than merely mostly based on such criteria. The last side door for smart noncomformist kids is now being slammed shut.
Colleges, as insitutions, care about progressive, equality of opportunity values. Those nebulous criteria will coalesce to produce roughly the same outcomes that they currently do.
They might adjust their admission picks until e.g. aggregate ethnic/racial admission stats look the same as before, but at the same time picking more of the rich, well-connected black/other minority kids and fewer of the poor but hardworking ones.
I was on financial aid myself.
I suspect no one is wondering because without tests people have to face some harsh truths about economic and social class structures that most people in the US like to pretend do not exist. If these tests were about meritocracy then they would be enforced without exceptions and rich kids wouldn't be able to buy their way into their favorite schools like they do now after their parents make a generous donation. The existence of the test does not matter if you're rich enough so the argument about meritocracy rings hollow.
Yes, that's my point. Given fewer learning opportunities poor kids end up at a disadvantage even though the next Einstein is more than likely somewhere in a poor neighborhood. The SAT might be a good way to find this person but it would be better if we required a standardized minimum from everyone and helped them as much as possible to achieve those minimum standards. That way the next Einstein wouldn't be like finding a needle in haystack with very poor objective measures of learning potential (Einstein himself being famously unfit for his own educational system based on standard measures of the time).
https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance#:~:text....
It was talking about automatic background checks for applicants at businesses. Some people wanted such processes to be illegal, on the grounds that they were supposedly racist.
In reality, automatic (i.e. indiscriminate) background checks actually resulted in more blacks being hired. Even if the local black population had a higher or much higher percentage of people with bad marks on background checks, being able to screen them out and allow those blacks with no bad marks to apply was made easy.
Without automatic background checks, employers fell back on their own biases, resulting in fewer blacks being hired.
The SAT is like an automatic background check. Without this indiscriminate screening, the schools have more ability to discriminate based on biases.
A much bigger problem in education starts much earlier. If your parents don't provide a stable and education-leaning home life, or you live in a school district where safety is a bigger concern than educational quality, well, social mobility becomes a lot harder then. These are some hard problems, but reach way beyond education, into the social safety net and beyond. Guaranteeing that a bright kid who is not born into the best circumstances gets a fair shot at life is still a work in progress, but has little to do with whether they get into Harvard or MIT.
The other problem you point to is very real, but that's independent of the issue currently being discussed in this post.
I, for one, find standardized tests far more stomach-able as barriers to entry to a university than the exclusive whims of administrators attempting to gauge the qualities of applicants.
Universities just need to do a good job of weighting the exams - I had lackluster LSAT scores, though not awful, but wrote an amazing law school entry essay and had a unique background: AmeriCorps, ski bum, tutor, etc... that catapulted me in to law school.
Entirely removing any type of exam from the college entry process just seems antithetical to what college is about.
Edit: a word.
These are the problems that standardized tests were supposed to solve. Eliminate the tests, fine, but you'd better have an adequate replacement for them in mind.
Re: uneven distribution of education. This is the fundamental problem and standardized tests don't actually address the root cause. We really shouldn't be confused about what skills and concepts people need to learn up until high school and the rigor with which they need to learn them. Addressing this confusion is a hard problem so post high school standardized tests end up being the band aid. We can keep the tests and work to address the underlying root causes for uneven educational outcomes. Test preparation industry is essentially a form of tax on something that we should have democratized by now.
I'm completely sympathetic to the idea that grades should be a better predictor of performance than one day of testing, but in practice the grades have a lot of flaws too.
I want more people that study calculus and higher level mathematics because it is a standard part of their education and not because it is a requirement on some test. I don't care what grade they get on their exams because if I end up working with them I'm not gonna care about the grade but the fact that they learned how to think rigorously (or at least were given the opportunity to do so without having to waste effort and energy on playing status games).
Some other places in the world admit based on the Z-score for each subject, with the average and standard deviation being specific to each school. While the university might not know how one would compare to other students based on an equivalent test, they'd at least know that a particular student is in the top decile for their school in a given subject.